I say that men are instinctively social animals who live by hierarchy. There is no mystery about this. Men were once warriors defending the borders, just like the chimpanzees in Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade. In chimpanzee troops the males patrol the border in threes. Obviously, when the three chimp comrades encounter an intruder from another troop someone needs to decide who holds down the intruder and who bashes his brains out with a rock.
So it is in a human army, with a hierarchy of generals over officers over NCOs over privates.
Now, the social scientists in our modern era advertise the conceit that they believe in equality. So did Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, dictators of the most unegalitarian regimes in history.
The fact is that every government that ever was and ever will be is a hierarchy, with a king or president or Dear Leader at the top and various subordinate ranks below.
But what is this magnificent hierarchy to do? That is the existential problem that faces every Great Leader who has climbed the greasy pole of political hierarchy. Somehow, they all decide on a war against an enemy.
But Alamogordo has rather taken the shine off glorious world wars, and so our Dear Leaders have been forced to find new enemies.
That is why, as Jeffrey A. Tucker relates, the World Health Organization went all-in on the existential war against COVID. WHO sent a team to China in February 2020 to view the CCP response to the new Coronavirus.
A team toured several cities and listened as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) instructed them on the control of infectious disease through shocking totalitarian schemes.
And the WHO team loved it. Their report exulted:
In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.
“Agile,” mind you. In fact, it was the clumsiest, most ineffective, and damaging attack Maurice Strong gussied up the Global Warming threat when he was rattling around at the UN in the 1990s. The United Nations, like any hierarchy, needed an enemy to fight. But what enemy? Obviously, an enemy that would make all the Nations of the world United.
It’s obvious, at least to you and me if not to the folk at the global Activist Industrial Complex, that the political response to the equality thing has not been exactly supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, as Bert would say. The drive for equality resulted in the opposite of equality. So what do we do?
The answer is clear. We must look again at hierarchy and try to understand how much hierarchy is really needed, in some middle ground between a hegemonic inequality and an unattainable equality.
As with many things, the Germans cottoned on to this fairly early. After World War I, in an all-hands review, the German army decided that the modern lethal battlefield required that responsibility be pushed down the hierarchy as far as possible — to preserve agility. But this meant that junior officers and NCOs needed to be resourceful and responsible. The Germans came up with a word for it: verantwortungsfreudig. It means “joyful in taking responsibility.”
Two things we know. The über-hierarchy of lefty domination by the best and brightest — as epitomized by the disaster of the late COVID unpleasantness — does not work, and the über-equality for the helpless victims of activist fantasy does not work either.
On the question of equality, I am going to step outside the Overton Window. See you in a minute. I believe that, since the beginning of agriculture, there have always been human slaves and serfs, and there always will be. You think plantation slavery is bad? Compared to the slavery of Communism and the slavery of drug dependency on the downtown streets of our liberal blue cities, I’d say that plantation slavery was usually a walk in the park.
But what does work? We don’t know. I believe we are entering a Golden Age where we are going to find out. I think the Golden Age will have something to do with that crazy German word that means “joyful in taking responsibility.” But, Bert the chimney sweep warns, it probably won’t quite be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Then there is the question of how the Committee of Neighborhood Women fits into this story of hierarchy. But that is another story.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
Imahe: RawPixel.com
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