WEBVTT NOTE Part VI 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.000 Our Enemy, The State by Albert J. Nock 2 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:07.000 Part 6 3 00:00:07.000 --> 00:00:11.000 Such has been the course of our experience from the beginning, 4 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:16.000 and such are the terms in which its stark uniformity has led us to think of the State. 5 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:24.000 This uniformity also goes far to account for the development of a peculiar moral innovation with regard to the State, 6 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:31.200 State, exactly parallel to that which prevailed with regard to the Church in the Middle Ages. 7 00:00:31.200 --> 00:00:35.760 The Church controlled the distribution of certain privileges and immunities, and if 8 00:00:35.760 --> 00:00:40.960 one approached it properly, one might get the benefit of them. It stood as something 9 00:00:40.960 --> 00:00:47.820 to be run to in any kind of emergency, temporal or spiritual, for the satisfaction of ambition 10 00:00:47.820 --> 00:00:53.520 and cupidity, as well as for the more tenuous assurances it held out against various forms 11 00:00:53.520 --> 00:01:12.520 As long as this was so, the anomalies were more-or-less contentedly acquiesced in, and thus a chronic moral enervation, too negative to be called broadly cynical, was developed towards the vast overbuilding of its material structure. 12 00:01:12.520 --> 00:01:18.520 A like enervation pervades our society with respect to the State and for like reasons. 13 00:01:18.520 --> 00:01:24.380 It affects especially those who take the state's pretensions at face value and regard it as 14 00:01:24.380 --> 00:01:30.880 a social institution whose policies of continuous intervention are wholesome and necessary. 15 00:01:30.880 --> 00:01:35.840 And it also affects the great majority who have no clear idea of the state but merely 16 00:01:35.840 --> 00:01:41.240 accept it as something that exists and never think about it except when some intervention 17 00:01:41.240 --> 00:01:44.840 bears unfavorably upon their interests. 18 00:01:44.840 --> 00:01:49.920 There is little need to dwell upon the amount of aid thus given to the state's progress 19 00:01:49.920 --> 00:01:56.200 in self-aggrandizement, or to show in detail or by illustration the courses by which this 20 00:01:56.200 --> 00:02:04.300 spiritlessness promotes the state's steady policy of intervention, exaction and over-building. 21 00:02:04.300 --> 00:02:10.200 Every intervention by the state enables another, and this in turn another and so on indefinitely, 22 00:02:10.200 --> 00:02:16.280 When the state stands ever ready and eager to make them, often on its own motion, often 23 00:02:16.280 --> 00:02:23.280 again wangling plausibility for them through the spacious suggestion of interested persons. 24 00:02:24.240 --> 00:02:29.680 Sometimes the matter at issue is in its nature simple, socially necessary and devoid of any 25 00:02:29.680 --> 00:02:36.680 character that would bring it into the purview of politics. For convenience, however, complications 26 00:02:36.680 --> 00:02:43.680 When complications are erected on it, then presently someone sees that these complications are exploitable and proceeds to exploit them. 27 00:02:43.680 --> 00:02:51.680 Then another and another, until the rivalries and collisions of interest thus generate, issue in a more or less general disorder. 