Can We Become What Our Overlords Least Expect?

Sovereignty, not salad forks. (DN 2.18)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22

(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11 | 2.12 | 2.13 | 2.14 | 2.15 | 2.16 | 2.17 | 2.XX | 2.18

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Chapter 2.18
A nation of ‘aristocrats’?

I have an idea. I had been planning to wait until a later chapter to begin discussing how this idea might be incorporated into our concept of the distributed nation. However, after a conversation with Hat Bailey, I have decided to change the timetable.

I was still in the process of formulating the idea—stirring it slowly on that back burner while working on more pressing concepts. But the time is right.

And you can help. As I said in the preface, this entire project is, and will be, made better by your input—through the miracle of collaborative intelligence. Your input is not only welcome, but, as you will see, it is especially appropriate that I should ask for it here, given the topic.

There are a lot of threads to weave together here, so please be patient as I do so.

A set of behaviors

The kernel of this idea began formulating about five years ago, after I read “God as a Gentleman”—the 2018 Erasmus Lecture by Rémi Brague. In this speech, Brague discusses the virtues of being a gentleman—not as one who has been born into it, but as someone who chooses to act as a gentleman ought to act.

At the same time, I was exploring the subject of aristocracy from the other end—as a problematic aspect of human life. The two notions appeared to be in conflict.

On the one hand, as I was writing in earnest in my other book and have further explored in this one, there is no such thing in nature as birthright authority. The notion that some are born with an automatic and permanent authority to rule, and others with an automatic and permanent duty to be ruled, is fiction.

Such designations may be culturally imposed, but they aren’t a fact of nature. There is no such thing as highborn and lowborn. As such, their demise in human culture was a necessary step. The end of divine right of kings was the end of an error.

On the other hand, there is an aspect of aristocracy that is compelling: not as a form of inherited authority, but as a set of behaviors.

I need not belabor the point too much: if I say that members of the aristocracy tend to hold themselves and their children to higher standards than many other cohorts, you know exactly what I mean.

They teach their children refinement: good posture, good manners, and good taste. They hold them to high standards of education and achievement. They instruct them to comport themselves with dignity, propriety, and grace.

Knowing which fork to use may seem like a meaningless indulgence, but it bespeaks the maintenance of standards and traditions—of holding the line against decay into the ordinary. In this same way, practicing walking with a book on one’s head develops the habit of good posture, holding the line against a descent into slouching. And honestly, who looks better—the person who strides confidently into a room with a ramrod-straight spine, or the one who shambles in like a common troll?

Did aristocrats of the past try to behave better because they believed themselves to be better? Sure. After all, everything in the human cultural, historical, and political experience had been telling them for centuries that they were, ontologically, of a higher caste. But that does not change the fact that they did seek to hold themselves to high standards of comportment and achievement befitting their “station.”

This also extends, importantly, to the notion of noblesse oblige—the belief that their station confers upon them certain social and civic obligations. To act honorably and responsibly. To give charitably, and to offer protection to all those within their ambit.

You needn’t inform me that there were plenty of nobles who did not behave nobly. I am not romanticizing; I am generalizing.

In fact, I got to witness something of a microcosmic version with my own eyes. When I was a young child, I spent five years living in an area with a lot of old money. Really old. Picture thirty-room mansions with staffs of servants. Imagine nineteenth-century ‘castles’ overlooking a mist-covered lake. I trick-or-treated at one such house, where—no joke!—a butler would lead us kiddies into a ballroom with silver trays heaped with candy corn and other treats. (It took restraint to just take a few.) I trick-or-treated at Robert Duvall’s house at least one of those years (and probably all of them, but I can only picture one in my memory). And no, he did not come to the door, though I am not sure that at age eight I would have recognized him even if he had. I assume he too sent his butler to greet us little ghouls.

Obviously most homes were less ostentatious than all that, but a few of my friends and schoolmates lived in quite massive houses. (We were not among the rich; we had simply been lucky enough to find a rental in half of what had been, at the turn of the century, a carriage house for a massive estate.)

This was in America in the 1970s. Any notions of fixed class and birthright authority had been left in the mists of history and on the shores of the Mother Country. And yet these people still endeavored to teach their children to be the best that they could. To achieve. To comport themselves with grace.

Honestly, if you leave behind the birthright authority and just think of aristocracy in terms of a set of behaviors, there really is a lot to like. Being snooty and entitled is obviously gross, as is being a useless playboy or debutante.

But being accomplished and classy is a laudable goal.

Decline and aspirations

Needless to say, interest in all things aristocratical runs high, even in a consciously egalitarian culture like that of the United States. Americans love Downton Abbey. They cry while watching royal weddings. Disney has a pantheon of princesses, and no little girl is begging her parents to buy her a peasant dress. There is something aspirational at work in this.

Of course, we are also right to be bitter toward the elites of a bygone age. Birthright authority was absolutely a form of oppression. Sumptuary laws. The inescapable bonds of a feudal caste system. Getting whipped for not knowing your “place.” It is good that all that is over, and it is not something we should ever want to emulate.

Yet there is something there—something that continues to hold the fascination of millions. Whatever that something is, does it hold any lessons for us?

In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe demonstrates, in painstaking praxeological detail, that the character of people in Western countries has diminished because of democracy. (And yes, that includes constitutional republics.)

The end of hereditary authority and fixed class is something to celebrate. But there is another kind of class—being classy—and that too is in decline. And that is not something to celebrate.

Can we somehow dispose of the former while retaining the latter?

Class, keep in mind, does not have to be all about cotillions and salad forks. In its higher sense, it is about being noble. About modeling virtues such as justice, honesty, and wisdom. It is about trying to be good—in the sense of the sorts of virtues we began looking at in our discussion of the SHOULDS.

