Politics is Evil
Sometimes necessary, but always evil
I have been meaning to write this for a while, but in some ways it feels too obvious for people to care, and in some ways it feels too radical for anyone to consider possibly true without millions of pages of argument. In both ways, I am worried that I will spend time writing millions of pages that go off into important and interesting tangents, only to erase them. If you think my normal posts are a bit rambling, you should see what gets cut… there’s a lot of it. Sort of the problem when you tend to think in terms of interconnected systems that repeat fractally across everything human; where do you draw the line between ideas?
The point of this essay is to suggest that politics is in and of itself evil, that is, destructive to human wellbeing, in the same manner that many other things we generally recognize and agree to call evil are evil. After suggesting the idea, which I suppose I just did, the essay’s task to attempt to convince you that claim is true, while at the same time costing something less than the rest of the month of my time. I want to make this abundantly clear because I know many people are going to recoil away from the premise and many of the examples I use to support it, and I don’t want anyone thinking I am trying to be sneaky or less than above board in my intentions. For those who actively do not want to believe that politics is evil, I would suggest you seek the egress.
So why is politics itself evil?
If someone knows anything about the work of Carl von Clausewitz, it is his famous quote “War is politics by other means.” Like most quotes, that is not entirely accurate, but does generally capture the idea of “War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means,” or as my edition1 has it:
24. War is a mere continuation of policy by other means
We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.
All of chapter I “What Is War?” revolves around this idea, that the whole point of war is to achieve some policy end, as opposed to war being an end in itself. The quote that I think is key, however, comes from section 2. Definition (emphasis in original):
War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.
Violence arms itself with the inventions of Art and Science in order to contend against violence. Self-imposed restrictions, almost imperceptible and hardly worth mentioning, termed usages of International Law, accompany it without essentially impairing its power. Violence, that is to say, physical force (for there is no moral force without the conception of States and Law), is therefore the means; the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the ultimate object.
Lastly, let’s grab an important line from Book V, Chapter VI, nearly at the end of the work (again, emphasis in the original):
Now, this unity [that war is both anathema to and necessary for society] is the conception that War is only a part of political intercourse, therefore by no means an independent thing in itself.
… We maintain… that War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means.
(I gotta hand it to Clausewitz, he emphasizes pretty much exactly what I would have wanted him to.)
We have here a pretty nice collection of quotes all to the effect that war is the servant of politics. There are scholars who will debate how correct Clausewitz is one way or the other, but not usually on account of War being independent from politics. From my (very outside) view, their arguments are different from the argument I am making; many read “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means” and take away “War isn’t so bad, it is like politics!” while others argue “No, War is totally bad! It isn’t like politics at all!” I am arguing that we should read Clausewitz and take away “War is totally bad, and war is just like politics, which is thus also totally bad.”
The barebones version of the argument is that if we are told two things are the same, and we thought one was good and one was super bad, we should update both beliefs equally to bring them in balance. If we had lots of prior evidence that the one was super bad and only a little evidence that the other was good, we should update pretty hard towards them both being bad. Just like if you think ice cream is good and bitrex is awful, and I say “this ice cream tastes just like bitrex” you are probably going to suggest I seek medical help instead of saying “Huh, bitrex must not taste nearly so bad as I think.” (It doesn’t, it tastes worse than anything imaginable.)
Considering it more in depth, and in fact more agnostically to whether or not old Carl knew what he was talking about, we get to the same place. It does seem true that war has a specific objective, which generally can be described as make someone else do what we want instead of what they want. Whether that objective is “stop stealing my cows” or “give me your cows”, it is still the case that each side of the war has some behavior they want the other side to adhere to, and are using physical force to make that happen. Just talking isn’t working, so they are mixing in other means.
However, just like Clausewitz says, the object of war and politics is the same, to make someone else conform to your will. It is just the means that changes, e.g. shooting a bunch of people until they decide to do what you want instead of being shot some more. We add physical compulsion to the normal means of getting people to do what we want.
