I have a brother. My brother is a conservative. Contrary to the dominant paradigm, however, my brother is a conservative that actually believes in conservative principles. My brother, in other words, is a great believer in liberty.
Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who are still the two greatest personal influences on the nature of the federal government, did not believe in liberty so much as they did “justice”, which is in quotes for a reason.
“Justice” doesn’t exist. It is, rather, something humans are predisposed to strive for, even if it proves perpetually unattainable. Liberty, on the other hand, is easy for the government to provide; it simply does nothing. When the government does nothing, every citizen enjoys perfect liberty, and all of the opportunities and perils inherent in the same.
Even the most libertarian of us, however, understand that we need some measure of government, up to and including the federal level. My brother, the nearly bulletproof conservative intellectual, could write sonnets about the inherent danger of federal authority.
My brother’s favorite example of the issue at hand is the federal Deparment of Education, instituted during the Carter administration. He points out that the country got along just fine without a DOE for two centuries, and that the quality and efficiency of education has suffered since centralization.
And my brother, of course, is right. The logic of any federal agency is, first and foremost, to perpetuate its own existence. Its second priority is to grow. It is the same for any individual human being; First food, then sex. Survival, then pro-creation. All else is secondary.
We should not be shocked that faceless bureaucracies act the same as cornered humans. Would a bureaucrat ever tell his boss that his job was done, or unnecessary?
With this insight on the nature of bureaucracy in mind, here is the leap that my brother and those aligned with him need to make: the Pentagon falls into the very same fold. The Pentagon is the Department of Education on crack.
The United States did not have a standing peacetime army until 1947. It got along for nearly two centuries without one. When the United States first adopted a standing peacetime army, it accounted for fully fifty percent of the world’s wealth, implying that the lack of a security state has thus far been friendly to America’s fortunes.
As soon as this insidious bureaucracy, this Pentagon, which must be explicitly distinguished from the military, came into existence, it had a vested interest in perpetuating the its own existence as an end in and of itself. And therein lies the flaw; you cannot deputize a war machine during peacetime, because that war machine will, by definition, seek to justify its existence via…guess what? Guerra.
In August of 1945 the United States was more powerful than any other country had ever been or realistically dreamed of being. The military, however, did not de-mobalize. This is the turning point.
The newly standing military, born of the 1947 National Security Act which created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the CIA, had to justify its existence. The logic became the Soviet Union.
No nation, in the far-too-extensive history of war, had ever bled in the quantities that the USSR did at the hands of Hitler. This was an incinerated, brutalized, and paranoid society. This was a society, which, hardened as it was, was in no condition to wage war.
The Pentagon, however, needed an enemy. This enemy was not invented, it was not unfairly criticized, but it was inflated to an absurd extent. This inflation was inevitable, given the logic of centralized bureaucracy and its single-minded focus on the budgets and power that only perpetual paranoia could secure.
This is the understanding we must come to: we are not surrounded by enemies. We are surrounded by 200 countries, every single one of which is poorer and weaker than us. We hold 20,000 metropolis-melting nuclear weapons. Why are we afraid? Why do we feel constantly under siege? Why were we afraid of Iraq in 2003, the country that met our cripping bombardment with precisely zero airplanes of their own? Is this constant fear based on reality? Or is it based on bureaucratic inertia?
2 comments:
Yes. Yes. Yes. So much new and good blog stuff.
It seems that a fairly common trait among the alpha individual or group is to fear who might take you down and replace you. When your in the back of the pack you're focused on the top and maybe those behind you. When you're on top, everyone is after you. The question, put forth at the end of the blog, is can an individual, group, nation overcome this biologically based fear? Perhaps instead of building bigger walls we should come to terms with the reality and win more hearts with actions of true compassion and wisdom.
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