Would we not prefer to live among such people? Would we not prefer to be such people?

True SELF-government

For those of us who seek greater freedom, there is another reason why a general decline in such virtues is a problem…

As we discussed previously, if one does not govern oneself, one is far more likely to invite governance from without. If you control yourself, there is less justification for anyone else to claim that they must exercise control over you.

We will be seeking greater freedom and independence. We will eventually be insisting upon our right to self-governance and self-determination. Setting aside, momentarily, discussion of the obstacles that lay in our path, what gives us the better chance?

If the people around us look at us, and how we conduct ourselves, and say,

Ugh, what a bunch of low-rent schlubs.

Or, if they say,

Wow, those people are always so decent and upstanding.

Again, I am not talking about salad forks and monocles. I am speaking of nobility in the best sense of the word.

Whither our freedom?

One of the challenges that conservatives offer to libertarians is to ask, simply,

Freedom FOR WHAT? What are you going to do with this freedom you so cherish?

There are at least five ways to define the word “freedom.” We lionize the first one—freedom from external coercion—and rightly so. The principles of natural law make it clear: you are free to do whatever you wish to do, so long as it does not violate the consent of another.

But just because you are free to do a thing does not mean that you should do that thing. There is plenty that you may do (in that it does not violate the consent of another) that you nonetheless should not do.

You should, rather, use your freedom to do good things.

Sometimes, that might even involve showing a little discipline:

Noble people do not let themselves be carried away by their whims. This alleged freedom to do as one pleases is rather to be found among slaves, who do what they like as soon as the eye of the master is not upon them. The paradox was already pointed out in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In a household, free people are rather more bound than let loose.

Self-government is a right, but it also involves some responsibilities. We are not slaves in need of masters, and we ought not act as such.

Noble principles, noble people

It is easy enough to get carried away in either direction…

We can allow the baggage of the past, and the oppression we undergo from today’s class of global modern ‘elites,’ to anger us, leading to the desire to bask in our status as the “common” people.

And on the other end, we certainly don’t want to start wearing top hats and tailcoats.¹

I am convinced there is some sweet spot to find here. After all, our core principles themselves are noble. Something is telling me that a focus on being the best that we can—on being as noble as our principles—will help us weather the storms to come.

And (Trump’s win yesterday notwithstanding), the world is quite a stormy place.

I return to Brague (emphases mine):

In today’s world, a clear and present danger is the emergence of two-tiered regimes in which an elite few don’t even think of the existence of the run-of-the-mill many, and when they do, the elite increasingly deride them as vulgar and unworthy of their leadership. One symptom of this widening divide is the rise of so-called populism. So-called, or rather called so by the elite. In this development, we suffer a double loss. On the side of the many, we see the loss of a consciousness of one’s own nobility. On the side of the elite, we see the loss of the consciousness of what the motto noblesse oblige involves.

Why have things moved in this direction? I suggest that it rests, at least in part, in a widespread tendency among elites to presume vulgarity and look for any possible reason to humiliate man. […]

Our elites have a reductive habit of mind when it comes to their general assessment of the human condition. Meanwhile, there exists something entirely opposite, a transhumanist dream in which the would-be elite will translate their monetary superiority into a permanent, physical superiority by enhancing their powers with the use of genetic or electronic devices. We may ask whether the idea of human dignity, the generalized ascription of nobility to all members of the human race—and ultimate ground of our sacred cow, human rights—will be able to resist the buffets of this double assault.

There is great tension in all this.

Kings and aristocrats of the past sullied and despoiled the concept of “nobility” with their cruelty, elitism, and serial violations of the rights of the individual human person. Today’s so-called ‘elites’ are doing the same thing.

Yet we still have the word “nobility.” There is still an ideal in there somewhere.

The problem comes from the temptations of authority and power. Indeed, our understanding of natural law tells us that authority and power are a big part of what is wrong with the world.

But why can’t nobility be decoupled from power?

Our principles and protocols already recognize—better than most, and better than anyone in power—the infinite preciousness of the individual human person. We know that each and every one of us is sovereign—in our selves and in our own spaces. And that each and every person has an equal claim to their sovereignty and rights.

In essence, we recognize the nobility of every person.

Our would-be overlords do not. They think of us as rabble. To them, we are a herd to be corralled and culled. Free-range humans on a tax farm.

Keep producing. Keep voting. Keep your filthy plebe mouth shut.

How are we to respond to this? By remaining the rabble they expect us to be? Or by becoming the aristocrats they never saw coming? Not a ruling class, but individuals ruling our own lives with class. Sovereign people, nobly defending noble principles.

Noble people, with our noble houses in order.

They expect us to pour into the streets every once in a while, to protest what they are doing to us. They expect us to be violent. In fact, they would love nothing better, since it would give them the excuse to do the things they really want to do to us.

What they don’t expect is a worldwide aristocracy of sovereign humans.

We already outnumber them by a thousand to one. But why just outnumber them as a throng of ‘the masses,’ who presume their leadership and complain once in a while?

Why not outnumber them as noble people and noble houses? Each aware of his own power. His own sovereignty and freedom. His own worth. Even his own noblesse oblige.

Something tells me that if this were successful on a large enough scale, our elitist overlords won’t need to be overthrown.

They will wither in fear and awareness of their own vulgarity.

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Please add your thoughts, so that together we can flesh all this out. You can also help by helping me support my family, so all of this can continue:

I *think* this was the house with the trays of candy. But I was really young, so I am not sure.

1. Indeed, one of the fictional “phyles” in Neal Stephenson’s quasi-anarchic near-future novel The Diamond Age were the Neo-Victorians. They dressed the part, and they did very much have their acts together, but they were also a bit hypocritical. (As we discussed previously, though this is fiction, reading it helps flesh out a few real-world ideas.)