But… what are the normal means of getting people to do what we want? Well, in general, when we want someone to do what we want, we either offer a positive trade, whether of goods, services or esteem, or a negative, taking goods, hitting you with a stick, or scolding you. That’s pretty much the universe of incentives we have, the proverbial carrots and sticks. War then is the “hitting you with a stick” set of incentives, which generally is forbidden normal people in society.
Forbidden to normal people in society, but not all people. The state, specifically its agents who are in charge of enforcing laws (legislation), is also allowed to use physical force, the hitting you with a stick set of incentives. As the esteemed Walter Williams put it in class “Never make anything illegal which you are not willing to kill people for doing, because a gun is the root of all governmental power. Even if they say ‘Oh, it is just a fine’ it isn’t optional; if you don’t pay the fine some police officers are going to come to your house to take you to jail; if you are not willing to go to jail, they are going to make you, and if you resist you are going to get shot.”2 The government having the monopoly on the use of force means that the government is allowed to make War on specific citizens in order to achieve its objectives. The monopoly part isn’t necessary there, by the by, just usually the way it is formulated. The difference between government and armed gangs is generally that under a government those subjected are fairly ok with those doing the subjection because the government does some good things too… otherwise the distinction is really fuzzy.3 Such is life.
Now, the government does have other ways of incentivizing people. It pays out subsidies to get people to do more of X, and some people follow the legislated rules simply because they are the legislated rules. The government also attempts to convince through argument and propaganda, just like normal people. When it really wants you to do something, however, the government passes legislation enforced by physical force. Law enforcement has force right there in the name, after all.4
So, the government of a region has the option to use force to further its goals, whether that force is against people outside the region or within the region. Writing it, it seems obvious, and I might not have needed the previous paragraphs. Still, it’s important, and hopefully so obvious that everyone is on board. I want you to be on board with that, because, no matter what notional object we are hopefully on board, that object is about to get uncomfortable.
How is the government controlled?
If you said “Politics!” give yourself a smug, self satisfied glow, right after you get done looking around and feeling awkward for shouting out a single word while otherwise quietly reading. But yes, politics is the process of determining policy, the process of controlling government, the process by which it is decided who is going to get hit with a stick until they and everyone else does what they are told. Politics is how we get the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will that is the ultimate object, and the means is legislation defining the enemy and thus making the physical compulsion legal. War is part of politics, and is in fact a normal part of politics, the primary tool of government that those engaged in politics wish to use. Politics is just the process for deciding who has war declared upon them; by the time we are at the point of politics we have already decided to kill people if they don’t do what we want.
That seems like a bit of a jump, killing people if they don’t do what we want, but remember, that is the primary way government works, making use of that monopoly on force. Anyone can subsidize a behavior, or applaud and scold you for deeds good or bad. Only government can declare a formerly acceptable action illegal and take your property, your freedom or your life without that taking being considered a crime.
So, we are all set! It is ok to kill people who don’t do what we want, so long as government does it. War isn’t so bad because it is just like normal politics. We call state violence directed at people outside the state war, and violence directed inside law enforcement, and basically it is the same thing, controlled by politics. Right?
No, wait, just the opposite. War is bad because it destroys life, liberty, security, resources and produces little more than compliance at best, and law enforcement does exactly the same things. The only thing that law enforcement has going for it is that it tends to be more limited than War, and since the people the law is being enforced upon tend to have some say in how it is done it isn’t so bad, and can result in a net increase in life, liberty and security more often than War. (However, ask someone who lived in the USSR, or Uyghurs in modern China, how different War is from law enforcement when government doesn’t have to answer to the people.) So when we engage in politics in an attempt to create some legislation to be enforced, we are literally arguing that we should kill people for doing whatever it is the legislation bans or mandates. Politics is about choosing who we should kill based on what they do.
