New Pantheon (05) — Ransom
Deprivation is a great manipulator.
[Letter #013]
Good morning, son.
I’ve been recently trying to buy up some children’s books for you. I want to make sure that I have a few of my favorites, but I’m sure that you’ll have your own ideas about what’s good and what’s cry-worthy. That’ll be fine. I’m looking forward to seeing just how similar and how different you are from your mother and me. She says that her family genetics are very strong on her father’s side, and I say precisely the same thing. Your specific collection of 23 is going to be a clash of titanic proportions.
Speaking of titans, I’d like to tell you about another in the pantheon. Her name is Ransom. Here’s a story.
You have a cousin on your mother’s side — well, he’s a cousin by way of marriage, but whatever. He holds a very particular worldview that’s become popular in recent years. He’s what the mainstream types would refer to as a “libertarian,” although that name previously belonged to more anarchist-type philosophies. He calls himself an “anarcho-capitalist,” which you should know by this point in your life is a conflict in definitions — it’s an oxymoron.
He and I were having a discussion over the most recent holidays. He said that he wanted to pick my brain. I don’t think he wants to do that anymore after our talk, but I spoke honestly, which is what he asked for. He and I discussed a hypothetical situation wherein we lived in a world without a government, and he wanted to own and run a business. I just ignored the fact that Money can’t be enforced without Hierarchy, which usually comes from a form of government, and allowed him to continue.
He wanted to create this business, we agreed that it would be a shoe-making factory, in order to provide for his family. That’s his stated goal here. He said that he wanted to construct the factory himself, hire the workers and pay them a good wage to keep them satisfied with their jobs, and use the proceeds to make himself rich enough to provide security and inheritance to his family. To an average American, and especially to your cousin, this is an honest and good plan for making a living.
I told him it wouldn’t work.
Of course, he insisted that I explain, but I knew full-well that he wouldn’t like my reasoning. He wanted to know why he couldn’t simply clear out the land himself, build a factory on it, acquire the raw materials to make shoes, hire the people to make them, and then sell the shoes in the market to make a profit. What part of that wouldn’t work?
In the absence of a government? “All of it,” I said.
The first part of clearing out the land would be a problem. Would you be doing that yourself? Or would you hire people? If you’re hiring, then there’s another problem that I’ll describe in a moment. If you’re doing it yourself, then that’s a tremendous amount of labor. Will you be using any gasoline or diesel powered equipment? If so, getting that fuel is going to be a problem in our non-government world. Plus, do you have a way of sustaining yourself and your family while you’re clearing out this land? Are you hoping all of this exists on the open market?
This is before we consider construction of the factory. That part might also be a struggle. Are you going to construct the building yourself? Where will you get the materials? Are you going to use wood from the trees that you cleared from the land? If so, how will you process the lumber? Will the building run on electricity? Can you wire it up yourself for that purpose? Where will the electricity come from once the factory is built? Will there be plumbing in the factory? Where will you get the wiring and pipes? Or, were you planning to get all of this on the open market?
Once you construct the actual building, you have to make it into a proper factory by adding in tools or machines to do the work. Are you going to make those yourself? Do you have the requisite blacksmithing and engineering skills to pull something like that off? Or, will you try to hire someone else to build them? Do you expect to find all of this on the open market?
Acquiring the raw materials to make shoes is going to be a nightmare. Even if we’re talking about basic leather-soled shoes, you need leather. You’ll also need cordage and glue. All of this can be acquired from animals, but that means you’ll have to either hunt constantly and run the risk of depleting the local wildlife, or you’ll have to ranch the animals to provide the materials. But, I suppose you want to just buy this from the open market.
Because, if the market is your plan to satisfy all of these necessities, and if there’s no government to maintain the system on which the market relies, then you’re going to come up short.
Remember, a government doesn’t have to call itself as such — it’s just an institution of some kind that makes rules for society and enforces those rules with violence. In order to preserve its power, it will insist that it is the only force that is allowed to dole out violence. Everyone else will be punished for doing so. A cartel can be a government. A corporation can be a government, a vivid example of which is the company town. A local warlord is a government. The system that enforces behavior of society through threat of violence is, in effect, the “government.”