28 00:02:51.680 --> 00:03:03.680 When this takes place, the logical thing, obviously, is to recede and let the disorder be settled in the slower and more troublesome way through the operation of natural laws. 29 00:03:03.680 --> 00:03:10.840 But in such circumstances, recession is never for a moment thought of. The suggestion would 30 00:03:10.840 --> 00:03:17.440 be put down as sheer lunacy. Instead, the interests unfavorably affected, little aware 31 00:03:17.440 --> 00:03:23.600 perhaps how much worse the cure is than the disease, or at any rate little caring, immediately 32 00:03:23.600 --> 00:03:29.400 call on the State to cut in arbitrarily between cause and effect, and clear up the disorder 33 00:03:29.400 --> 00:03:59.400 The State then intervenes by imposing another set of complications upon the first. These in turn are found exploitable. Another demand arises, another set of complications, still more intricate, is erected upon the first too. And the same sequence is gone through again and again, until the recurrent disorder becomes acute enough to open the way for a shocking political adventurer to come forward and, always alleging necessarily 34 00:03:59.400 --> 00:04:05.680 The necessity, the tyrant's plea, to organize a coup d'etat. 35 00:04:05.680 --> 00:04:11.880 But more often the basic matter at issue represents an original intervention of the state, an 36 00:04:11.880 --> 00:04:17.240 original allotment of the political means. Each of these allotments, as we have seen, 37 00:04:17.240 --> 00:04:23.320 is a charter of highwaymenry, a license to appropriate the labor products of others without 38 00:04:23.320 --> 00:04:29.360 compensation. Therefore it is in the nature of things that when such a license is issued, 39 00:04:29.360 --> 00:04:34.240 The State must follow it up with an indefinite series of interventions to systematize and 40 00:04:34.240 --> 00:04:36.960 regulate its use. 41 00:04:36.960 --> 00:04:42.440 The State's endless progressive encroachments that are recorded in the history of the tariff, 42 00:04:42.440 --> 00:04:48.160 their impudent and disgusting particularity, and the prodigious amount of apparatus necessary 43 00:04:48.160 --> 00:04:53.680 to give them effect, furnish a conspicuous case in point. 44 00:04:53.680 --> 00:04:57.640 Another is furnished by the history of our railway regulation. 45 00:04:57.640 --> 00:05:03.180 It is nowadays of the fashion, even among those who ought to know better, to hold rugged 46 00:05:03.180 --> 00:05:10.280 individualism and laissez-faire responsible for the riot of stockwatering, rebates, rate 47 00:05:10.280 --> 00:05:15.520 cutting, fraudulent bankruptcies and the like, which prevailed in our railway practice after 48 00:05:15.520 --> 00:05:20.400 the Civil War, but they had no more to do with it than they have with the procession 49 00:05:20.400 --> 00:05:22.840 of the equinoxes. 50 00:05:22.840 --> 00:05:28.480 The fact is that our railways, with few exceptions, did not grow up in response to any actual 51 00:05:28.480 --> 00:05:34.760 economic demand, they were speculative enterprises enabled by state intervention by allotment 52 00:05:34.760 --> 00:05:41.680 of the political means in the form of land-grants and subsidies, and of all the eagles alleged 53 00:05:41.680 --> 00:05:47.120 against our railway practice, there is not one but what is directly traceable to this 54 00:05:47.120 --> 00:05:50.420 primary intervention. 55 00:05:50.420 --> 00:05:55.420 So it is with shipping, there was no valid economic demand for adventure in the carrying 56 00:05:55.420 --> 00:06:01.480 trade, in fact every sound economic consideration was dead against it, it was entered upon through 57 00:06:01.480 --> 00:06:07.700 state intervention, instigated by shipbuilders and their allied interests, and the mess engendered 58 00:06:07.700 --> 00:06:12.720 by their manipulation of the political means is now the ground of demand for further and 59 00:06:12.720 --> 00:06:16.040 further coercive intervention. 60 00:06:16.040 --> 00:06:22.860 So it is with what, by an unconscionable stretch of language, goes by the name of farming. 61 00:06:22.860 --> 00:06:28.100 There are very few troubles so far heard of as normally besetting this form of enterprise, 62 00:06:28.100 --> 00:06:33.040 but what are directly traceable to the state's primary intervention in establishing a system 63 00:06:33.040 --> 00:06:39.820 of land tenure which gives a monopoly right over rental values as well as over use values. 