|
Reading Yvon Dionne's interesting piece against Canadian gun controls in the current issue of the Québécois Libre,[1] I noticed something that we are not used to in the country that Voltaire called "a few acres of snow." The author, an economist and retired (and repented) civil servant, calls the state "the tyrant." I thought I was the only one here to use such radical terminology, and I now feel less lonely. Thank you, Mr. Dionne. Now, Dionne's piece, like most of the Québécois Libre, is in French, which makes it inaccessible to most English readers. It is true that English is historically the language of liberty and that, for any (often minor) French libertarian author, you can find ten great Anglo-American ones. However, English has become the international language in a very statist epoch, and it can now be called as much the language of tyranny as the language of liberty. Thus, speaking a minority and moribund language like French is a nice way to feel elsewhere, which is an urgent psychological necessity. I am a Martian. One can always, anyway, write in English for the Financial Post or the Laissez Faire Electronic Times: the best of all worlds. But this is not my topic. (Why is it that I always get carried away when writing for the Laissez Faire Electronic Times?) My question is, When it is proper to call the state "the tyrant"? When should we start using the dirty word? Many objections can be raised against identifying the states under which we live under in the Western world as tyrants. But potent counterarguments also exist. One objection is that our states are very mild compared to other tyrants like, say, the Chinese tyrant or the Iraqi tyrant. There are degrees of tyranny, and we are lucky to live under states that are not the worst tyrants on earth, although they have not exactly improved over the last hundred years. But the very fact that tyranny comes in different degrees give meaning to the question of when to call a cat a cat, and a tyrant a tyrant. A related objection is that our states are not tyrannical but, on the contrary, very nice: they provide for us things that we could not otherwise enjoy, and they do this out of a genuine concern for our welfare. This is the Nice State, about which Alexis de Tocqueville forecasted that it would minutely regulate social life "till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."[2] Nice States can be more tyrannical than nasty autocrats. Another objection: one may wonder whether the expression "the tyrant" hopelessly personalizes a state which, far from being an autocrat, is the whole nation or, at any rate, a vast complex of political and bureaucratic processes. Now, the state cannot literally be the whole nation or the whole society, because it rules coercively over at least some individuals. And nothing says that "the tyrant" cannot be a collective. An autocrat cannot rule without his court, his praetorians, and a crowd of privileged supporters: "the state" or "the tyrant" is made of all these persons. The state is an organization which can be "the tyrant" as much as any individual autocrat. If we grant that tyranny comes in degrees, that there are states that are more tyrannical for more people than others, we may imagine a conceptual index of tyranny that would go from 0 to 100. The Stalinian or the Nazi states would be, say, around 95, the Iranian state at 80, the French state at 50, the American state at 49, and the Canadian state at 48. There is room for honest disagreement here: perhaps the Canadian state would be at 37 and the American at 35; the French may be at 36. De minimis non curat praetor. (Don't imagine that such an index could be constructed in any meaningful way.) Note that there is no point in talking about tyranny at 0, which is perfect liberty, and that there is no opportunity of calling tyrants names at 100. But the question is, Where should we start crying wolf before we have moved from, say, 5 to 95? By calling the tyrant or the 40% tyrant by its name, we may have more chance of uncovering it and of organizing the resistance. The Declaration of Independence identified the tyrant: "A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." The French revolutionary song that became the national Anthem says, "Contre nous de la tyrannie, L'étendard sanglant est levé," or "Against us the blood- stained banner of tyranny is raised."[3] The French Revolution ended up in tyranny. The Declaration of Independence fomented a revolution against the state of what was then the freest country in the world, and finally led to the USA Patriot Act of 2001. Do we need another proof that identifying the tyrant is perhaps a necessary, but certainly not sufficient, condition for eliminating tyranny? The expression, then, should be used with care. If we cry wolf too early, we will not be taken seriously, and not be heard when the wolf drops its disguise. If we start too late, we will not be able to say the word. Or we will not wish to, anymore. As the famous French legal theorist Georges Ripert said, "The man who lives under the servitude of laws takes, without noticing it, the soul of a slave."[4] At the rate at which things are going in most countries, calling the state a tyrant might soon be deemed a so-called 'hate crime'. So, let's hurry while we still can. In the growth of state power, there is a point past which it becomes very useful to call the state a tyrant. I suggest we are at this point or, if not there, very very close. [1] At http://www.quebecoislibre.org (visited December 21, 2002). Le Québécois Libre is a Québec libertarian e-zine edited by Martin Masse; in fact, it is the only libertarian e-zine in the French world. Yvon Dionne's piece is at http://www.quebecoislibre.org/021221-11.htm (visited Decem- ber 21, 2002). [2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), Chap. 6; available at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch4_06.htm (visited December 22, 2002). [3] Found here (visited December 21, 2002). When you listen to La Marseillaise, note how the French succeed in making sure their dirty state looks like a work of art. [4] Georges Ripert, Le Déclin du Droit. Etude sur la législation contemporaine (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1949), p. 94: "L'homme vivant sous la servitude des lois prend sans s'en douter une âme d'esclave." Pierre Lemieux is co-director of the Economics and Liberty Research Group at the Université du Québec en Outaouais, and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute (California). E-mail: PL@pierrelemieux.org.
|