Without this institution, there is no agreement on, or enforcement of, money. Without agreement on money, people in general don’t care about it and won’t use it. If there’s no need for money, and there almost never is in the absence of a taxing government, then there isn’t going to be a market as such. People won’t need to sell things in order to provide for themselves and their families. In such a situation, humans will behave exactly as they did for 90+% of our existence as a species: they’ll work together within their tribes to make sure everyone is as safe, fed, and comfortable as possible.
Just as I expected, your cousin didn’t care for this explanation. He’s lived a long time and seen the world, you see, and so he knows how people are. He knows that such an arrangement wouldn’t work. He knows that people are lazy, often stupid, and definitely won’t be productive without the promise of a paid wage.
Of course, I couldn’t convince him that all he’s ever seen has been people who have endured the world as we know it now. The only reason that he sees this behavior at all is because of the conditions that people are given. Change the conditions, change the people. Humans are extremely adaptable. It is, indeed, the characteristic that makes us such a successful species.
Everything changes, and humans are really good at changing, even if it scares the bejeezus out of us to do so. We learned that once a big guy with a big weapon came along and set up a system to force behavior on pain of violence or death, it was in our interest to play the game just enough to satisfy him so that he would leave us alone. Over a few millennia, the expectations of these governments of various sorts have expanded and contracted. Right now, the system expects a tremendous amount from us, and the way we behave is tightly constrained by it. You could no more judge the way people act today to be “human nature” than you could judge a starved and beaten animal to be expressing “animal nature” if they bite you.
He believed that I was trying to convince him about “Communism” and how it had been tried before and failed. In a sense, I was trying to convince him of something like that, but I was not trying to convince him of what he feared. I rather like the little-“c” communism ideals of the philosophers of old. He only knows one sort of “Communism,” and that’s specifically what came from the Cold War era. He’s older than I am, so he probably remembers a bit of that period.
He believed that people would only behave as I described if they were forced to do so, that it would take secret police thugs with jackboots and rifles to force everyone to behave “altruistically.” Late-USSR-style social control is, in his mind, the only way that anything called “Communism” can ever be attempted. That is, of course, why I didn’t use the word with him at all. I knew how he’d react to it.
The reason that he fears that god, “Communism,” is because he unknowingly worships a different one. He worships the goddess named Ransom. I would never tell him this to his face, and he’s a good Christian man who is all about his Ten Commandments. He would be most offended if I ever suggested that he has another god before “Him,” but I still argue that it’s true. Without Ransom, that is, nothing about his utopian dream is possible. No factory, no hiring workers, no profiting on the market. Can’t be done. Why? No one will help. Let me explain.
Back before the beginning of the 17th century in the land of Capitalism’s birth, jolly old England, there were vast open tracts of land. They were called “the Commons,” and no one could claim ownership of it except for the king. The king could dole out bits of it to members of the nobility for their own wealth accumulation, but apart from that, no one could “own” the land. Nor did they really care what anyone did on it, so long as whoever needed taxing paid their share. If you wanted to settle down somewhere and build a farm, or just live by hunting and gathering out there, you could just do that. If there was a local lord, then he would demand a cut of whatever you produced each year — because God said so, or some such nonsense — and that was it.
In a situation like this, a common person can’t really be well controlled. They produce everything they need to survive on their own just by pulling it from the land. It’s a subsistence living, to be sure, and no one is going to get wealthy by dirt farming, but it’s hard to manipulate someone into doing anything they don’t really want to do if you don’t have leverage over them.
Then came the Enclosure Acts, starting around 1607. These were a series of laws passed over the next three centuries or so that would carve up the country with imaginary lines. Anything on this side would now be owned by such-and-such person, and anything on that side might be owned by another. The person would then be their own little king, still subject to the laws of the actual king but in all other ways able to do whatever they like on their own property. This also meant that if their holdings had peasants living on it, the new owner could have them legally removed by force.
