Institutionalised Immorality
Unlimited Liability
“The State, by its very nature, must violate the generally accepted moral laws to which most people adhere”. - Murray Rothbard
We are told that our institutions constitute our values. They represent the manifestation of our culture and principles. They are lauded as the embodiment of our civilisation and sophistication.
Where once we savaged each other as bloodthirsty tribes, we now have three pillars of governance; the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. In place of kill-or-be-killed, we can now rely upon the democratically constructed bulwarks against the inescapable, self-obsessed human evil that lives inside each and every one of us.
And then someone made me think. A libertarian commentator made the point that, if you believe in the inalienable rights of the individual, then any delegation of those rights flows from that individual. Life, liberty and property (or variations thereof) emerged as the perquisites for nearly every successful society. The foundational principles upon which humanity thrives.
With those rights come responsibilities. And it is understood that delegation demands the retention of that responsibility with the delegator.
The point made was, it cannot logically be the case that the recipient of the delegation can somehow absorb responsibilities for which the delegator takes no blame.
To put it another way, we cannot assign to institutions rights that we did not originally possess.
The context for this point was that of war. Of the bombing of innocent civilians. Children. Mothers. In a functioning community, we cannot instruct our institutions to perpetrate sins and somehow absolve ourselves of those atrocities.
It is profoundly immoral to advocate for a war in which you personally are not willing to participate.
The State’s authority, its government, flows from its citizens. The State is an entity that exists at the behest of its participants. It is our agent. Downstream of our wishes. It represents its populace and it acts on their behalf…under their instruction.
It is that foundational principle that lends our institutions legitimacy.
The government works for us, not us for the government.
In the context of the modern-day West, it is instructive to read those words and sense the excruciating, clashing incoherence with our daily experience. We are instructing the government to pursue anti-human Net Zero, we are delegating the bail out of the failed banksters, to censor ourselves, to debase our currencies, tax ourselves to a standstill, indebt our children. Spiritual as well as bodily autonomy overruled. The Fed, Bank of International Settlements, the IMF. The bombing of a school full of young Iranian girls. And then the “double-tapping” of their parents, as they come to the rescue (allegedly).
But that is the whole edifice upon which our civilisation rests. Our institutions reflect our wishes. They execute (unfortunately often literally) our wishes.
The will of the people.
The absurdity was brutally manifest during COVID where those that we instruct, our servants, somehow deigned to incarcerate us in our own homes against our own free will. Somehow, our institutions have turned against us.
Through combining the tools of the banking system, the information landscape and a selective monopoly on technologies it is evident that power has coalesced in the very entities that were designed to protect, above all else, our individual rights and freedoms. Our individual sovereignty.
We are ruled from the top down rather than bottom up.
Top-down upside
“The state is a fragile organisation, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.” - Henry Kissinger, World Order
It is morally incoherent for us to think we can delegate actions to institutions and for us not to be responsible for those actions.
Rewards detached from the corresponding risks. Risks taken without the corresponding consequences.
And the problem pervades levels deeper into our society. Limited liability corporations are able to divorce actions from repercussions. They act as a legalised buffer that absorbs the hit for bad but also unethical decisions made by shielded beneficiaries.
The company may go bankrupt but those previously enriched by its behaviours may escape any further punishment. No consequences.
The Dutch East India company is often held up as the first incorporated company (1602). It introduced limited liability for both shareholders and directors. It was also heavily protected and empowered by the State. It relied upon the Dutch State for financial and military backing as it extracted wealth from colonial conquests. The integration - the bundling - of state power with corporate profits from the very beginning of the corporate world.
“Fascism” derives from the Italian word fascio (plural: fasci), meaning “bundle” or “sheaf”, which originates from the Latin fasces.
We must first understand that all legislation is abstract. Legal codes are human constructs with a dizzying array of artificial objectives, interests and outcomes.
But I venture that even the concept of a limited liability company (LLC) makes no sense. Its very design is to privilege the already privileged. The fundamental premise is that a group of moneyed people can get together and take decisions for which those individuals will not be wholly responsible. They can benefit from the upside, with asymmetrical protections against the downside. The abstract construct of an LLC is anti-nature. We have to ask ourselves, how well is that going in terms of chemical factories’ pollution, heavily-rewarded bankers or pharmaceutical companies where even the confected corporate arrangement has no liability, never mind the employees. Is it morally justifiable?
Ultimately, we can take great comfort that we are all individually responsible for our actions. Whilst this may not hold in the modern societies that have been co-opted by those most willing to use the machinery of institutions to their own advantage, then it finds truth at a more spiritual level.
Many of us are not in a position to prevent our time and labour from being extracted for the purposes of immoral acts, whether via taxes, state borrowing or inflation. However, for the time being, we are in a position to resist in whichever way we can…and to wake up those who have been anaesthetised into accepting what is unthinkingly familiar. A lack of scrutiny borne of unchallenged, intergenerational complacency. The water in which we have always swum. A result of being schooled rather than educated. Established norms. Mainstream views.
Institutionalised immorality.