That’s ok! Some people really need killing. Every society has laws against murder and theft, and most have laws against rape, fraud, kidnapping, all the usual life, liberty and property type things. The rules might differ about what constitutes murder and how we define who owns what and whether or not it can be stolen, but we can be pretty sure that societies that take no interest in whether members kill each other or not don’t survive long since none exist, and we have lots of evidence that societies that ignore the notion of property all together fail pretty quickly as well. Killing people who violate other people’s life, liberty and property is probably a necessary function of human groups, at least if the violated parties are members of that group.5
Some people need killing, but killing is still generally not considered good. You don’t want to do it much, not because killing someone who needs killing is bad, but because determining who needs killing is a fuzzy process, and so you run the risk of killing people who don’t need killing, which is evil. Killing someone who doesn’t deserve to be killed is one of those things that makes you deserve killing. (I feel like that sentence could have been a palindrome if I tried harder… I will leave that as an exercise to the reader.) The trouble with War and law enforcement is that we end up killing or harming people that don’t deserve it, which is why War especially, and law enforcement when badly done, are evil. Sometimes a necessary evil, but inherently evil. We can’t really get around that, either. You have to kill people sometimes, and in doing so you are going to end up harming people that shouldn’t be harmed. The best you can do is minimize the total harm, balancing off removing those people who are themselves giant harm factories for all around them while letting others go to avoid becoming a harm factory yourself.
The thing is, when we say politics in the modern world, we aren’t talking about “should murder and theft be legal?” and generally not even about the definition of murder and theft. The US political scene is about whether or not people should be allowed to take certain drugs, be forced to use certain pronouns when talking about other people, or any number of other questions so trivial and invasive that one can hardly credence being willing to kill people over such things. At best, most arguments for increasing governmental control of our lives hinge on arguments of externalities, and very dubious hinges they are. In essence, we have gone well past killing people to defend the life, liberty and property of group members into killing people for liking things we don’t like.
“But, but!” I hear no one say because no one is still reading “I don’t want to kill people for not getting a COVID vaccine/saying black lives matter/buying a large soda/getting a sex change!”6 Or maybe you are openly saying exactly that… if so, I applaud your self awareness and consistency, even as I deplore your behavior. For most people, however, they are not saying we should kill people for doing things they don’t like but don’t actually harm them in any tangible way. Just, you know, punish them a little until they behave the way they should, for the benefit of everyone. Everyone else, that is, not the people being punished, but really it is in their own best interests anyway so really it is better for them and so it isn’t even as though they are being hurt. In fact, they should be glad we are making them do what is right for themselves. It is more than the irrational jerks deserve, so really we are helping them by making them stop being bad to other people. We aren’t hurting people, just getting rid of the monsters on the other side of the political arena.
And that, right there, is why politics is evil in and of itself: Politics allows us to wage War upon our neighbors while pretending that we are doing nothing uncivilized. It is the euphemism that we use to describe inflicting an evil upon ourselves without asking if it is necessary or even considering it evil. We not only have removed ourselves from the experience of law enforcement, we have removed ourselves from admitting that we are doing something with distasteful consequences at all. We prefer to pretend that we would never be so tyrannical as to kill someone for doing something we merely disapprove of, so we simply engage in politics and declare it the will of the people that some people get killed for doing something we disapprove of, and we never have to see that part anyway. Politics allows us the delusion that we are perfectly civilized, abhorring violence and those who use it to harm others, all the while demanding others do violence on those who do not conform to our will. Hell, we even go further and condemn those whom we demand enforce the laws we passed as violent murderers. Nothing says “clean hands” like defunding the police who enforce the laws you never call to repeal!
In a better world, we would be honest and say “These are the things I think we should kill people for doing, and these are the things I think we should kill people for not doing. We don’t have to jump right to killing them, but I think we should injure them in some way for violating these laws, and eventually kill them if they don’t stop.” We could debate and argue the details about the definitions of those things, and what the penalties up to and including death should be, but we would never pretend that we are not discussing the things we are willing to kill our friends, families, neighbors and countrymen for. In a better world, we would not lose sight of the fact that we are discussing when and how we are going to wage war on ourselves.
Robert E. Lee is quoted as saying “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.” Politics removes the terrible bits of war from those engaging in it, and we have subsequently become too fond of it.
