“Anarchism, like celibacy, is simple; it was because they are simple that Celestino had clung to both of them.”
- Montherlant.
I write this essay to show you this blog is still a place of intellectual vigor. I have spent the past month planning extravagant business enterprises which, if you but retain your subscriptions, will allow you to pass a Marshmellow test to the most delightful oases of content far beyond anything else in this Internet sphere. Nonetheless, I must appease the snivelling bores who come at me waving their arms in the air about how I have written nothing for months (every day I seep hours into literary labour!) And so here are some brief notes inspired by recent things people have told me about “Natural Law”. I do it because I need content, not because I have anything against the people who believe in it.
The foundational ideology of the present is the idea that there exist inherent rights, separate from state force, which the state is obliged to accept and not interfere with; thus we have such sundry examples as the government being prevented from deporting terrorists by the ‘rights’ of such terrorists which are themselves created by the government; or the government being sued in its own courts to remunerate billions of taxpayers’ money to companies for breaching contracts which can only exist due to its own force.
Most people understand the idea of rights to be ridiculous, but believe that society cannot function without them. They are thus properly an “ideology” in the correct usage of that word, something we all know to be false, but maintain as a pretence anyway, rather than the subsequent Freudian notion of a subconscious force. This supposition of necessity is a false one, the world’s most successful capitalist economy in history, the People’s Republic of China, lacks even rudimentary ‘property rights’. I have been told countless stories by businessmen of their Chinese counterparts literally stealing the rights to TV shows, computer programmes, creative copyright or steel supplies; and these are the ‘posh’ Chinamen who deal with Western companies. Regardless of the immorality of such actions, or your estimation for China, it is clear from this example we do not require belief in these magical concepts to have a productive, commercially successful society. We might also add how English industrialization was undertaken on the back of two immense confiscations of land from the monasteries, and by enclosure, separated from each other by 200 years.
The refutation of the idea of inherent rights is not new and by now banal. For let us first define what a right is. A definition of the word right at all consumeasurate with its use in politics must be something like a norm which one is always forced to obey when invoked. For rights, as so defined, to be efficacious they must be imposed by a universally compulsory force. I either vindicate my rights by my own force, in which case I do not need to call them rights not having to dispute them, or a superior force gives them to me at its leisure. If a norm exists without any force, then it is clearly not a right for there is nothing ensuring its obedience; it makes no sense for me to talk of my right not to be imprisoned without trial if by ‘right’ I simply mean a non-compulsory norm.
It also makes no sense to talk about ‘rights’ derived from my own force, for if I take an apple from a tree and eat it, or secure my ownership of land by shooting dead a trespasser, what use is there to invoke my ‘right to eat apples’, and to what authority is the right invoked? The only universally compulsory norm derivable from this condition is the tautology which states weakness yields to strength. I cannot invoke my ‘natural right to eat apples’ to a landowner who has seized the apple tree, for both of us are really appealing to the effects of might when we take the apples. I either overpower the landowner, or the claim is meaningless. Thus we find the concept of ‘rights’ can only exist to refer to something established by a superior force over those in its charge and liable to its convenience.
Frequently, this produces an emotional reaction which associates what we have said with the idea that the state in itself is morally admirable and we may only exercise force by submitting to it. This is a false supposition taking the idea of the state we would get from the argument FOR natural rights, viz: as a sort of fixed body of inherent legitimacy created by common compact, when if we accept there are no norms but those established by force, the state is whatsoever has sufficient force over given land or people. There is nothing wrong in saying a man living by himself defending his property is thus ‘sovereign’, but it is wrong to say he is so because of a ‘right’ independent of the ability to defend himself which a conquering state is obligated to respect.
I realize the tautology created here only works for the definition of right I have proposed, but I challenge anyone to find a better definition if they have a problem with this. To avoid identical conclusions they would have to define Rights as things which are either non-compulsory, in which case they become meaningless if invoked except as mere requests, or not universal, which amounts ultimately to the same thing. It is from the following cast-iron arguments that I do not believe natural rights are real. I will now address the eccentric attempt by which some have cavilled with my belief to show natural rights are real by an analogy with Darwinism.
This interpretation of Darwinism is not new, very similar things have been said from the opposite end of the ideological ‘spectrum’, also to justify an untenable moral claim. Steven Jay Gould was fond to invoke the ‘Evolutionary Logic’ of Altruism with the vague implication this justified a redistributive welfare-state. According to Gould, the fact the near ancestors of human beings lived in what he believed to be co-operative egalitarian tribes and needed one another for survival, mean that we are somehow obligated to accept refugees and support the idle because of ‘Gnon’. If Ronald Reagan cut social security then, like a monkey cut off from the monkey-tribe, he would simply die alone by inexorable evolutionary vengeance.
