Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Our Enemy, the Pigs

Limey polemicist and fiction author George Orwell is claimed as a hero by progressives and libertarians. How can this be? Tom Watson, commissar of the thought police and writer at Salon, says we must be in opposition to one another, instead of uniting against the NSA. George Orwell was not a libertarian, nor was he a classical liberal. He was however, a man with a proclivity to liberalism, and this is the least common denominator betwixt progressives and libertarians.

I may be a smidgeon tardy, but I just finished reading Animal Farm by George Orwell. Literary critics, and more importantly Orwell, say that the entire novel is an allegory to the U.S.S.R. under commissar of the commissars Joseph Stalin. I agree. SPOILER ALERT, this should not be necessary seventy years after Animal Farm was written, but I'm covering my bases with my readers. Mr. Jones is a human farmer who gets his farm, Manor Farm, overthrown by his animals who had been preached the equality of nonhuman animals by an aged goat. The nonhuman animals, hereafter beasts, want to have equality of outcome and establish seven commandments which they will abide by. It does not take long for hierarchy to set in. The pigs, the most literate of the herd, take charge and deliver orders. Most of the commandments are about not emulating humans - one in particular bans trade with them. The pigs incrementally break/alter the commandments and become more human. In the end the beasts can't tell pig from human. Mr. Jones is the tsar, the pigs are the State Socialist ruling committee, the neighboring humans that the pigs trade with are the varying interventionist countries bordering the U.S.S.R. , and the beasts are the uneducated masses intellectually won over by the utopia of State Socialism.

A progressive and a libertarian can read this tale and learn that as Lord Acton says
power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I would stipulate this phrase works in the context of man, and has no metaphysical connotations. The pigs claim to be equal with the beasts, but over time they become "more" equal. They get more food. They dress as the humans do. They get drunk as the humans do. They walk on two legs as the humans do. The progressive sees that this is an issue of authority. She says that the pigs have no right to tell the beasts what do in the privacy of their homes. The libertarian takes this one step further and says the pigs have no authority the beasts are bound to respect. Let's make like a tree and leave this allegory.

The brushfire of liberty is being ignited in the minds of progressives, because the State has penetrated our collective privacy to an extent they did not expect. Progressives do not want the State to read the emails, listen to the phone calls, and track all electronic trails of Americans without a warrant. They don't think the State should have the authority to do this, nor to prevent homosexual unions, nor to hail missiles at Syria until kingdom come. The libertarian agrees. Again, she takes this thinking to its theoretical conclusion. She pontificates, "If the State should have no authority to do x, why should the State have authority to do y?" She concludes, the State should have no authority that men outside the aegis of statehood should have. She concludes, the State should have no authority to steal, kidnap, murder et cetera. She concludes, the State should have no authority.

The great uniter betwixt progressives and libertarians is our shared appreciation and history against authority. Though Lord Acton uses the term power, authority is interchangeable. Progressives and libertarians are witnesses to the collusion of corporation and State in sundry sections of the market economy. The libertarian testifies to this persistence in all State action - roads, courts and security production included.

I'm not asking every progressive to wave the black flag, against all other flags, though I would ooze jubilee everywhere I frolicked if they did. I'm asking progressives and libertarians to put aside their other differences and collaborate against authority wherever and whenever they both see it. Smash the NSA, the banks, Big Pharma, land thieves, oil tycoons, patent/copyright Gestapo, the military-industrial-complex and any other tentacle of the State. People of the world, unite against our enemy, the pigs.