The title of this essay is the first half of a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien. I have long believed that in this bit of wisdom lies the only solution to the endlessly creeping statism that’s been engulfing the United States the way The Blob did its victims. I’ve repeatedly noted that “an addict needs to bottom out before starting on the road to recovery,” and I’ve felt that America’s election of the quasi-socialist Barack Obama after the “compassionate conservative” statism of George W. Bush might represent that nadir of addiction to statism.
However, the twin popularities of the proud socialist Bernie Sanders and the corporatist demagogue Donald Trump, and the lack of any traction of pro-liberty messages delivered by the other candidates, have me rethinking the depth to which the nation must descend before deciding to seek recovery. I’ve also realized that I’ve fallen prey to that which I have warned against over my years as a libertarian wonk – subordinating individuals to groups.
First, lets consider the fuller quote from Tolkien, found in The Lord of the Rings, Book III, Chapter 11:
“I wish I had known all this before,” said Pippin. “I had no notion of what I was doing.”
“Oh yes, you had,” said Gandalf. “You knew you were behaving wrongly and foolishly; and you told yourself so, though you did not listen. I did not tell you all this before, because it is only by musing on all that has happened that I have at last understood, even as we ride together. But if I had spoken sooner, it would not have lessened your desire, or made it easier to resist. On the contrary! No, the burned hand teaches best. After that advice about fire goes to the heart.”
“It does,” said Pippin. “If all the seven stones were laid out before me now, I should shut my eyes and put my hands in my pockets.”
The crux of this pearl of wisdom is “After that, advice about fire goes to the heart.” The flaw in applying it to the American political landscape is in conflating an individual’s burned hand with a nation’s suffering under statism. The nation is not a single consciousness, capable of feeling the pain from the burn. It is a collection of millions of individuals, many of whom have not felt the individualized consequence of a foolish predilection to statism, and many of whom have spent their lives so immersed in the miseries of statism that they have no sense of what life is like with less of it. They can’t imagine engaging in an economic transaction without a thousand government overseers peering over both shoulders and up all skirts, they can’t imagine speaking without a raft of scolds specifying and vetting the words and phrases they use, they can’t envision a life where Big Daddy isn’t there to protect them from any bad consequence, and the notion that voluntary cooperation produces better outcomes than a pack of “best and brightest” overlords can is so alien as to be incomprehensible. They are frogs born into an already-hot pot of water, and they aren’t easily able to imagine how much more comfortable a cooler pot would be.
Another problem lies in the complexity of life under government. If I pick up a hot coal and burn my hand, it’s pretty obvious what caused the burn. It’s not so obvious, though, why I might be having trouble finding a good job. If there were no pain receptors in my hand, I might have to rely on my vision to know that my hand was burned. If I could not see, and someone placed the hot coal in my hand, I’d know that my hand was burned, but not by what object or mechanism. In a complex reality, where cause and effect are shunted through multiple steps and actors, it’s harder to truly associate cause and effect, and this makes us susceptible to bad information. I might come up with a dozen different reasons why I am having trouble finding a good job, and if I don’t drill down into those reasons and apply critical thought and logic, I may end up preferring or believing a completely invalid or inaccurate one. I can convince myself, or be convinced by others, that my inability to find a good job is due to factors completely at odds with the objective truth. And, make no mistake, there is an objective truth. It may be very complicated, it may even be not fully known or knowable. But, a hot ember WILL burn my hand if I pick it up, and no argument, no matter how seductive or elaborate, will make that not true.
Personal experience to counter this phenomenon isn’t as overt as the burned hand, but it isn’t nonexistent, either. It can be found in accumulated years or decades of life experience and awareness. Herein lies the problem with thinking that the nation simply needs to bottom out before recovering. Those decades of personal experience can be shared with others, and others can and do learn from them, but those others don’t learn the lessons personally. Gandalf knew that Pippin had to burn his hand in order to truly learn the lesson, no matter that Pippin already knew the facts of the lesson.
Since none of us live forever, and since a fresh batch of young people reach voting age every election, we are faced with a perpetual need for people to burn their own hands. This is why the young are more likely to flock to socialism – they haven’t experienced its horrors directly in an educational or revelatory fashion. The information about socialism’s evils is widely known and broadly available, but until they feel the burn, they can easily convince themselves that it’s not only not too hot to touch, but that embracing it is the right thing to do.
What, then, is the solution to the ever-expanding and all engulfing blob that is statism in the US? If waiting for the addict to bottom out isn’t the solution, because we are faced with millions of new addicts every year, then the fight against statism must take a different path. Addicts fall prey to addictive things because they make them feel good. No one shoots heroin to make himself feel lousy. A common “trick” for breaking a bad habit is to replace it with something else. If we can’t burn a statist’s hand directly, a taste of liberty and the pleasure it provides might make an effective substitute. In the aggregate, that means chasing small victories and broadcasting the positive results they spawn. Young people can be turned onto the path of liberty, as Ron Paul’s rEVOLution demonstrated.
As for Sanders and Trump? Feel the Bernie blames the nation’s woes on the wealthy, The Donald blames the nation’s woes on foreigners Both think the fix for those woes is the big fat hand of government, applied their way. Both are wrong. Their supporters may have to burn their hands directly, though, to truly learn that hard reality.
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