From the White-PillBox: Part 53
Those in positions of power can be cluelessly incompetent, or downright evil. Either way, their destructive results are a Black Pill. Where's the White Pill in that?
Many anarchists and other freedom advocates cannot seem to decide which better explains social decay: that government is inept, or purposefully evil. And almost all are Black Pilled by whichever they choose.
Government as an incompetent force
This position holds that the bad outcomes of statism emerge because politicians and bureaucrats lack intelligence and forethought. They set up poor systems, making government lumbering and inefficient. This all makes a mess of things.
For being inept, they are blameworthy. But this is tempered because they are generally well-intended. They know not what they do.
Government as a sinister force
This thinking holds that those in power know exactly what they are doing. They are highly competent, and explicitly evil. They collude and conspire as the world’s ruling elites. Their harmful outcomes are planned, with people as mere pawns in their game.
How can there be a White Pill here?
To answer this, we first need to explore some aspects of this Black Pill. Who or what is incompetent? Who or what is evil? Which of the two, incompetence or evil, better explains the social wreckage caused by government?
Who exactly is the threat?
It’s actually not the State per se. The State, as an institution, is not a thinking entity. Indeed, it is not an entity at all, but an abstraction that arises out of human actions and beliefs. It is a composite of individuals, each acting according to their own motivations and values.
As far as the thing we call “the State”, there is nothing there to label as incompetent or evil 1. True, the idea of the State is bad. But an idea cannot be incompetent or act sinister. So although the threat is very real and its outcomes horrifying, part of our White Pill is that the threat comes from people alone, nothing more.
So is it incompetence or evil?
We don’t have to take a side on the question of whether the powerful are incompetent buffoons, or evil Bond villains. The ruling class has earned both badges of honor.
We know this because we observe both. Blundering government bureaucracy is ubiquitous. But it is also utterly implausible that the endlessly horrific outcomes of statism arise from incompetence alone. Intent plays a role as well.
Are they more incompetent than evil?
There is reason to assume incompetence predominates. Amongst ourselves, average-to-low competence is common, while evil is less common 2. It is no stretch to assume this is mirrored in government.
Moreover, it squares with our firsthand experiences dealing with government workers. Generally they are unimpressive. We often see bad attitudes and laziness, while we do not often see outright evil.
Are they more evil than incompetent?
But incompetence does not paint the full picture. We can likewise observe enormous evil by State actors and their cheerleaders. They clearly act with intent, and seem indifferent to the destruction they cause.
The worst of them are psychopaths or psychopath-adjacent. They perceive others as mere tools to get what they want; they lack empathy and human compassion - traits that restrain most of us from bringing harm to others.
It is hard to imagine that the consistent damage done by government arises from blind incompetence. As Ayn Rand said, “mistakes of this size are never made innocently”.
The truly evil clearly exist, posing a threat that makes the incompetent look mild in comparison.
Politics: the magnet and breeding ground for psychopaths
There is even more reason to suspect that evil predominates in government. Politics draws psychopaths like flies. The reason is simple: it is the only area of life that legitimizes them. This results in unavoidable outcomes:
Those with psychopathic tendencies gravitate to politics, where their desire to control has institutional and social sanction. They are given permission and power to indulge their greatest urge: to control men.
Even those who enter politics with good intentions are easily corrupted. Politics takes whatever microscopic germ of psychopathy they have, and grows it like a cancer. People who might otherwise never become manipulative, sinister and lustful for power are bred into it thanks to politics.
Therefore, among politicians and other politically powerful groups, there exist the worst of us. And far out of proportion to the general population.
Resisting the urge to oversimplify incompetence and evil
We tend to be too generous regarding the inept
We are wrong to use good intentions as an excuse for bad State outcomes. Being well-intentioned implies they can learn from their mistakes. But clearly this does not happen. Government’s results get worse over time. There is no learning process at work.
We forget that they operate under incentives: their pay, benefits, job security, prestige, and the attraction of having power over others. But a key incentive is absent - the very one that makes private interactions productive: trading value for value. They don’t have to be evil for this to yield bad results 3.
And that demolishes another common assumption: that the well-intentioned in politics are salvageable. They are not incentivized to learn from bad outcomes. Indeed, if they are incompetent, they are not likely able to learn.
We tend to assume the evil are Bond villains
Sometimes we get comfortable with a nice neat picture of an elite, entrenched cabal of powerful manipulators controlling the world.