64 00:06:39.820 --> 00:06:45.460 As long as that system is in force, one coercive intervention after another is bound to take 65 00:06:45.460 --> 00:06:53.080 2 Thus we see how ignorance and delusion concerning 66 00:06:53.080 --> 00:06:59.220 the nature of the state combine with extreme moral debility and myopic self-interest, what 67 00:06:59.220 --> 00:07:08.300 Ernest Rennan so well calls la bassesse de l'homme intresse, to enable the steadily accelerated 68 00:07:08.300 --> 00:07:13.020 conversion of social power into state power that has gone on from the beginning of our 69 00:07:13.020 --> 00:07:15.460 or Political Independence. 70 00:07:15.460 --> 00:07:17.620 It is a curious anomaly. 71 00:07:17.620 --> 00:07:23.300 State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, 72 00:07:23.300 --> 00:07:25.860 disinterestedly or honestly. 73 00:07:25.860 --> 00:07:31.260 Yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid 74 00:07:31.260 --> 00:07:36.540 of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for. 75 00:07:36.540 --> 00:07:41.380 Does social power mismanage banking practice in this or that special instance? 76 00:07:41.380 --> 00:07:45.820 Then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep its own finances from 77 00:07:45.820 --> 00:07:52.020 sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to 78 00:07:52.020 --> 00:07:59.980 supervise or regulate the whole body of banking practice, or even take it over entire. Does 79 00:07:59.980 --> 00:08:06.580 social power in this or that case bungle the business of railway management? Then let the 80 00:08:06.580 --> 00:08:11.540 The State, which has bungled every business it has ever undertaken, intervene and put its 81 00:08:11.540 --> 00:08:16.580 hand to the business of regulating railway operation. 82 00:08:16.580 --> 00:08:22.380 Does social power now and then send out an unseaworthy ship to disaster, then let the 83 00:08:22.380 --> 00:08:28.220 State, which inspected and passed the morrow castle, be given a freer swing at controlling 84 00:08:28.220 --> 00:08:31.580 the routine of the shipping trade? 85 00:08:31.580 --> 00:08:36.500 The Social Power here and there exercise a grinding monopoly over the generation and 86 00:08:36.500 --> 00:08:42.900 distribution of electric current, then let the state, which allots and maintains monopoly, 87 00:08:42.900 --> 00:08:48.180 come in and intervene with a general scheme of price fixing which works more unforeseen 88 00:08:48.180 --> 00:08:55.180 hardships than it heals, or else let it go into direct competition, or, as the collective 89 00:08:55.180 --> 00:09:00.040 is surged, let it take over the monopoly bodily. 90 00:09:00.040 --> 00:09:06.680 Ever since society has existed, says Herbert Spencer, this appointment has been preaching, 91 00:09:06.680 --> 00:09:13.680 put not your trust in legislation. And yet the trust in legislation seems hardly diminished. 92 00:09:17.000 --> 00:09:23.880 But it may be asked, where we are to go for relief from misuses of social power, if not 93 00:09:23.880 --> 00:09:29.600 to the State. What other recourse have we? Admitting that under our existing mode of 94 00:09:29.600 --> 00:09:34.600 political organization we have none, it must still be pointed out that this question rests 95 00:09:34.600 --> 00:09:39.960 on the old inveterate misapprehension of the State's nature, presuming that the State is 96 00:09:39.960 --> 00:09:46.280 a social institution, whereas it is an anti-social institution. That is to say, the question 97 00:09:46.280 --> 00:09:53.280 rests on an absurdity. It is certainly true that the business of government in maintaining 98 00:09:53.280 --> 00:10:00.220 Meaning, freedom and security, and to secure these rights, is to make a recourse to justice 99 00:10:00.220 --> 00:10:06.880 costless, easy and informal. But the state, on the contrary, is primarily concerned with 100 00:10:06.880 --> 00:10:14.160 injustice and its primary function is to maintain a regime of injustice. Hence, as we see daily, 101 00:10:14.160 --> 00:10:19.640 its disposition is to put justice as far out of reach and to make the effort after justice 102 00:10:19.640 --> 00:10:23.720 is as costly and difficult as it can. 103 00:10:23.720 --> 00:10:29.120 One may put in a word that while government is by its nature concerned with the administration 104 00:10:29.120 --> 00:10:36.120 of justice, the state is by its nature concerned with the administration of law, law which 105 00:10:36.120 --> 00:10:41.640 the state itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends. 106 00:10:41.640 --> 00:10:48.640 Therefore, an appeal to the state based on the ground of justice is futile in any circumstances. 