The title of this post is borrowed from a character in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), where politically-correct snowflakes and easy women are one. Fanny explains to Lenina that she must be promiscuous because “everyone belongs to everyone else.” Lenina repeats what must seem a truism to her.
F.A. Hayek, the Nobel economics laureate, devotes a whole chapter of The Fatal Conceit (1988) to “Our Poisoned Language.” He complains that our language is plagued by archaic tribalism, animisn, and their modern incarnation, collectivism. “So long as we speak in language based on erroneous theory, we generate and perpetuate error,” he writes.
One manifestation of this is the incredible confusion between the terms “country,” “nation,” “state” or “government,” and “society.” They seem to all mean the same, because they are all “us,” and as Fanny and Lenina thought “we” all belong to “us”. Of course, those who incarnate the “we” rule over the rest of us; we really belong to them, like under the “plantation state” evoked by Anthony de Jasay in the last chapter of The State (1985, 1998). (See also my “The Vacuity of the Political ‘we’,” Econlib, October 6, 2014.)
I found another example of the collectivist and at best confusing way of speaking (at worst, it’s tyrannical). Apparently a society belongs to its country, as Fanny and Lenina could have said. This way of speaking, which looks like voodoo sociology and politics, must have seen innocuous to the three reporters, their editor, and the copy-editor involved, vindicating Hayek. It is in the Wall Street Journal of April 7 (“Global Coronavirus Death Toll Passes 81,000 as Some Lockdowns Tighten“):
In Europe, some countries that credit strict containment measures with helping to curb the contagion began taking steps to reopen their societies after a month of lockdown.
READER COMMENTS
Thaomas
Apr 9 2020 at 11:46am
Yes, we lack a language that reflects some but not total identification with each other appropriate for a society of not anatomist, not volonté générale, individuals.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 9 2020 at 5:17pm
I am not sure we lack one as much as we simply don’t use it. From David Hume and Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek, classical liberals have developed it. Others in the liberal mouvance have added to it: James Buchanan and Anthony de Jasay may be the main 20th-century innovators on that front.
Thaomas
Apr 10 2020 at 12:03pm
I’m not convinced that the language, or at least the policy approaches of these gentlemen are adequate to a society in which there is a lot of non-price mediated influence of one individual on he other, including preferences concerning different income distributions.
Pierre Lemieux
Apr 10 2020 at 2:45pm
I don’t (and shouldn’t) want to minimize the importance of your interrogation. I think that if you reread Hume, Smith, and Hayek, you will find that much, if not most, of society is regulated by the non-price mechanisms that are conventions and institutions. It’s a bit more complicated in Buchanan and de Jasay. In Buchanan, the main political institutions are determined by a social contract. De Jasay is an extreme and anarchist Humean theorist, for whom all social life is determined by conventions; it is a valid question to ask whether this can conflict with markets (de Jasay thinks not). Note–and this is crucial–that none of these theorists believes that there exists a “social welfare function” that can reconcile everybody’s preferences on income distribution. Joe can want and succeed to impose his preferences on redistribution, but this is the only sort of (coercive) social welfare function that can exist. In Buchanan, there can be redistribution of income as long as some individuals (strong men and bullies, for example) can negotiate it in their favor because everybody knows that their condition would be better in anarchy and that, without such a bribe, they won’t agree to the social contract.
Hans Eicholz
Apr 10 2020 at 9:33am
You have captured the essence of the problem as usual.
At the base of all are languages seem to be two principles: value creation vs. spreading the risk. Collectivist languages articulate off the latter. As you indicate, the world is entering an age of WE.
SaveyourSelf
Apr 11 2020 at 2:27pm
“One manifestation of this is the incredible confusion between the terms “country,” “nation,” “state” or “government,” and “society.” They seem to all mean the same…”
I, respectfully, disagree. I suspect that if you asked people on the street to define each of these words, you would find they do not all mean the same to most people. I also suspect they would mean radically different things to different people and that most people have no clue whatsoever what society is or what government is in particular. State and nation are defined in the US under our republic system and taught in public grade school, so I suspect there would be some consistency there. Country is defined simply by boundaries on a map displayed prominently in every school, so that, also, would likely produce similar responses.
For fun I asked two of my co workers, both college graduates, how they define these words. Here were their answers: Country 1) “A place where you live.” 2) “The large body of land we live on.” Nation – 1) “A group of people who live together.” 2) “I don’t know.” State 1) “Subgroup of the country.” 2) “I don’t know. Maybe a separate entity of our nation.” Government 1) “Authority over the nation.” 2) “The devil.” Society 1) “I don’t know.” 2) “The group of people that live in the nation or country.”
So there you go. This tiny survey seems to support my hypothesis and contradict Pierre’s. So while I’m on a roll, I don’t think Americans in general believe anyone belongs to anyone else, much less everyone belongs to everyone else. It appears as though Pierre is trying to deduce the justification behind socialist success and is forwarding a rough postulate that language is part of that pattern along with a very broad interpretation of personal property by many that includes other people’s property. (ha! You can’t tell me that’s not funny. Defining your personal property boundaries so that they include other people’s personal property!). Anyway. I’m rambling. Thanks, as always Pierre, for you fun and interesting posts.
Jon Murphy
Apr 11 2020 at 3:38pm
I disagree. Your little sampling seems to confirm Pierre’s hypothesis. Note that Person 1 has no distinction between a nation and a society and Person 2 has no distinction between a country and a society. And in all cases, they define it in terms of polity.
SaveyourSelf
Apr 11 2020 at 4:53pm
Good points.
Warren Platts
Apr 11 2020 at 2:31pm
But replace ‘countries’ with ‘companies’ and ‘societies’ with ‘factories’, then miraculously, the sentence makes perfect sense.
I gotta say this article caught my attention because I had watched the movie “Master of the World” (1961–based on the Jules Verne novel) the night before. The main character is this arch-Libertarian, Robur (played by Vincent Price) who declares war on all the world’s Leviathans at once. The best line in the movie is when Prudent, the arch-capitalist, loyal American, defense contractor discusses a bit of philosophy (about 37:41):
PRUDENT: And sir, do you consider a man who makes a weapon responsible for the actions of the man who buys it?
ROBUR: Yes I do, sir. All men are responsible to all other men.
The Huxley quote is obviously self-conscious twisting of the Verne aphorism. I think Verne is right. According to the Canadian Bureau da la Traduction, Robur’s statement should be interpreted as “All men have a duty to all other men.” So we all have a duty to try to do what we can to slow the spread of this deadly virus. Things will get better beginning in May.
Jon Murphy
Apr 11 2020 at 3:36pm
No, the confusion would remain. Not all companies are factories. To a mercantilist, who tends to treat manufacturing as the only economic activity, it might make sense to conflate company with factory, but not in the ordinary sense of the words.
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