It is implausible that this reflects reality. There is scant evidence for this, and it is even too absurd for a movie script. It requires not one, but a group of highly efficient, intelligent, competent and cooperative Bond villains, persisting over decades or more.
Such shallow thinking distracts us from a better understanding of the true evil we see. Yes, they do conspire 4. But at the same time, they are not that masterful at it 5.
Why those in power are both incompetent and evil
Those comprising the State clearly display both attributes. Any broad explanation must account for both. This starts with the nature of the State.
The nature of government fosters incompetence
It funds itself by theft, and imposes its rules by force. Theft and force are by definition less productive than consensual interactions. And as indicated, the incentives breed incompetence.
From the point of view of private actions, the poorer outcomes of State actions are necessarily inefficient and incompetent.
The nature of government produces harmful outcomes
Its nature is to operate by violating consent. Members of the State have no inherent reason to factor in how their actions affect actual human beings 6. It is no surprise their actions produce poor outcomes.
The nature of politics corrupts men psychologically
Politics breeds psychological conflict in a person wielding power.
His inner, unspoken conscience knows that consent violation is wrong for all men equally. And yet he consciously participates in the process of violating consent. Normally, craving and using that power would produce guilt.
He needs to avoid feeling this guilt. So he convinces himself the victims are to blame for their suffering. He does this by perceiving them as lowly, flawed, evil, etc., and thereby feels they deserve what they get.
For the powerful, politics breeds contempt and hatred toward the common man; their inner humanity is leached out.
Yet (except for the pure psychopaths) there’s a conscience there…an inner voice that sees all men as equal. We know this because he does not exhibit this hatred and victim-blaming in other contexts. For example, he does not hold animals in contempt: they are by nature more vulnerable than humans. The same goes for those with limited mental capacity. He does not hold them in contempt: they too are by nature more vulnerable. But the general public is by nature just like the politically powerful. There is no natural reason to hold power over them. Yet he does. His mind resolves this contradiction by seeing them as at fault. They are subhuman; they are ignorant; they are evil. They deserve contempt and abuse.
Unifying incompetence and evil
This analysis permits us to find a unified explanation of those holding political power or influence 7:
They act willfully to further their self-interest, and willfully disregard the consequences.
With this template, we can see how they roll incompetence and evil into one.
Incompetence
Their disregard for consequences yields bad results. Because we tend to not analyze what is happening, we feel these outcomes are explained by incompetence. We assume they were trying to get good results, but did it badly.
Instead, the bad outcomes happen primarily because the ruling class does not have to consider the consequences. A good outcome is simply not on their radar. In fact it is more indifference than it is incompetence.
Moreover, it is willful indifference; the choice to ignore the damage they do. We know they ignore it because of the overwhelming evidence and history of State actions leading to bad outcomes. We are naive to assume they are blind to what is plainly evident 8.
Self-oriented
This is where we come to understand what is really important to them. It is their immediate desire to serve their own values and goals, at the center of which is power.
To do this, they act with intent: they are willfully self-oriented. They want to use their influence and power - and to keep it 9.
Sometimes the bad outcomes happen by chance; other times they specifically plan and orchestrate them. War, devalued money, pandemic lockdowns, or drag-queen story hours may or may not be outcomes they prize. But that is not relevant. What is important to them is their power. The destructive results? They are okay with it, intended or not. Again, willful indifference.
Who are they?
It is not a fixed global cabal working as a committee of ruling elites.
Rather, it is a group of parasites, with each person possessing their own level of influence, and each persisting over different stretches of time. They ally by choice or happenstance, formally or loosely. Their common attribute is that they are always in pursuit of their self-betterment, above all.
These people and groups blend, shift, intersect, grow and shrink. There are likely thousands of such individuals and groups acting in separate spheres at any given time. They sometimes care what other groups are doing, but generally do not.
They are hardly a cabal.
It is more like a hundred parallel tracks, all with runaway trains, manned by people in each engine room, with all their hands on the levers, all at the same time. They crave control; they delude themselves that they are untouchable; and they pay no attention to the damage along the way.
The White Pill
With this clearer understanding of the mindset of the ruling class, our White Pill is more evident. But as always, it is clearer when we take a longer-term perspective.
Indifference to their bad outcomes
Because they are indifferent to the consequences of their actions, they are asleep at the wheel. In the long run, the wreckage they cause is self-defeating. Their efforts cannot compete with the better outcomes that emerge from voluntary choices.