107 00:10:48.640 --> 00:11:08.640 For whatever action the State might take in response to it would be conditioned by the State's own paramount interest, and would hence be bound to result, as we see such action invariably resulting, in as great injustice as that which it pretends to be correct, or as a rule greater. 108 00:11:08.640 --> 00:11:18.640 The question thus presumes, in short, that the state may on occasion be persuaded to act out of character. And this is levity. 109 00:11:18.640 --> 00:11:31.640 But passing on from this special view of the question, and regarding it in a more general way, we see that what it actually amounts to is a plea for arbitrary interference with the order of nature, 110 00:11:31.640 --> 00:11:38.600 of Nature, and arbitrary cutting in to avert the penalty which nature lays on any and every 111 00:11:38.600 --> 00:11:44.440 form of error, whether willful or ignorant, voluntary or involuntary, and no attempt at 112 00:11:44.440 --> 00:11:50.000 this has ever yet failed to cost more than it came to. 113 00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:55.040 Any contravention of natural law, any tampering with the natural order of things, must have 114 00:11:55.040 --> 00:12:01.560 its consequences, and the only recourse for escaping them is such as entails worse consequences. 115 00:12:01.560 --> 00:12:14.560 Nature wrecks nothing of intentions, good or bad. The one thing she will not tolerate is disorder and she is very particular about getting her full pay for any attempt to create disorder. 116 00:12:14.560 --> 00:12:23.560 She gets it sometimes by very indirect methods, often by very roundabout and unforeseen ways, but she always gets it. 117 00:12:23.560 --> 00:12:30.560 Things and actions are what they are and the consequences of them will be what they will be. Why then? 118 00:12:30.560 --> 00:12:35.720 Then, Should We Desire to be Deceived? 119 00:12:35.720 --> 00:12:41.240 It would seem that our civilization is greatly given to this infantile addiction, greatly 120 00:12:41.240 --> 00:12:46.740 given to persuading itself that it can find some means which nature will tolerate whereby 121 00:12:46.740 --> 00:12:53.660 we may eat our cake and have it, and it strongly resents the stubborn fact that there is no 122 00:12:53.660 --> 00:12:56.600 such means. 123 00:12:56.600 --> 00:13:01.280 It will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think the matter through that under a regime 124 00:13:01.280 --> 00:13:06.880 of natural order, that is to say under government, which makes no positive interventions whatever 125 00:13:06.880 --> 00:13:13.320 on the individual, but only negative interventions on behalf of simple justice, not law, but 126 00:13:13.320 --> 00:13:20.120 justice, misuses of social power would be effectively corrected, whereas we know by 127 00:13:20.120 --> 00:13:26.660 by Interminable Experience that the state's positive interventions do not correct them. 128 00:13:26.660 --> 00:13:33.400 Under a regime of actual individualism, actual free competition, actual laissez-faire, a regime 129 00:13:33.400 --> 00:13:40.180 which, as we have seen, cannot possibly coexist with the state, a serious or continuous misuse 130 00:13:40.180 --> 00:13:45.680 of social power would be virtually impracticable. 131 00:13:45.680 --> 00:13:51.480 I shall not take up space with amplifying these statements because, in the first place, 132 00:13:51.480 --> 00:13:57.700 this has already been done by Spencer in his essays entitled The Man versus the State, 133 00:13:57.700 --> 00:14:03.000 and in the second place, because I wish above all things to avoid the appearance of suggesting 134 00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:09.860 that a regime such as these statements contemplate is practicable, or that I am ever so covertly 135 00:14:09.860 --> 00:14:14.840 encouraging anyone to dwell on the thought of such a regime. 