Remnant Review
Most Americans know who Scut Farkus was. They watch A Christmas Story (1983) every Christmas.
I first learned of Farkus in the fall of 1963, when I was a seminary student in Philadelphia. My radio received WOR from New York City. So, most evenings, beginning at 10:15, I tuned in to listen to the Jean Shepherd show for 45 glorious minutes. There, I was introduced to Raphie Parker, his brother Randy, his friends Schwartz and Flick, Miss Shields, and Scut Farkus.
Scut Farkus was an archetype bully. We have all dealt with some version of Farkus.
Two years after A Christmas Story, the world met Biff Tannen in Back to the Future. He, too, was ominously familiar.
I believe all political theory should begin with either Scut or Biff.
In both movies, the bully was overcome by acts of insanity. Raphie went berserk -- a condition recognized in the middle ages. I am convinced that there really were berserkers who "saw red." They became unstoppable, impervious to pain, and uncontrollably violent. In Back to the Future, George McFly knocks him out by mistake in order to impress a girl.
The trouble is, bullies return for revenge. The lone defender is outgunned the next day or week.
The bully always has a sidekick or gang. Scut Farkus had Grover Dill. Biff Tannen had three of them. The bully and his toadies constitute an organized threat.
My theory of the origin of civil government is this: the victims finally figure out that they outnumber the bully and his gang. The bully is a specialist in violence. He and his gang are extortionists. They extort money or subordination from people as a way of life. The victims have high costs in organizing. Yet individually, they are defenseless.
At some point, the expected costs of compliance outweigh the expected costs of resistance. The victims organize a resistance movement. But this always takes leadership. The makings of a new bully and gang are present in every resistance movement.
The key to successful resistance is to persuade the bully that it is less expensive and less risky to serve as a policeman. He will receive a regular salary. He and the gang members will also be rewarded in other ways. They will be cut in unofficially on deals in the community. In exchange, the bully becomes more predictable. He agrees to abide by rules of order that are imposed by the majority.
Then the victims get back to their lives -- their own specializations.
If the resistance movement succeeds in overthrowing the existing gang, the same problems of power and predictability will still exist. It takes power to overturn power. A new regime takes over.
Over time, the arrangement that places the bully under the rule of law is accepted as legitimate. Self-government then takes over. People obey the law.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
In October 1689 but dated 1690, an anonymous book was published in London: Two Treatises on Government. The author was John Locke, but he never admitted this in his lifetime. He died in 1704.
Locke was the main source of a social contract theory of the origin of civil government. He believed that autonomous individuals gathered together and surrendered some of their sovereignty to the state. They did this in order to preserve life, liberty, and estate.
This theory assumes that society previously had been plagued by neither Scut nor Biff. Personally, I never bought this theory. I had too much familiarity with bullies. Bullies are forever. They were therefore basic to the society of Locke's hypothetical surrender of sovereignty to the first state. There was always a state, and probably more: Scut vs. Biff.
I think we should take seriously the words of Jean Jacques Rousseau, author of The Social Contract (1762). In 1754, he had written an essay, "Discourse on Inequality." Here, he penned this classic paragraph:
Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect the question. The researches, in which we may engage on this occasion, are not to be taken for historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, fitter to illustrate the nature of things, than to show their true origin, like those systems, which our naturalists daily make of the formation of the world.
He laid aside facts. The biggest fact he laid aside was the fact that Locke had laid aside when he wrote The Second Treatise on Government: on the day the first bully appeared, the state appeared.
Civil government is a negotiated initial settlement between gangs and their victims. It is a means of increasing the predictability of violence. It lets people specialize, leaving most of the responsibilities of suppressing evil to armed specialists and courts that offer the armed specialists a degree of legitimacy. They also provide predictability.
To overthrow a government is risky. As Karl Marx's partner Friedrich Engels wrote in 1872:
A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon -- authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune [1871] have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
The theory of autonomous men getting together to create an initial constitution and the first state is conjectural history -- a convenient myth. Ignore it. Think "Scut Farkus."
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