Roughly the same time, there was this whole new hemisphere of land, at least from the European perspective. The people who had lived there for literally thousands of years apparently didn’t get a say in the matter. This new land was likewise cut up by imaginary lines and given to Europeans, sometimes for free and sometimes in exchange for money. It was always, however, given without the consent of the indigenous people. Just like the Enclosure Acts, the colonization of the Americas would progress over the next few centuries, eventually forcing the native population to integrate or die. The reservation system is better than nothing, but it’s a pathetic consolation for the atrocities visited on these people.
While there have always been acts of forced deprivation in the past, I would argue that this period, roughly from the late Renaissance forward to present, has been when Ransom truly came to form as a goddess. Prior to her dominance, to make your way in life, you could take yourself and your family out into the country and live off the land, perhaps with a small village. You could grow, build, and fabricate everything you needed to survive, all on your own or, as was often the case, with a “tribe” of people. People lived in cities as well, of course, but there was always the option to simply live away from city-life.
With the appearance of the Church of Ransom, the English peasantry had everything taken away, and indigenous peoples of the Americas suffered far worse than that. Everything that they used to survive was removed by law and violence. If they tried to stay, enforcers of the government would show up and escort them away. If they resisted, they would either be locked in a cage or murdered. Without a way to provide for themselves, the dispossessed would be forced to look for new sources of food and survival. With nowhere else to go, they had to take jobs in cities and integrate themselves within the monetary system of the new capitalists. In the case of the original Americans, they were forced west, onto reservations, or just murdered outright.
The system of Capitalism was growing in Britain, spreading to the colonies and around the world, and the cities that adopted the system were industrializing rapidly. Previously self-sufficient people would be put to work to earn a wage, and then they would pay for food, clothing, a home, and any other necessities. They would pay because there was no other option. My guess is that if they were given the choice of life in the factory or life on the village farm, they would easily choose the latter. My opinion, I guess, but they were often not given the choice.
Ransom, daughter of Hierarchy, takes what people need to survive and charges them to have it returned. In the case of the British peasantry, she took them away from the land that they had used for generations to live peacefully, forcing them into a brutal economy in the cities. She then didn’t even return their livelihoods to them. She rented it back, because she never intended to allow them out of her power again. In the case of the indigenous Americans, she went full genocide.
She’s been doing this ever since as well. These days, the corporate bigwigs think they’re being cute when they say nonsense like, “You will own nothing, and you will be happy.” They want us to rent everything just to survive. They know they’ll get away with it as well, because the entire system is built to enforce that scheme. Money is required for absolutely everything today, and as much as possible, products are no longer sold but rented as services. When you have to work for a boss for everything necessary to survive, and you have no choice in the matter whatsoever, well… there are words for such arrangements.
But, back to your cousin, he really didn’t want to hear any of this. In his mind, he built the hypothetical factory, and thus he owned it. I didn’t argue with that, although I had no idea how he managed to build it, as I alluded to above. He said that he would hire people to work there, and he resolutely refused to believe that people would not use money if they weren’t forced to do so. He still believes the old Adam Smith myth (hmm, “Adam’s Myth”?) about bartering cows for shirts, or however his version goes, despite all archeological evidence that we have on the matter demonstrating that this has never happened in human history.
See, in order for his fantasy to become real, he requires Ransom to prevent people from providing for themselves. If they have other options, they aren’t going to submit themselves to being servants — erm, workers — for money that they don’t otherwise have to use. They won’t work in his factory, and they won’t call him “boss.” If Ransom, by way of government violence, however that manifests, forces the people into the system, then and only then can he hire them to work and produce for the market.
Thing is, if he isn’t able to hire people to make the shoes of our hypothetical example, then no other capitalist is able to hire people to produce the leather, the cordage, the glue, or to ranch the animals, or to grow animal feed, or to produce the fuel for the machines, whether that’s diesel or electricity. Without a capitalist forcing them to do so, people probably won’t even do the same thing every day. They’ll just do whatever is needed by the tribe when it’s necessary.
People will always work together to make the tribe better, as that’s what we’ve always done, but without forcing people into the economic system, there won’t be a system. People will just work together to make sure everyone in the tribe has enough, and the rest of the time, they’ll probably play and sing or some silly communist thing like that.
