Contrary to the polemics of Hobbes and other statists, every political system is an institutionalized means of forcibly transferring control of property from owners to non-owners. Of course, this is too candid and unvarnished a statement for most conventional, formally educated men to comfortably consider. The price of admission into the antechambers of the philosopher-kings has been one’s tacit agreement to never call a thing for what it is, for truthfulness and clarity would allow others to apprehend the nature of the game being played at their expense. Because people prefer the illusion that politics is a “noble”, “socially responsible” undertaking, they resist these more pedestrian explanations, or dismiss them as “simplistic thinking”.
But what practices are more “simplistic” than those grounded in the belief that social order can be generated by an institutionalized elite using tools of violence to compel individuals to act as the elitists choose them to act? What arrogant assumptions underlie both the propriety of employing such methods and the belief that knowledge of means and outcomes lies in the hands of those enjoying the use of such coercive power? Life is far too complex and subject to far too many perturbations to any longer permit the illusion that human society can be organized and run from the top-down.
