Broken Oaths and Broken Trust
I have been fortunate over the years in knowing at least some of the intellectual leaders of both the conservative movement and the libertarian movement.
I have not always known the activists in the conservative movement, but I have known a number of the intellectuals. All things considered, the smartest guy I have known is Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Murray Rothbard was very smart. So was Rousas Rushdoony. But they were smart in only one language. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Kuehnelt-Leddihn.
Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (born July 31, 1909 in Tobelbad (now Haselsdorf-Tobelbad), Austro-Hungarian Empire; died May 26, 1999, in Lans, Austria) was an Austrian Catholic nobleman and socio-political theorist. Describing himself as an "extreme conservative arch-liberal" or "liberal of the extreme right", Kuehnelt-Leddihn often argued that majority rule in democracies is a threat to individual liberties, and declared himself a monarchist and an enemy of all forms of totalitarianism, although he also supported what he defined as non-democratic "republics," such as Switzerland and the United States. Described as "A Walking Book of Knowledge", Kuehnelt-Leddihn had an encyclopedic knowledge of the humanities and was a polyglot, able to speak eight languages and read seventeen others. His early books The Menace of the Herd and Liberty or Equality were influential within the American conservative movement. An associate of William F. Buckley Jr., his best-known writings appeared in National Review, where he was a columnist for 35 years.
His greatest book was Leftism. I am happy to say that it is back in print. He and I discussed the possibility of doing this about 15 years ago, but I never got around to it. Fortunately, somebody else did.
My friend David Gordon would give him a run for the intellectual money, but he could not give him a run for the social and geographical money. Every year he traveled to every continent except Antarctica.
I attended a lecture that he gave to Rev. Edmund Opitz's little group, the Remnant, probably in 1972. I shall never forget the point that he made. I don't remember anything else about the lecture, but I remember this. He spoke of his father's experience as a citizen of Austria. He said that his father had sworn allegiance to four separate regimes: the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Republic that replaced the Emperor in 1918, the Nazi-run regime that replaced the republic in 1938, and the postwar regime that replaced the Nazis in 1945. His point was this: people in the modern world have been forced to break their oaths again and again. This happened in Western Europe in a period of less than 30 years.
No society can live apart from binding oaths. Marriages are built on binding posts. But marriages come and go in our generation. The oldest are clearly not binding judicially any longer. Churches are built on binding oaths. But people move their memberships from congregation to congregation. This is a Protestant legacy.
Roman Catholic Spain went through the turmoil of a civil war in the second half of the 1930's. Men who had been loyal to the King and to the church were caught in a civil war between communists on the one hand and military forces under Francisco Franco on the other hand. Anarchists were caught in the crossfire. They were doomed, no matter which side won the war. Franco was not a fascist. He was a traditional militarist and Catholic. Adolf Hitler could not stand him. He funded Franco in the civil war, but Spain remained neutral throughout the war.
Franco maintained tight control over Spanish society. Protestants were discriminated against. He died in late 1975. By 1985, Spain was a secular republic. There was no trace of Franco or his regime. Here was a society that had battled Islam from 711 until 1492. That was the longest war in the history of the West, rivaled only by India's wars with Islam. In 1492, Isabella and her husband created a Catholic Empire that lasted until the Latin American revolutions of the 1820's. The monarchy lasted until the Civil War in the 1930's. Yet the whole thing disappeared in a decade. I may be giving it more credit than it is due. It may have taken less than a decade to make the transition. Now you see it; now you don't.
A series of revolutions all over the world have undermined the authority of oaths. Obviously, Asia has gone through this revolutionary process since the end of World War II. China and India are now experiencing extraordinary and unprecedented per capita economic growth. Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea preceded them. I don't think any nation has ever grown economically faster than South Korea. In 1950, it was a poverty-stricken agricultural backwater. In 1980, it was getting rich. Today, it is rich. Yet its national leaders keep winding up in jail. I don't know of any nation in which a national leader is more likely to go to jail. Actually, this is healthy. The practice ought to spread.
The loss of legitimacy of civil government has never been greater than it is today, all over the world. People do not trust their rulers. Western democracy allows people to begin with this premise: they are as good as anybody else. In nondemocratic societies, the masses assume that the people at the top are corrupt. But they don't assume that they can do anything about it. They don't accept any responsibility for it. But with democracy, guilt spreads to the entire society. The people at the top are technically the same as the people at the bottom. There is no divine right of kings any longer.
This actually goes back to the Bible. The main chapter on this is Leviticus 4. The people of Israel were morally and legally responsible for the sins of the priests or the king. That was even before they had a king. When they got a king, he was a loser: Saul. The prophet Samuel had warned the people that this would be the case, and the people didn't listen (I Samuel 8). The people did it to themselves. There was nobody else to blame.
People constantly break their oaths. They look back over their lives, or the lives of those around them, and they see a series of broken oaths. In the United States, this has been less of a problem than in Western Europe. But the nation was founded on a series of broken oaths. We fought a civil war in the 1770's over oaths to the king. Then there was a coup d'état in 1787/88 in which people violated the oath of allegiance to the national government, which was founded on the Articles of Confederation. Then, in 1861, there was another civil war. An entire region broke their oaths to the national government. They were called rebels. They accepted the term. In 1865, they lost the war. Then they had to swear allegiance again to the national government as a condition for getting back into the union. As it turned out, they adhered to that oath.