Your cousin believed the lie. He believes that if there isn’t someone metaphorically holding a whip, driving the people to work, then they simply won’t work. Without someone “in charge,” then the people will be lost. It’s been probably the greatest lie of the last ten thousand years. The lie that people are stupid and lazy, and that they must be forced into Productivity. Without strong leaders in charge, they said, we would never have made any Progress, regardless whether we call those leaders “king” or “CEO.”
I can think of a couple of reasons off the top of my head that it’s an obvious lie. First, our species has existed for two-hundred thousand or more years, and only about the last ten thousand have seen empires and economies. That’s 5%, if my math still computes. Hardly a good sample size to declare a definitive “human nature.” And yet, that’s how he and those of his philosophy think. He believes that humans naturally want to use money, want to buy things, and are willing to do anything for cash. He can’t see that the only reason anyone has any such tendency is because unless people play the game of the powerful “elites,” they die.
The second reason is that despite the incredible pressure these days to commodify literally every atom of existence, every millisecond of time, humans still do lots of things for free. I don’t mean just charity and volunteer work either, although there’s an overwhelming amount of that in society. I mean that people do things all the time just for the credit of having done it. The video games that I play have had people developing “mods” for them for most of my lifetime. They’re freely given away, and these people continue to support and update (read: work on) them for years for free. This is just one example.
I’m afraid your cousin isn’t an “anarcho-” anything. He definitely wants someone in charge, preferably himself at the head of a company. So long as he doesn’t call his power a “government,” then he thinks that’s A-OK. But, without violence, there’s no power, no control, no forced labor, no forced engagement with economies… no corporations. He wants to be a boss, and thus he wants people to play along, so he needs violence in some form to force that. That’s a government, regardless of what you call it.
I don’t want to paint him as someone evil though. You know I don’t really believe in “good” and “evil” anyway. People do what they are incentivized to do by their circumstances. I said at the start of this letter that what he truly wants is to provide security for his family and to better their situation. There’s no world in which that’s a bad thing. What he’s seeking is a very human thing to want. It’s actually a very “living” thing to want, as life has a habit of preserving itself and promoting future generations.
However, if he were to get the economic system that he says he wants, a society without any form of “government,” he would get a society without forced compliance. I believe that everything he’s built his worldview on would dissolve away. Humans are social creatures, and we have been for a couple hundred thousand years. This is how we got to where we are now, and we’re not going to stop looking out for each other, at least within the “tribe.” Honestly, this is the absolute best place for your cousin to find security and prosperity, but he believes this sort of “human nature” doesn’t exist. I hope one day he’s proven wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
When (not if) our current civilization crumbles away forever, I don’t know if what will arise will be some form of anarchist lifestyle that would mimic our paleolithic ancestors. It might be that we just go back to tiny, warring kingdoms for centuries to come, so even our grandchildren’s grandchildren might not be able to settle the debate that he and I had over this last holiday trip. But, I’m kinda hoping that they can.
What I do know now, today, is that Ransom is the goddess of deprivation and forced servitude. Those who worship her pray for her to remove the people’s agency to take care of themselves. Once the faithful receive her blessing, the people are then dependent on the capitalists to survive. By the way, before we had capitalists, they were called other things. I’ll describe that more another time.
Ransom is the goddess your cousin worships. He thinks that he will find security and prosperity in her church. And, he absolutely could, too. But, doing so requires that he sacrifice other people’s health, happiness, and very lives. As a capitalist, he’s willing to make such a sacrifice. Not because he doesn’t care and not that he’s a bad person, but just because he’s believed all of the lies, and he thinks that’s the way the world works.
Ultimately, I wasn’t able to convince him, and I doubt that I ever would. He’s set in his ways now, and he’d rather just continue on believing what’s gotten him this far in life. That’s a fine strategy, so long as the system that he relies on continues to go strong. It might become a problem if, say, the global financial system were to melt down or mass migrations and climate disasters destroyed our current civilization. I’m sure he doesn’t have anything to worry about there though.
I look forward to reading some of these silly books to you, son. You should be here in a few more months, and we can knock out some red fish and blue fish together. Come to think of it, I might need to think about teaching you how to actually catch real fish as well. My, my, you are going to just seismically shift my whole life around. Looking forward to it, son. I love you very much.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
