Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [85]
For these reasons and more, some become fanatics for the cause. They take to the streets and, ironically, demand their own demise as they protest against their own self-determination and for ever more autocracy and authoritarianism. When they vote, they vote to enchain not only their fellow citizens but, unwittingly, themselves. Paradoxically, as the utopia metastasizes and the society ossifies, elections become less relevant. More and more decisions are made by masterminds and their experts, who substitute their self-serving and dogmatic judgments—which are proclaimed righteous and compassionate—for the individual’s self-interests and best interests.
These masterminds—the politicians, judges, and bureaucrats—have become America’s version of Plato’s philosopher-kings and guardians, with obvious exceptions. As Plato wrote in the Republic, “Philosophers because of the love of Forms [a perfect thing or being], become lovers of proper order in the sensible world as well. They wish to imitate the harmony of the Forms, and so in their relations with others they are loath to do anything that violates the proper order among people” (404). Moreover, only they are able to know “the Good” (the ultimate truth). They are wise and learned beyond the capabilities of the people they rule.
But from where do the masterminds acquire their superhuman qualities? Are they born with them? Do they materialize upon election or appointment to high office? The truth is that no individual or assemblies of individuals are up to the task of managing society. They never have been and they never will be. They do not know what they do not know. As Friedrich Hayek explained, “Economics has from its origins been concerned with how an extended order of human interaction comes into existence through a process of variation, winnowing and sifting far surpassing our capacity to design.… In our economic activities we do not know the needs which we satisfy nor the sources of things which we get. Almost all of us serve people whom we do not know, and even of whose existence we are ignorant; and we in turn constantly live on the services of other people of whom we know nothing. All this is possible because we stand in a great framework of institutions and traditions—economic, legal, and moral—into which we fit ourselves by obeying certain rules of conduct that we never made, and which we have never understood in the sense which we understand how the things that we manufacture function.”1 There is symbiosis to the civil society in which individuals participate in an intricate system of infinite voluntary economic, social, and cultural interactions that are motivated by their needs and desires within the community.
Thus central planning is not about rationality and reason. It is not about knowledge and experience. It is about illegitimately exercising power over others. It is about the deceit of moral relativism and situationalism. It is about the coercive imposition of a hopelessly impossible utopian ideal—an ideal that is complex and ambiguous; fixed and elusive; comprehensive and piecemeal; and abrupt and gradual. However, its direction is certain, steady, and one-way—tyranny, in one form or another. It requires nonstop social engineering and intervention, in matters big and small, for it concedes no failures, acknowledges no bounds, and tolerates no deviation from dogma, which is said to be futuristic, paradisiacal, and preordained.
Post-constitutional America bears the resemblance and qualities of a utopian enterprise. Its exact form and nature elude definitional precision, but its outlines are familiar enough. It shares ambitions, albeit inexactly, not only with the hierarchical caste system in Plato’s Republic, where the politicians and judges behave increasingly as philosopher-kings, federal bureaucrats serve as guardian enforcers, and “the masses” exist to serve the greater good of the state, but also with the artificial humanism of Thomas More’s Utopia, where labor is managed, conformity imposed, and no one