As I understand it, this argument is that it is easier for people to agree to respect one another’s lives and property because of the common risk to life in fighting to subjugate another. On a zoological timeframe this means the beings who co-operate with one another will produce more children than those subjugating heroes who, even when successful for one generation, will inevitably wipe each other out. Thus, our concept of “property” (as opposed to ‘altruism’, or ‘socialism’) is a kind of “Natural Law” in which property rights (or welfare) are Natural Rights. It is Natural Law because it has come down to us through millions of years of selection. Not only must individuals respect the property of other individuals, but if the state, as a sort of social organism, does not respect the property of individuals (as opposed to other states) it will be inevitably destroyed by obscure mechanisms of providence.
What this tells us is simply that organisms believing themselves weak respect property rights. Darwinism is a theory of how present differences among organisms are generated by the pursuit of Egoistic ends in the past. By definition, it does not entail anything but ‘freedom’, and then study the results of this freedom, in the present moment. The time-span of evolution too much outstrips that of an individual life to make the norm of co-operation which has emerged in this way a compulsory one. Should you choose to emulate, instead of the organisms who co-operate with one another from fear of death and leave mediocre children behind, the heroic creatures which risked death for supremacy, you will not face immediate ruin. Indeed, what our Darwinian syllogism (a syllogism invented by the Natural Law people, not me) that co-operation is rational only in weakness show, is that nobody who faces this choice will; and the logical world finds plenty of material exemplars: for the cases where property rights are most sought, Putin seizing the assets of Yudkowsky, the government nationalizing industries, Slavery etc. Are all cases where the expropriator is far beyond the threat of vengeance.
It is not evident from the record of history any vindication of this Natural Law has occurred yet. We have mentioned the English nobility expropriated the property of the Monasteries and then the common land of the people, and no thunderbolts of ‘co-operation’ were released from the Darwinian heaven. The invasion and colonization of foreign lands is excused by the idea “Natural Law” does not apply to the “out-group”, but unless one seriously argues for the opposite of Darwinism, Aristotelianism, saying species differences exist inherently in nature due to teleology, then this is a “cope”, for there is nothing stopping any class or singular man from declaring whomsoever they wish to expropriate the “Out Group”. Hence trying to shift selection from individuals to groups of individuals (viz. That while the boss will suffer no penalty from allowing rapine, a society which practices it will collapse) is not sustainable. The success of ‘civilization’ is not a persuasive reason for the labouring slave to prolong it.
It is part of the nature of things that man has a nature apart from the nature of things. Human beings are conscious. Even if that consciousness has wholly material basis in chemicals, it is self-evidently extant, and consequently we do not simply fulfill biological imperatives withal. The reason for this is that human beings can suffer fates worse than death, the fate of servitude, and access to paradise called fame. Fame is the only afterlife which we all know to be true. Even if the conquerors who refuse to co-operate kill themselves off, and the co-operative survive to produce sons, the human being who is not an animal will still rather risk death for the glory of imposing his memory as a conqueror upon those who submit. History shows there is nothing inherently impossible about this, and knowing pre-eminence to be possible, vital mankind will always strive for it.
It seems then that it is quite possible for ‘Natural Law’ to be violated with impunity, and with that possibility it is likely (if not virtuous) that men will violate it. Ofc. the readers’ mind will now be filled with smoke and flame of rapine, for arguments about the ‘state of nature’ necessarily turn to exaggeration. So let us be clear it is still quite prudent and wise for a ruler to maintain property of his slaves. We have yet to mention even among animals, co-operation is hardly as strict as Natural Law has made out. Young Lions will frequently kill or drive out an ailing male. In every group with sufficient intelligence to develop notions of ‘property’ there also exist internal status hierarchies where mobility occurs through usurping said property. We say this now, to point out the violations of “Natural Law” are mainly done by people seeking power against those with power, rather than the powerful against the powerless. It is in examples already given, Putin moving against the oligarchs, that we find the main human cases where property rights are dispensed with. In short, our objection to Natural Law from a purely utilitarian standpoint, almost mimicking the faux-Darwinianism, is that it comes into being purely to contain elite power-struggles.
This, however, is something very different from what the Natural Law believers want; a series of cast-iron norms nobody can violate, and which ideally citizens can use to build a society without the need for a state, for whenever the conveniences of the ruler outway the fairly low value of general social stability, there is nothing stopping him from seizing property and indeed it is rational that he does so. What it also entails is that politics must mean more than simply securing property rights; as many who do not believe in Natural Law, like Moldbug, simply assume to be true. The purpose of politics, for me, lies elsewhere: in the selection of the individuals who violate Natural Law; so as to create a being of so meritorious an endowment, perfect beauty, superior intelligence and raptor-cunning as to fix the will of mankind in fretful admiration of his magnificence, and so command them to conformity.