TL;DR
Politics is evil, just like War is evil, because the object of politics is to force others to conform to our will. Sometimes politics is a necessary evil, just as War is. Politics is no less evil, and perhaps extra evil, as by its nature it hides what it is from those participating in it. Hitting others with a stick until they comply with our will or die is pretty infrequently a morally good thing to do, and it doesn’t get better because we ask someone else to swing the stick while we are in another room so we can’t hear the screams.
Follow-up Questions and Answers for Another Time!
These don’t really fit in the main essay, but are important questions that I should address later in more depth.
Q1: If it is sometimes good to kill, such as is implied by saying that sometimes war and politics in general are necessary evils, does that mean there is objective morality?
A: No.
Q2: How do we know when someone needs killing and it is the right thing to do?
A: We don’t all the time, but we can get pretty close.
Q3: Isn’t the point of democracy that the people get to choose what is good? Doesn’t that mean that by definition whatever legislation gets passed must not be evil, and that politics in a democracy isn’t evil?
A: Not unless you have a definition of good and evil that is very different from “Good things are those that help humanity flourish and evil things are those that harm humanity.” Unless a democracy (or any form of government) just happens to change laws at exactly the time those laws go from net good to net evil, there will always be a time where a democracy has laws that are net evil or does not have some that would be more good. I.e. democracy is fallible, and there is no prima facie reason to believe that any particular action must be good in and of itself. Which is good, because otherwise you would have to do things like justify why e.g. slavery was to the good for democracies that allowed and legislated it. Have fun with that!
Silly but not really argument for why politics is likely evil
Have you ever heard a single person say “Man, I love my new job! There is so much office politics, you wouldn’t even believe it. So great!” Neither have I. In fact, every single time I have ever heard anyone use the word “politics” in the sense of something they have to deal with within a group, it has been negative. Somewhere between “really annoying impediment” and “daily root canal with a sharp stick” negative. Something that, when it gets into our daily lives, at best we ignore and at worst we hate so badly that we leave an organization entirely is not likely to be good or even neutral in its moral quality.
The Penguin Books version of the 1908 translation by Col. J.J. Graham, ISBN 0-14-044427-0.
These may not be his exact words, as I might have miscopied or condensed what he said. However, I am sure it is extremely close, as I had long known the argument, but as something my grandfather said, so I was both familiar with the content and surprised at the source. My grandfather died before I was born, so I don’t know why I thought that was a saying of his; I certainly never heard him say it. Walter Williams wasn’t born in time to be my grandfather, so if it was something my grandfather said, he probably picked it up from Walter Williams instead of actually being Walter Williams, which would also be ok with me. In any case, I have a long and strange history with the argument.
I miss Dr. Williams.
The famous example here is Mancur Olson’s Stationary Bandit model, but any casual glance through history shows a lot of really awful heads of state and ruling systems defended by their people and a modest number of fairly benign foreign occupations never the less opposed by the natives. Machiavelli wasn’t wrong when he said that if you want to rule a place, being born there matters as much or more than actually being a good ruler. (That’s a big paraphrase of the first chapter or so of The Prince, by the way.)
Etymonline.com has enforcement come from Old French around the 15th century, meaning “constraint, compulsion”, being applied to legal aspects in the 1680’s. Police also comes from French, being used initially to mean what we use “policy” for today instead of the people who enforce that policy. Adam Smith uses police to mean policy; I always try to put a really bad movie French accent on police while reading to make it work in my mind. Funny how much of English’s government words come from French; thank the Normans, I guess.
If they are outside the group that counts as War, which is different enough from normal law enforcement as to be its own named subset of politics, the subset where “those people don’t really count as people like we do”, typically. War is violence against the outgroup, law enforcement is violence against the ingroup.
I recognize that these are mostly left issues, and that is not entirely by accident. I am pretty sure that the current political environment in the US can be summed up as the left wanting to make a lot of things either mandatory or forbidden, and the right trying to be left alone. Not true in exactly every case, but see Contra Hanania and Alexander on Partisanship for a more detailed argument about the modern left.