The Deep, Dark Roots of Politics: Using Others to Help Ourselves

A Discussion of Peter Foster’s Why We Bite the Invisible Hand Chapter 13 “The Chimpanzee in the Room: Darwinian Politics”

In an earlier chapter, Foster has discussed the origins of the instinct to trade. While trading seems natural to people, the disconnected and abstract modern economic system today challenges our unconscious moral assumptions.

So he then examined the origin of morality citing social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s work that our rational minds are not so much thinking rationally as they are justifying our subconscious assumptions about the world.

Now in this chapter he is asking what is the origin of our political instincts.

Smith had suggested that people had a trading instinct and a moral instinct, insights confirmed by modern studies in evolutionary psychology. But what about a political instinct? Insofar as politics is ultimately about the use and restraint of competitive violence in pursuit of resources, it has deep roots in evolutionary history, both human and animal. (p. 276)

He mentions two “opposing views of human nature” in regards to violence. (p. 276)

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of people being “naturally peaceable”
• Thomas Hobbes’ vision that “violence was fundamental” in our nature.

Foster notes that early man living in primitive tribes had to negotiate complex relationships that let men work together to hunt and share the spoils.

Even so, the resulting hierarchies that developed to facilitate this would face challenges from inside and outside the group. War was common as one group would raid another group for their women and other resources. (p. 283)

That take on our early existence lends credence to the Hobbesian view that violence is in our nature rather than the “Rousseauian notions about the noble savage.” (p. 283)

Foster cites the work of anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon who studies the Yanomamo tribe of South America to back up this viewpoint.

He also refuted their claim that all war was about resources. He observed that even when they lived above subsistence, the Yanomamo still constantly raided rival villages. Moreover, they were not “egalitarians.” Kinship ties determined status and dominance. Worst of all, his meticulous research established that being a killer was adaptive. Killers got more offspring (as Genghis Khan’s widespread genetic heritage confirms.) (p. 283)

So we had a need to figure out how to live and work together to survive, but we also had a natural tendency towards violence that was rewarded as a successful strategy.

All that together gets us to modern politics, according to Foster.

He says the fundamental question at the base of politics is, “Where’s mine?” (p. 284)

This leads naturally enough to a more threatening version of “Where’s ours?” because there is “violence in numbers.” (p. 284)

But politics gets worse.

“Most subtle — and Machiavellian — of all is the claim that you are speaking not for yourself, but for others: “Where’s theirs?” “Speaking up on behalf of others” is thus at once both the most noble-sounding and the most potentially devious posture of human politics, in particular modern democracy. It has been at the heart of the redistributionist ethic since Marx: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Which is to say, the vanguard of the proletariat would “speak up” for the needy, and justify taking from those with abilities. (p. 284)

That does hit at the heart of the worst of the politicians today — claiming to help others while they are really helping themselves to power and riches.

Interestingly, he adds that self-deception can also be in play. The best politician needs to believe his self-serving claims he is trying to do what is best for others, otherwise his deceit may be detected by others. (p. 287)

… the social psychologist Mark Mulder…conducted experiments that demonstrate that there is a taboo surrounding the word “power.” Men prefer to speak of “carrying responsibility,” “being in a position of authority,” or “helping others by taking decisions out of their hands.” [Frans] de Waal notes, “Machiavelli was the first person to refuse to repudiate or cover up power motives. This violation of the existing collective lie was not kindly received. It was regarded as an insult to humanity.” (p. 288)

“Forceful redistributors” justify their policies by saying they need to correct “the greed of the rich.” (p. 291)

They also appeal to the positive rights of the downtrodden to more income or services like health care. Positive rights sound good in theory but can only be enforced with government power. Something has to be taken from another in order to fulfill them.

Our system is based on negative rights which is the right to be free from others’ coercive actions.

We have the God given right to liberty, freedom and private property. We do not have to take liberty or freedom or property from someone to give to another to fulfill negative rights.

Instead we just have to restrain people from taking the existing negative rights. Positive rights, by contrast, conflict with another’s negative rights. (p. 292) Income redistribution to fulfill a positive right to resources can only occur by violating someone else’s negative right to private property.

In general, the Right is more comfortable with the unequal income distribution because it is seen as the incentive to work hard, to seek innovation, and to grow the economy.

The Left values fairness and thinks it requires the securing of positive rights through income redistribution.

Using Haidt’s work, this makes sense because they prioritize compassion over fairness. The problem is, they do not see the oppression they are causing by indulging their compassion with other people’s money. (p. 293)

Fulfilling this compassion requires either coercive force or deference to authority, which is why Foster says the root of political power is either coercion or authority. (p. 285)

Authority at first glance seems like it would be better than coercion which comes with implicit or explicit violence backing it up, but authority can have a dark side, too.

Foster notes that deference to authority is also likely a cultural or biological adaptation that made society work better. (p. 285) Without it, the group would have to spend a lot of time building consensus. Unanimous consensus would be better, or bad feelings could wear society down over time.

However, deference to authority can lead to group think and in the darkest scenario result in the Nazi defense of just-following-orders.

Foster concludes this chapter with another round of criticism of the economics field for having devolved into a debate over various mathematical models of different ways to manage the economy.

He mentions a 1990 conference in Edinburgh ostensibly celebrating Adam Smith, well attended by many Nobel laureates in economics, that had a program describing the field of economics.

Modern economic analysis constructs models of human behavior and uses computers and statistical data to map this process at work and predict changes in it. (p. 300)

Contrast that to Smith’s own words.

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people. (p. 301)

How far the field has moved from the “father” they were honoring.

The political instinct with its desire for power, the tendency towards self-deception, the deference to authority, all these come together and create a field of people attracted to the idea of managing the economy and redistributing the resources in a way they see as better or fairer.

And though there is no way to use their own models to show that socialism and central planning and redistribution works out well, they cling to their beliefs because the beliefs came first.

It wasn’t so much that you couldn’t teach old economists new tricks as that economists perpetually sought to find new ways of justifying their unshakeable, morally based interventionist pretensions. (p. 304)

In recent times the buzzword has become sustainability. That is just a new name for the same “morally based interventionist pretensions.”

Next chapter, Foster turns to the climate debate that is wrapped in these moral pretensions with the conclusion coming first and the evidence arranged as needed to support it.

At its heart, it is not about the climate, it is just the latest dress for the anti-capitalism sentiment.

Reference: Foster, Peter, 2014. “The Chimpanzee in the Room: Darwinian Politics” Chapter 13 of Why We Bite the Invisible Hand, Pleasaunce Press.