Butler D. Shaffer Quotes

The origins of any productive system seem to be traceable to conditions in which the self-interest driven purposes of individuals are allowed expression. These include the respect for autonomy and inviolability of personal boundaries that define liberty and peace and allow for cooperation for mutual ends. Support for such an environment has led to the flourishing of human activity not only in the production of material well-being, but in the arts, literature, philosophy, entrepreneurship, mathematics, spiritual inquiries, the sciences, medicine, engineering, invention, exploration, and other dimensions that fire the varied imaginations and energies of mankind.

Every institution is a racket. Whether we are considering political, religious, economic, ideological, or educational institutions, each is a formal, elaborate system designed for one purpose: to control people. Each seeks to persuade or compel individual to divert their energies from the pursuit of private, personal objectives, and to dedicate themselves to organizational purposes.

We offset the pursuit of our well-being with notions of altruism, and temper our happiness with feelings of guilt. In the vernacular of pop psychology, we speak of being ‘self-alienated’ people who have learned to reject our very selves. Whatever other advantages flow to us from our institutionalized world, the personal disadvantages carry a prohibitive price tag.

The belief that order must be intentionally generated and imposed upon society by institutional authorities continues to prevail. This centrally-directed model is premised upon what F.A. Hayek called ‘the fatal conceit,’ namely, the proposition ‘that man is able to shape the world according to his wishes,’ or what David Ehrenfeld labeled ‘the arrogance of humanism.’ That such practices have usually failed to produce their anticipated results has generally led not to a questioning of the model itself, but to the conclusion that failed policies have suffered only from inadequate leadership, or a lack of sufficient information, or a failure to better articulate rules. Once such deficiencies have been remedied, it has been supposed, new programs can be implemented which, reflective of this mechanistic outlook, will permit government officials to ‘fine tune’ or ‘jump start’ the economy, or ‘grow’ jobs, or produce a ‘quick fix’ for the ailing government school system.

Because we fear the responsibility for our actions, we have allowed ourselves to develop the mentality of slaves. Contrary to the stirring sentiments of the Declaration of Independence, we now pledge ‘our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor’ not to one another for our mutual protection, but to the state, whose actions continue to exploit, despoil, and destroy us.

One cannot be devoutly religious, or patriotic, or moral, without differentiating oneself from the ungodly, the disloyal, or the immoral. To be for one’s own group, or nation, or race requires that one be against strangers.

We delude ourselves with the beliefs that the establish order suffers from only from policy or style defects, and that the new leadership or legislation or organization reforms are sufficient to overcome any problems. We can tinker with the machinery, but dare not think of doing without it. We may be willing to believe that the emperor is naked, but certainly not the empire itself.

For our world to be predictable and controllable, it must be mechanistic and linear in nature. But, the illusions of the behaviorists to the contrary notwithstanding, there is nothing less mechanistic and linear in nature than the human mind, whose intricacies and capacities have yet to be matched by even the most sophisticated computers.

If, on one occasion, a police officer brutalizes a harmless individual, does that mean that a police-state has arisen? No, but intelligent minds should recognize that such totalitarian consequences are implicit in such an act, and should respond accordingly. I am reminded of that powerful scene at the end of the movie, Judgment at Nuremberg. Judge Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy) has been called to the jail cell of the Nazi judge (played by Burt Lancaster) who has just been given a life sentence for his crimes. The convicted judge tells Judge Haywood: ‘Those people, those millions of people. . . I never knew it would come to that.’ Judge Haywood replies: ‘it ‘came to that’ the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.’

The mainstream media and high-ranking government officials feigned righteous indignation over city officials in Bell, California, who paid themselves gargantuan salaries—one as high as $800,000 per year, and with retirement pay nearing $1,000,000 annually. What is most upsetting to such critics, however, is not the enormity of their racket, but that these local officials failed to conform themselves to established methods for the looting of taxpayers. Like Captain Renault in the movie, Casablanca, who informs Rick that he is ‘shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on’ in his business—as he receives his gambling payoff from the croupier—the town government of Bell will receive a selective criticism of its behavior.

We have learned to project onto politicians our capacities for favorably directing our lives, and have come to identify political action as our most effective attribute. If governments are strong, it is because we are weak.

As the creators of sophisticated technologies, we have made ourselves increasingly machine-like; robotic servants of institutional systems we have been conditioned to revere, whose purposes we neither understand nor control, and of which we are afraid to ask questions. Our corporate-state world plunders, enslaves, controls and destroys us, all in the name of advancing our liberty and material well-being. Most of us are dominated by an unfocused fear of uncertainty, a longing for the security of emptiness.

The problem with all of this, as historians advise us, is that the institutionalization of the systems that produce the values upon which a civilization depends, ultimately bring about the destruction of that civilization. Arnold Toynbee observed that a civilization begins to break down when there is ‘a loss of creative power in the souls of creative individuals,’ and, in time, the ‘differentiation and diversity’ that characterized a dynamic civilization, is replaced by ‘a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.’ The emergence of a ‘universal state,’ and increased militarism, represent later stages in the disintegration of a civilization.

In furtherance of the war effort, the WIB centralized the economic life of America into a highly structured bureaucracy under the effective direction and control of leading business interests. Matters relating to the production, pricing, and allocation of strategic goods and services were handled not by the impersonal forces of the marketplace, but by the quite personal direction of businessmen armed with governmental authority. American industry had, in short, become ‘mobilized’ in the most literal, military sense of the word. Depending upon how one viewed the practice, American businesses found themselves subject to political ‘coordination’ or ‘regimentation’ in furtherance of collective goals.

The 1920s are part of that critical period discussed by the historian James Gilbert in his study of the development of collectivist thinking, a phenomenon he relates to the emergence of ‘a new industrial civilization in which the giant business organization was the dominant force.’ As Gilbert has demonstrated, the architects of twentieth century American collectivism had patterned their ideas on the industrial corporation as the central organizational tool. Any form of collectivism is, after all, ‘conservative’ in nature, being premised on the establishment of static, rigidly structured social relationships designed to restrain any influences that would pose the threat of substantial change. A symbiotic relationship thus developed between the forces of "social reform" and those advocating the conservation of existing economic institutions and relationships. In twentieth-century ‘ liberalism, declared the historian James Weinstein, many business leaders saw ‘a means of securing the existing social order.’