Because I Say So

Dissatisfaction being the permanent condition of mankind, it behoves us to put our dissatisfactions into some kind of perspective. If we do not, we shall mistake inconveniences for tragedies and, what is perhaps worse, tragedies for inconveniences. Without any knowledge of history, or even appreciation that history is important, it is impossible to achieve perspective; and one should never forget that it is easier to effect change for the worse than for the better.

Dissatisfaction in Europe is rife and is locked in a struggle with complacency, sometimes within the same breast. On the one side is apprehension that we are heading for a smash; on the other is a desire that nothing much should change. Some few people only are aware that change is necessary to avoid much greater and more painful change, the greatest justification for change.

There is a strong and dangerous feeling, not only in Europe but in North America, that our political system is no longer capable, or willing, to deal with the problems that confront our societies that only a third of a century ago prided themselves on having solved all fundamental political problems. A tweak here, a tweak there, constant tweaking in fact, would secure our ascent to what Stalin once called an ever better, ever merrier life. This does not seem to have eventuated.

In Britain and France, leaders have brought forward elections for reasons that are opaque to their respective populations. Perhaps M. Macron in France wants to give Marine le Pen the opportunity to fail (as certainly she would) before the next presidential elections; or perhaps he wants to establish once and for all that her party is unelectable and that, when push comes to shove, the majority of the French population will always prefer anyone to her.

As for Mr Sunak in Britain, either he had had enough of the tiresome business of being Prime Minister, was hoping for a miraculous and dramatic improvement in the economy such as has never happened before, or revelations that his opponents were Bolsheviks in social democratic clothing. Alas, they don’t need to be the latter to bring about disaster; the leader of the Labour Party wears an air of apparatchik-type incompetence like a cold front on a weather map. Unfortunately, accusations of incompetence cannot be brandished with impunity by his opponents. British politics may therefore be summarised, to adapt Ecclesiastes slightly, as “Nullity of nullities, all is nullity.”

Across the Atlantic, things are hardly any better.

The election in the United States, unless the candidates are soon disposed of, will boil down to whose mental state is worse. Do you prefer dementia to personality disorder? What is more important in the long run is that people of differing political opinions can scarcely be civil to, or about, each other. If it is true that we have the leaders we deserve, our leaders are a sad reflection on us.

But someone has to be elected and our system is such that whoever is elected will have been legitimately elected, give or take a ridiculous conspiracy theory or two. Alas, with that inability to make proper distinctions which it is the effect of modern education to bring about, a person legitimately elected in the administrative sense will believe his actions to be legitimate in all other senses, including moral, even if he has been elected by only a minority of the population.

How easy it is to be persuaded of one’s own popularity and importance, and therefore of the legitimacy of the power one exerts over others! I had a tiny but revealing proof of this recently during a meeting of the local council of the small town in which I live, that deals in strictly parish pump matters. I attend for the fun of it.

I asked a question about a promise the council had made but had so far not kept, though it had repeated it several times over two or three years, including at the last council meeting. A councillor, exasperated by my polite persistence, exclaimed, “We changed our mind.”

Of course, one accepts that decisions have sometimes to be gone back on when new circumstances supervene, but there were none in this case. The manner in which the councillor answered me was rather like that of Louis XIV when he told the peasant who said, “But sire, I have to live”, that he did not see the necessity. Alternatively, I was for her an irritating fly to be brushed away, though I was more polite than any fly.

Now it so happened that this councillor had been returned at the last elections unopposed, not because she was so popular but because no one else wanted to stand. In these circumstances, very few people bothered to vote, and I suppose you might say we deserve what we get if we are prepared neither to stand for election ourselves nor even to vote for or against others. But that is not the point: it was clear from her manner that her tiny portion of legitimately obtained power had gone to her head. She was now the lord of the little that she surveyed. For her, “Because I say so” had become a clinching argument.

I asked her how, if the council were able to change its mind without any reason except on a whim about what it had already decided, we could have confidence in anything that it decided: but this question was treated with the disdain that she evidently thought it deserved. The public was not her master, much less her sovereign, but she was rather their liege lord. It did not help that she thought herself of superior intelligence, another form of legitimacy.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, said Pope, but a little power is even worse.

My experience leads me to think that the councillor was not unique of her type. The briefest taste of power is sufficient to turn the mind of many a person with more self-restraint than she.

The problem, I think, is that we have lost any sense of personal limitation. We are not prepared to place limits on ourselves that either we did not decide for ourselves from our own first principles, or that cannot be justified by a train of valid logical reasoning from an indubitable metaphysical point. There is, of course, no such point, so we are entirely free to place our limits where we will.

But if also the people are sovereign, and the people elected me, even if only unopposed, then I am sovereign over the people, at least for my term of office, for I have become the expression of the general will. I do not have to explain, therefore, why I have changed my mind: and those who question my right to do so are questioning the general will. How can a democratically elected person do wrong?

The American Founding Fathers understood the problems that arose from democratic sovereignty and therefore tried to place limits on it, though they did not solve the problems once and for all. Life has become a lot more complicated since, and ever more decisions have to be taken administratively and without real consultation with those who are affected by them. Few of us are able to express ourselves usefully on matters pertaining to the electricity grid or the water supply, for example. Someone has to decide things for us on our behalf—many, many things, in fact. It was very different in the America of the eighteenth century.

Thus feeling, or knowing ourselves to be, impotent and highly dependent on others in our everyday lives anyway, we are angered when we are confronted by elected representatives who disdain us or set themselves to lord it arbitrarily over us. It is my experience that little manifestations of disdain anger more than gross injustice or even gross incompetence. There seem to be ever more numerous such manifestations of disdain. I am infuriated when the tax authorities call me (as they do) a “customer”, as if I had some choice in the matter. I feel they are deliberately humiliating me.

Increasingly, we feel not that we live in countries with a government of the people, by the people, for the people, but that we are a people of the government, by the government, for the government. To give but one small example: in the United Kingdom, public sector workers are the only ones to enjoy generous end-salary pensions which are indexed to the cost of living. Everyone else is obliged to take his chances with downturns and inflation.

However, we must not exaggerate, for fear of making self-fulfilling and self-destructive prophecies. Even now, our lives are not hell, unless we choose to make them such ourselves.

Under his pen-name Theodore Dalrymple, Anthony Daniels recently wrote The Wheelchair and Other Stories and These Spindrift Pages, a collection of literary observations and reflections (both published by Mirabeau).