If there is one thing that I appreciate about H.L. Mencken's writings most, it is his honesty when others would pretend otherwise.
And the one honest observation about politics and life that I appreciate most from Mencken is that politics and life is one long lie - to ourselves, to one another, to the world - as long as people insist on undermining one another's freedoms. This is why Mencken thought government inherently and unreformably corrupt. Because it was in the business of curbing freedoms, which was the very thing that led to so much of the dishonesty in the world.
I don't think people or government are inherently and unreformably corrupt. But I do think that we will live with a big lie in our lives, in our culture, and in our government as long as we pretend that it is our force and not our freedom that makes for more honest people, cultures, and governments.
Two studies - one on cigarette taxes and one on border security - have come out affirming the ability to force our way through serious issues. And the one interesting commonality among these paternalistic studies is that neither seem to give much concern, at all, to the people whose lives they govern.
Remember, Nazism and Communism, both, also had scientific arguments and studies to buttress their ugly and wrong-headed ideas. Paternalistic and repressive governing efforts of all stripes have learned that trick in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Genuine efforts need genuine freedom for the independent people responsible for those efforts to internalize the lessons and do what needs to be done - whether it be cutting down and ending their smoking habit and non-smokers learning to respect the rights of smokers to make choices with their lives or a culture developing a more understanding immigration policy and immigrants learning to respect the security priorities of a new country that accounts for all of the concerns that people face in both arenas, not just the narrow concerns of those who wish to end either - freely and without resistance. There is no faking this fact. It does not matter how many studies find short-term consequences that researchers prefer from efforts to force their way through issues. The truth is both studies reflect the self-centered priorities of the reformers they seek to buttress. Instead of a genuine concern for smokers, the smoking study focuses on how money can be raised for children's health insurance programs to both cut down on short-term sales of cigarettes and to rationalize their paternalism. And instead of focusing on the enormous difficulties that Mexicans face in their own country making a living and building an economy - where a much more paternalistic governments more seriously limits free trade and free and more equitable economic development and where educational opportunities are limited - researchers focus on how to scare Mexicans who they weren't too terribly concerned with, anyway, from crossing the border.
When most people say that force works - as has been true since the beginning of humanity - what they mean is that it works for them, even if it means sacrificing the needs and interests of others. By this logic, Kim Jong Il's use of force over his country works, because it gets him a big mansion and a luxurious lifestyle, even if it means that his people starve. As long as all he has to do is limit who his use of force is working for to rationalize its use, then he can clearly demonstrate it works. And by that logic, the Chinese government is effective at dealing with citizen dissent when it imprisoned and killed all those people at Tiananmen Square, because they haven't had as many problems with student dissent since (though their one-child policy is sparking more violent reactions these days). Every despot in the world - including Hitler and Stalin - could make such arguments successfully if the only criteria was that force work for someone at the expense of the interests of others.
But those arguments aren't worthy of liberal democracies whose ideals posit that their principles and values work for all people, not just those they favor.
That is always how force has been used. And, apparently, if we do not make a more fundamental change in the way we use force, that is how it will always be used, abused, and then fall apart, as it always must since we can only get away from sacrificing the interests of others for so long before both our consciences and our self-centeredness catches up with us.
The proponents of force are failing to appreciate the fundamental political shift that is occurring in the world away from the most serious wielders of force - the U.S. and even state institutions, generally - as citizens look elsewhere for someone, some body, somewhere they can trust. They will turn to these states and institutions to force themselves upon areas they want forced upon. And then their cynicism and mistrust in those institutions will be reinforced as they find themselves forced upon. That is the long and sad history of liberal democratic peoples' and cultures. And it always finds a way to unravel itself from such nonsensical logic. We are in the middle of one such unraveling. It will take time.
In the meantime, it is nice to read people who were at least honest in the face of that kind of bullshit in their own time, rather than playing politics - which translates: lying for the convenience of maintaining one's power or influence - because being more honest about world was inconvenient to their smaller and more narrow aspirations.
A more regulated life is a more dishonest life, inherently. There is no way around that fact of life, really. And either we will face up to that fact. Or we will be doomed to a more and more repressive direction for our democracies until we do.
One thing is for sure: do no expect the proponents of force to take responsibilities for their failures. They are not likely to. It is not in the nature of those who want power over others to take responsibility for their mistakes, in my experience. It threatens their interests too much. Generally, someone else - a future leader, a future generation, someone other than the person who has wielded or abused the power - will have to take responsibility for the mistake, if it happens at all.
Repressive govenments and cultures are resistant to letting go of their repressive ways, generally, from my observations, for the same reason that citizens are resistant to their repression, even the most well-intentioned, paternalistic repression - because everyone resists efforts to hurt or punish them. There are very few exceptions to this rule of human nature, and certainly not dependable enough to replicate them reliably.
In the meantime, I don't give a shit, anymore. I will have to learn my own lessons and live my own life taking my lumps - helpful or not; and those who give them to me when I made clear that they were not helpful get no credit from me and as much desparagement of your condescending efforts as I can possible muster - and just working to be so much better than everyone else in my fields that it becomes impossible for them to pretend otherwise except as also-rans trying desperately to prove that their failures are someone else's responsibility other than their own. That is a discouraging reality to come to terms with and which undermines my enthusiasm and confidence in tackling the problems I need to tackle in my fields. But it is the reality that I live with, right now, and can only hope that I can improve for future generations. I can only hope I deal with that reality with enough confidence and enthusiasm that my children and future generations won't judge me harshly for falling short of their more ideal expecations of what life in a free world should look like and my part in that creating or obstructing that freedom.
I am tired of the world being one long lie so that none of us have to face up to our bullshit, especially what should be irreversibly abandoned bullshit after the enormous tragedies of the 20th century, that more forceful and repressive measures are responsible for all the good in our lives rather than the well-intentioned but largely failed and often ugly efforts to limit our freedom to improve our lives, forever imperfectly but better with more freedom rather than less.
I am tired of that lie getting the traction that it does, and rationalizing all of the worst uses and abuses of power in the history of humanity, including and especially those that occur today.
Giving up the repression doesn't magically make this an honest world. But it will make us more honest, with ourselves and with one another. And that is a world I wouldn't mind seeing before I die.
Love,
Ben