136 00:14:14.840 --> 00:14:20.920 Perhaps some eons hence, if the planet remains so long habitable, the benefits accruing to 137 00:14:20.920 --> 00:14:26.380 conquest and confiscation may be adjudged over costly, the state may in consequence 138 00:14:26.380 --> 00:14:32.100 be superseded by government, the political means suppressed, and the fetishes which give 139 00:14:32.100 --> 00:14:39.280 nationalism and patriotism their present execrable character may be broken down. 140 00:14:39.280 --> 00:14:44.600 But the remoteness and uncertainty of this prospect makes any thought of it fatuous, 141 00:14:44.600 --> 00:14:51.080 in any concern with it futile. Some rough measure of its remoteness may perhaps be gained by 142 00:14:51.080 --> 00:14:57.080 estimating the growing strength of the forces at work against it. Ignorance and error, which 143 00:14:57.080 --> 00:15:04.200 the state's prestige steadily deepens, are against it. La bassesse de l'homme in tres, 144 00:15:04.200 --> 00:15:11.200 steadily pushing its purposes to greater lengths of turpitude, is against it. Moral 145 00:15:11.200 --> 00:15:27.200 What combination of influences more powerful than this can one imagine, and what can one imagine possible to be done in the face of such a combination? 146 00:15:27.200 --> 00:15:36.020 To the sum of these, which may be called spiritual influences, may be added the overweening 147 00:15:36.020 --> 00:15:41.600 physical strength of the state, which is ready to be called into action at once against any 148 00:15:41.600 --> 00:15:48.120 affront to the state's prestige. Few realize how enormously and how rapidly in recent years 149 00:15:48.120 --> 00:15:54.680 the state has everywhere built up its apparatus of armies and police forces. The state has 150 00:15:54.680 --> 00:16:01.680 It is now known to every intelligent person that there can be no such thing as a revolution as long as this advice is followed. In fact, there has been no revolution in the modern world since 1848. Every so-called revolution has been followed. 151 00:16:24.680 --> 00:16:28.800 has been merely a coup d'etat. 152 00:16:28.800 --> 00:16:34.520 All talk of the possibility of a revolution in America is in part perhaps ignorant, but 153 00:16:34.520 --> 00:16:36.480 mostly dishonest. 154 00:16:36.480 --> 00:16:43.880 It is merely the interested clamors and sophistry of persons who have some sort of axe to grind. 155 00:16:43.880 --> 00:16:47.960 Even Lenin acknowledged that a revolution is impossible anywhere until the military 156 00:16:47.960 --> 00:16:54.960 We have all seen demonstrations of a disarmed populace and local riots carried on with primitive weapons, and we have also seen how they ended, as in Homestead, Chicago, and the mining districts of West Virginia, for example. Cox's army marched on Washington, and it kept off the grass. 157 00:17:17.960 --> 00:17:23.520 Taking the sum of the state's physical strength with the force of powerful spiritual influences 158 00:17:23.520 --> 00:17:31.160 behind it, one asks again what can be done against the state's progress in self-aggrandizement? 159 00:17:31.160 --> 00:17:33.000 Simply nothing. 160 00:17:33.000 --> 00:17:38.740 So far from encouraging any hopeful contemplation of the unattainable, the student of civilized 161 00:17:38.740 --> 00:17:43.120 man will offer no conclusion but that nothing can be done. 162 00:17:43.120 --> 00:17:48.300 He can regard the course of civilization only as he would regard the course of a man in 163 00:17:48.300 --> 00:17:53.920 a narrowboat on the lower reaches of the Niagara, as an instance of nature's unconquerable 164 00:17:53.920 --> 00:17:59.520 intolerance of disorder, and in the end an example of the penalty which she puts upon 165 00:17:59.520 --> 00:18:06.520 any attempt at interference with order. Our civilization may at the outset have taken 166 00:18:06.520 --> 00:18:12.280 have taken its chances with the current of statism either ignorantly or deliberately. 