Consider the Post Office and the public libraries. Both were once seen as solid institutions. Today they are relics of the past, sustained only because the State still supports them. One would not have predicted this decades ago, but their slow decline is now evident to all. And we see no enthusiasm to return them to their former status. They are dying of irrelevance.
It is a true White Pill. Their indifference to outcomes will doom itself naturally. Death by irrelevance awaits all manifestations of the State.
Willfulness
In the big picture, we expend great resource debating about them: who occupies the thrones; the details of their agendas; how inept they are; how finely tuned their conspiracies.
Regardless, we should remind ourselves that their priority is seeking their own ends. The external outcomes are only relevant insofar as they serve that priority.
We should be glad they are more focused on the self, to the exclusion of the outcomes. This keeps them asleep at the wheel. They remain desperately self-centered, while the world slowly grows more aware of their nature. Their days are numbered when enough realize there is no virtue in obeying them.
Conclusion
Being White Pilled is not a rosy-eyed view of the world…a glass-half-full attitude. It is the perspective that in the long run, good outcomes are quite possible. Maybe even likely. It is the attitude that evil does not necessarily prevail, and so hope is justified.
It’s a solid White Pill that the politically powerful have an obsessively singular focus on themselves - an attribute they share with psychopaths, narcissists and serial killers. But unlike the latter, whose threats are hidden and unpredictable, the problem of all statism boils down to a simple root issue: its perceived legitimacy.
It is an Achilles Heel of those with political power: the growing awareness that they are willfully self-centered and indifferent to consequences. As the awareness spreads, statism’s legitimacy declines.
This does not deny that the very idea of the State is dangerous. And given its horrific outcomes, the State is too dangerous to tolerate. But its frightening nature arises not from any inherent power, but from the collective power held by the innumerable individual human beings who comprise it. Nonetheless, the State at its root is purely an idea, and a weak one at that, fraught with contradictions.
This makes government workers about as skillful as you or me. Which is to say:
In many respects: not particular competent
In some respects: somewhat competent
In very few (or no) respects: highly competent
The super-highly skilled and ultra-competent are few and far between. So in government, even when they are evil, they are usually not all that good at it.
Even if they have a conscious and strong desire to see people free and to leave them and their property alone, they don’t have the power to do this. Their individual power is but a fraction of all State power.
There is no shortage of examples of genuine conspiracies by those in power. The manipulations that led to World War I, followed by over 100 years of practically continuous war and war scares. The formation of the Federal Reserve, and its century of manipulation of money. The World Economic Forum, and its programs to transform the world by force into its vision of a paradise of equality, vegan diets and finely tuned weather. The CDC and the medical elite, allegedly the top tiers of scientific inquiry, advancing the least scientific measures during the COVID hysteria. The State and big social media, together suppressing dissident voices.
And of course the corporate press advancing and dutifully promoting all of it.
It is naive to see this as merely coincidence - the random results of incompetence. Random incompetence would not produce such consistent, anti-human results.
The elite may be powerful, but clearly they are not omnipotent:
Their control of propaganda has diminished. Mainstream media has lost viewership to the point where they generally capture lower audience share than many alternate media sources.
They leveraged the events of Jan 6 to make it look like a coup. This is a good example of how they must blow things out of proportion because their propaganda tool box is wearing thin.
The COVID lockdowns and mandates could be pushed only so far, and mostly got pulled back. If they really had the control of a Bond villain, they would have kept the measures in place and extended them.
Their efforts to censor unapproved social media content is being exposed.
These are not signs of a ruling class in control. They are signs of desperation.
Except in a broad political sense, insofar as it may serve their selfish interests.
Including the State’s handmaidens in corporate media, academia and big business.
One of the best examples of this is the disregard for the success of capitalism. It is quite plain that the relative liberty and private property rights (capitalism) of recent centuries lifted the world out of the grinding poverty and sickness of the past (the normal brutal existence since the dawn of man). And this is further supported by the very recent examples of East versus West Germany, and North versus South Korea. Statists make no effort to explain these inescapable and glaring examples. And yet they claim to advocate for the betterment of humanity. One cannot wish to see mankind spared the horror of poverty and illness, and at the same disregard freedom as the obvious solution.
Their silence can be nothing other than willful indifference.
Whether it is the petty power of a small town planning board, the influence of a big company lobbyist, or a high ranking politician…all prize their role, whatever its scope.