Then there was this oath:
Ten years later, that was a broken oath, and the whole South admitted this. Wallace later apologized. In between his oath and his apology, there had been the Civil Rights Movement, which was in fact a social revolution in the south. Yet on the whole it was bloodless. The bloody riots took place north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of Texas.
The modern world has learned that oaths are not really binding. This lesson is not openly taught. We learn it from experience. We teach our children to honor their oaths, yet our children learn from our history, not from our words. They know the old phrase, "do as I say, not as I do," and they pay as little attention to it as we paid in our youth.
Yet there is a price to pay. The integrity of oaths has faded, and along with this has come the loss of integrity of contracts. We cannot safely trust each other any longer. People sign on the dotted line, and then they violate the terms of the contract. This is considered normal business activity. It is why lawyers multiply like mayflies. There was a time in American history when it was illegal to practice law for a fee. That was true in New England Puritans. The only fee that a lawyer could collect would be for administering a trust. The Puritans did not trust lawyers in a courtroom. Now, we trust nothing else. We want our lawyer to be able to get us out of a contract or else bind somebody else to a contract.
Fundamental to the operation of any society is trust. Trust is at the core of the economy. Poverty-stricken societies are invariably low-trust societies. Yet the restoration or creation of trust cannot be done by civil government. It has to be established on a face-to-face basis. This takes time. It takes a track record.
This is why your FICO score really is important. It is a numerical score that others can use to evaluate your willingness to fulfill your contracts. We don't have many numerical scores like this. How utterly strange that this crucial score is an acronym for Fair Isaac Corporation.
The Great Default is going to test the trustworthiness of the federal government. The unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare will bankrupt the federal government. Crucial political promises are going to be broken. This is why the Great Default will be a defining event in the history of this country. Comparable defaults in other Western nations are going to be defining events for all of Western civilization. The Great Default is going to shake the foundations of the welfare state and also the theology and moral philosophy that have undergirded the welfare state.
The single event of the bankruptcy and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the defining moment for socialism. It became the tombstone of socialism. So will the Great Default mark the abandonment of the welfare state.
There is always this problem: you can't beat something with nothing. There are defenders of the free market, but most of them have made their peace with the welfare state. Hayek certainly did. He accepted the legitimacy of Social Security. So did Milton Friedman. He just wanted welfare to be more efficient. He wanted tax-funded educational vouchers, not the abolition of public schools. Ludwig von Mises was a consistent defender of the free market, and he was an opponent of the welfare state. But in the American Right, he was a fringe figure. Rothbard was even further out on the fringe. The Austrian school of economics has never gained traction within the conservative movement. There is no philosophical opposition to the welfare state across the board. Conservatives want to reform the public schools, not replace them. They want to fix Social Security, but reduce taxes. They are schizophrenic.
This is why the battle has to be fought in the churches. There is no other institutional base that is large enough to affect the thinking of large numbers of Americans.
The inability of Benedict XVI to mobilize Catholic conservatives was a disaster. His replacement is a liberation theologian. That ideological ship went down in 1991. I realize that he is not a revolutionary Marxist, but liberation theology was born in Latin America as an apostate Catholic adjunct of Marxist revolution. There were some Protestant defenders of liberation theology, but there were not many of them.
The Catholic intellectual and author Malachi Martin described the situation in the Catholic Church three decades ago. He said that there was a battle for the future of the church between Cardinal Casaroli, who was Paul VI's man, and Cardinal Ratzinger, who was a supporter of Opus Dei, an extreme conservative group in the Church. Casaroli died in 1998. Ratzinger became Benedict XVI in 2005. Yet he resigned the position in 2013 -- unheard of. There is no question in my mind that the present Pope is the spiritual heir of Casaroli.
Mainline American Protestantism is basically in bed with the Social Gospel. This began in 1908 with the founding of the Federal Council of Churches, which was initially bankrolled by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. It has little influence anymore, and mainline churches are shrinking. But the replacement churches, while socially conservative, are systematically and defiantly pietistic. They don't want to talk about social theory or economic theory. They are probably closer to the free market position than the welfare state, but they have made their peace with the welfare state. They don't believe in tithing, and they don't believe that churches can replace the modern welfare state as agencies of charity.
So, where are the binding oaths? Where are the replacement institutions for the welfare state, which is going to go bankrupt sometime in the next three decades?
Where is the trust?
Western civilization is going to be sorted out in terms of the imputation of trust to some institutions and not others. But, at present, there are no visible institutional alternatives to the modern welfare state.
There are no political vacuums. Something wins, and everything else loses. But we face a situation comparable to what the father of Kuehnelt-Leddihn faced. We have all taken oaths, implicit and explicit, to institutions and arrangements that are not going to survive the Great Default in their present structures. We have imputed trust to these organizations, but they are not trustworthy.