167 00:18:12.280 --> 00:18:18.580 It makes no difference. Nature cares for nothing whatever about motive or intention, she cares 168 00:18:18.580 --> 00:18:24.340 only for order, and looks to see that her repugnance to this order shall be vindicated, 169 00:18:24.340 --> 00:18:29.180 and that her concern with the regular orderly sequences of things and actions shall be upheld 170 00:18:29.180 --> 00:18:36.180 in the outcome. Emerson, in one of his greatest moments of inspiration, personified cause 171 00:18:36.180 --> 00:18:43.760 The 172 00:18:43.760 --> 00:18:50.160 Attempt to Nullify or Divert or in any wise break upon their sequences must have its own reward. 173 00:18:52.800 --> 00:18:58.400 Such, says Professor Ortega-Agasset, was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization. 174 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:04.240 A dozen empires have already finished the course that ours began three centuries ago. 175 00:19:04.240 --> 00:19:10.520 The lion and the lizard keep the vestiges that attest their passage upon earth, vestiges 176 00:19:10.520 --> 00:19:16.400 of cities which in their day were as proud and as powerful as ours, Tadmor, Persepolis, 177 00:19:16.400 --> 00:19:21.960 Luxor, Baalbek, some of them indeed forgotten for thousands of years and brought into memory 178 00:19:21.960 --> 00:19:27.680 again only by the excavator, like those of the Mayas and those buried in the sands of 179 00:19:27.680 --> 00:19:29.360 the Gobi. 180 00:19:29.360 --> 00:19:34.320 The sites which now bear Narbonne and Marseille have borne the habitat of four successive 181 00:19:34.320 --> 00:19:40.280 civilizations, each of them, as St. James says, even as a vapor which appeareth for 182 00:19:40.280 --> 00:19:45.560 a little time and then vanisheth away. The course of all these civilizations was the 183 00:19:45.560 --> 00:19:52.860 same. Conquest, Confiscation, the erection of the state, then the sequences which we 184 00:19:52.860 --> 00:19:57.820 have traced in the course of our own civilization, then the shock of some eruption which the 185 00:19:57.820 --> 00:20:03.780 The Social Structure was too far weakened to resist, and from which it was left too disorganized 186 00:20:03.780 --> 00:20:08.060 to recover, and then the end. 187 00:20:08.060 --> 00:20:13.300 Our pride resents the thought that the great highways of New England will one day lie deep 188 00:20:13.300 --> 00:20:18.780 under layers of encroaching vegetation, as the more substantial Roman roads of Old England 189 00:20:18.780 --> 00:20:24.540 have lain for generations, and that only a group of heavily overgrown hillocks will be 190 00:20:54.540 --> 00:21:24.540 What we and our more nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization, a steadily growing bureaucracy, state power and faith in state power increasing, social power and faith in social power diminishing, the state absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income, production languishing, the state increasing in social power diminishing, 191 00:21:24.540 --> 00:21:29.780 are in consequence taking over one essential industry after another, managing them with 192 00:21:29.780 --> 00:21:36.260 ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality, and finally resorting to a system 193 00:21:36.260 --> 00:21:43.020 of forced labor. Then, at some point in this progress, a collision of state interests, 194 00:21:43.020 --> 00:21:48.800 at least as general as that which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and 195 00:21:48.800 --> 00:21:55.320 and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear, and from 196 00:21:55.320 --> 00:22:01.940 this the state will be left to the rusty death of machinery, and the casual anonymous forces 197 00:22:01.940 --> 00:22:05.640 of dissolution will be supreme. 198 00:22:05.640 --> 00:22:12.180 3. But it may be quite properly asked, if we in common with the rest of the Western 199 00:22:12.180 --> 00:22:18.620 The human world has gone so far in statism as to make this outcome inevitable. 200 00:22:18.620 --> 00:22:23.060 What is the use of a book which merely shows that it is inevitable? 