The Humanity of Fiefdoms

The Bigger the Government, the More Humanity it Loses

“Government is a true religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its ministers. To annihilate it or to submit it to the discussion of all individuals, is the same thing”.

Joseph de Maistre

The phrase “absolute power corrupts absolutely” is often used to suggest that all men become evil when they become Kings and so it follows that we should not have any Kings at all. This idea is used to justify the creation of representational democracies that dilute this power from one autocratic leader to many people so that no one person may become corrupted. Many governments in the world today function like this, but they still carry out great evil. So it cannot be that the concentration of power is what only leads to evil. 

In the book Brother’s Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the character Alyosha suggests that a good society is one in which it is easy for the ordinary person to be good and to exercise the best version of himself. There is good and evil in each of us. The opposite of a good society, in fact, is one in which a person must be a saint to be good because everything in that society makes it simple and convenient for him to be evil. 

This principle can be applied not only to the members of a society, but also to governments. Political philosophy is the set of questions investigating what system of government bring out the best natures of rulers. What system of government makes it convenient and easy for a King or President to be good? 

Painting by NC Wyeth, “Giant”

I argue that it is not the system of government, but rather the size of the government that decides this. This is not because the government being large gives the rulers too much power, but because the government being large gives him too little power. The president of a large and convoluted government is as much a slave to administrative tyranny as the ordinary man who spends an afternoon figuring out which forms to file so he can go catch a fish in the lake behind his house.

When I visited England this past spring, I stayed in those small shires that are made up of cottages. In them, every cottage doesn’t have a number or street address but rather it has a name. Sommerville house, Woodpecker cottage, Hollies Cottage, The Old Barn, there were the kinds of names that they had and they were written in darling little plaques on the outside of gate of the garden or next to the door. I asked them how anyone mailed anything here or found out where anything was. The locals replied that the mailman just knew every house, and when you got directions you’d have to ask someone. It was very peculiar to me.

I compared the Cottage’s names to people’s names. You might have a friend named John or Emma or Raj or Michael. There are millions of people with these names in any given country let alone the whole world. Yet, you don’t refer to each of your friends with their social security number in order to refer to them uniquely. You know perfectly well which Emma or which Michael to whom you are referring. This is because you know them at a personal level. Similarly, the people in these small English towns know how to find the cottages despite their lack of normal address numbers because they know the town personally. 

As governments become larger, the likelihood that they will become evil increases because they must dehumanize people in order to organize them better. The foremost sign of this dehumanization is of course the fact that everyone receives a numner that is referred to as their identity rather than their name.

When the number of people being ruled is small, the laws can be catered to that demographic’s culture and needs. The citizens the government is ruling can access the ruling body more easily and therefore deliver feedback for their decisions, be they good or bad, more quickly. Faced with this reality, the ruler or ruling group is motivated to make good decisions because they will face direct feedback for thier decisions right away. There are fewer layers of administration that are required for the running of a smaller government because fewer people and less land must be organized. 

What is more, when the group of people being ruled is smaller, it is easier to judge the specific moral situations of each individual case so that where the written law is vague or insufficient, the ruling party can exercise their humanity in making decisions. 

When the number of people being ruled is large, many of these benefits are impossible. The laws must be generalized to more cultures and demographics of people and as such lose their specificity. The citizens must go through more administrative steps in order to access the ruling group and as such there is not only greater opportunity for corruption, but also the ruling group does not get direct feedback for the quality of their decisions from the people these decisions impact. Instead of this, the ruling group is motivated to making decisions that please the administrative layers whose silent hands pull the strings of the power of politics behind the scenes. 

When laws are applied to a large number of people, there are greater chances that the law will be unjust in a percentage of the cases. The enforcement of the letter of the law is not always the same as the spirit of the law. This happens most often when the law is implemented by an administrative system rather than by human beings who evaluate situations and make human judgements about what the law really means in that particular scenario.

It is not power that corrupts large governments but rather the lack of touch with the ordinary person. When governments are large, they must rely more and more on administration in order to manage their responsibility. As the layers of administration increase between the rulers and the people whom they serve, there is a numbness toward the people. Human connection is less possible and as a result, any laws that are made or enforced will always consider humanity as the last variable in the decision-making process. 

In a better political philosophy, I believe that politicians work at a smaller scale, and this ironically makes them more powerful because they are less beholden to government members more senior than them compelling them to act against their values in order to preserve their “career” if they wish to do the right thing. Perhaps if we dismantle the obstacles preventing people doing the right thing, the right thing will be done more often. 

I am not naive to human nature and I understand that there is an inherent desire in men to conquer increasingly more and more land and power. This desire for more is what pushes men to make more fantastic monuments, greater and greater works of art and literature, and pushes mankind to achieve more than the previous generation could image possible. As a result, it is difficult to categorise this desire for conquest as squarely good or evil. It simply is. Perhaps nature just balances us out when we build the tower too high into the sky.