From Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Harper & Brothers, 1943:
“According to my observations, mankind are among the most easily tamable and domesticable of all creatures in the animal world. They are readily reducible to submission, so readily conditionable (to coin a word) as to exhibit an almost incredibly enduring patience under restraint and oppression of the most flagrant character.“So far are they from displaying any overweening love of freedom that they show a curious canine pride in it, and again are often simply unaware that they are existing in that condition. Byron, one of the world’s greatest natural forces in poetry, had virtually no reflective power, but in the last lines of his poem on Bonnivard, who ‘regained his freedom with a sigh,’ he displays a flash of insight almost worthy of Sophocles, into mankind’s easy susceptibility to conditioning…
“I do not know the origin of this idea that mankind loves liberty above all things, but the American revolution of 1776 and the French revolution of 1789 apparently did most to give it currency. Since then it has done yeoman’s service to an unbroken succession of knaves intent on exploiting the name and appearance of freedom before mankind, while depriving them of the reality.”
This preference for servility is particularly striking in the military, which is ostensibly dedicated to freedom but demands the opposite from the rugged individualists in its ranks. No novelist could create characters so apparently sturdy and yet so supple and submissive as Colin Powell and David Petraeus. They may be armed, but they are in service.
Elsewhere in his memoirs, it now occurs to me, Nock writes along these same lines:
“I always think of this when I see a file of soldiers, wondering why the sound of a drum does not incite them to shoot their officers, throw away their rifles, go home, and go to work. Why, instead of producing this effect which seems natural and reasonable, does it produce one which seems exactly the opposite?”
Posted by: Jerry Doolittle on May 10, 2008 8:15 AMHe said nothing more clearly about it than this, from Free Speech and Plain Language: "Man tends to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Not, it must be understood, that he always does so satisfy them, for other considerations -- principle, convention, fear, superstition or what not -- may supervene; but he always tends to satisfy them with the least possible exertion, and, in the absence of a stronger motive, will always do so."
That, and the first four paragraphs of the fourth chapter of Our Enemy The State are probably all one really needs to read of Nock to understand him.
Posted by: Michael on May 10, 2008 12:33 PMMy view, different from Nock's, is that human action may be divided into three spheres, political, economic and social. The mobilization of the social means may supercede the political, which is anti-social in character. By the organization of social means is evolved Government, rather than State.
Posted by: Michael on May 10, 2008 12:44 PM