201 00:22:23.060 --> 00:22:26.660 By its own hypothesis, the book is useless. 202 00:22:26.660 --> 00:22:31.940 Upon every evidence it offers, no one's political opinions are likely to be changed by it, no 203 00:22:31.940 --> 00:22:37.560 one's practical attitude towards the state will be modified by it, and if they are, according 204 00:22:37.560 --> 00:22:43.000 According to the book's own premises, what good could they do? 205 00:22:43.000 --> 00:22:47.840 Assuredly I do not expect this book to change anyone's political opinions, for it is not 206 00:22:47.840 --> 00:22:49.720 meant to do that. 207 00:22:49.720 --> 00:22:53.940 One or two perhaps here and there may be moved to look a little into the subject matter on 208 00:22:53.940 --> 00:22:59.800 their own account, and thus perhaps their opinions would undergo some slight loosening 209 00:22:59.800 --> 00:23:02.140 or some constriction. 210 00:23:02.140 --> 00:23:05.260 But this is the very most that would happen. 211 00:23:05.260 --> 00:23:10.240 In general, too, I would be the first to acknowledge that no results of the kind which we agree 212 00:23:10.240 --> 00:23:15.620 to call practical could accrue to the credit of a book of this order, were it a hundred 213 00:23:15.620 --> 00:23:21.740 times as cogent as this one. No results, that is, that would in the least retard the state's 214 00:23:21.740 --> 00:23:28.620 progress in self-aggrandizement and thus modify the consequences of the state's course. 215 00:23:28.620 --> 00:23:34.620 There are two reasons, however, one general and one social. Why, the publication of such 216 00:23:34.620 --> 00:23:57.620 The general reason is that when any department of thought a person has or thinks he has a view of the plain intelligible order of things, it is proper that he should record that view publicly, with no thought whatever of the practical consequences or lack of consequences likely to ensue upon his doing. 217 00:23:57.620 --> 00:24:04.860 He might indeed be thought bound to do this as a matter of abstract duty, not to crusade 218 00:24:04.860 --> 00:24:11.500 or propagandize for his view or seek to impose it upon anyone, far from that, not to concern 219 00:24:11.500 --> 00:24:16.580 himself at all with either its acceptance or its disallowance, but merely to record 220 00:24:16.580 --> 00:24:24.140 it. This, I say, might be thought his duty to a natural truth of things. But it is at 221 00:24:24.140 --> 00:24:29.340 That all events is right, it is admissible. 222 00:24:29.340 --> 00:24:34.860 The special reason has to do with the fact that in every civilization, however generally 223 00:24:34.860 --> 00:24:40.420 prosaic, however addicted to the short time point of view on human affairs, there are 224 00:24:40.420 --> 00:24:46.820 always certain alien spirits who, while outwardly conforming to the requirements of the civilization 225 00:24:46.820 --> 00:24:52.820 around them, still keep a disinterested regard for the plain intelligible law of things, 226 00:24:52.820 --> 00:24:56.160 Irrespectable of any practical end. 227 00:24:56.160 --> 00:25:01.620 They have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august 228 00:25:01.620 --> 00:25:03.340 order of nature. 229 00:25:03.340 --> 00:25:07.920 They are impressed by the contemplation of it, and like to know as much about it as they 230 00:25:07.920 --> 00:25:13.960 can, even in circumstances where its operation is ever so manifestly unfavorable to their 231 00:25:13.960 --> 00:25:16.840 best hopes and wishes. 232 00:25:16.840 --> 00:25:25.160 For these, a work like this, however in the current sense impractical, is not quite useless, 233 00:25:25.160 --> 00:25:31.640 and those of them it reaches will be aware that for such as themselves, and such only, 234 00:25:31.640 --> 00:25:34.480 it was written. 235 00:25:34.480 --> 00:25:37.560 The End 236 00:25:37.560 --> 00:25:44.400 A printed copy of this book can be purchased or a PDF downloaded from the Ludwig von Mises 237 00:25:44.400 --> 00:25:51.400 Mr. Nock included many footnotes in the book, and these are only available in the printed editions.