No Kings: A Quick Note on Equality

And why not everyone should have the right to vote

But why not?

“Equality under the law is inequality under the law of nature.” Lobaczewski wrote this in Political Ponerology. He expanded on the idea and its political implications in Logocracy, where, among other recommendations, he argued that citizens should have to pass a very basic test in order to gain the right to vote. In order to pass, they would have to demonstrate a basic level of competence in geography, political history, economics, psychology, and constitutional law, in effect automatically disqualifying around 10% of the population from voting in elections (not to mention those who wouldn’t bother trying).

Basically, Lobaczewski thought that acceptance of the reality of inequality was necessary for the proper functioning of the state and that this understanding should inform the laws of the state. While he was a believer in free speech, freedom of conscience, property rights, etc., he thought political participation—in the form of voting and running for political office—was not a universal right, but one that had to be earned. He was even convinced that the bar didn’t have to be that high—that even the slight disincentive of a test was enough to exclude a good proportion of low-information and psychologically abnormal citizens. This made up one prong of his proposed solution to one of the biggest problems of politics: elites and the process and criteria (or lack thereof) by which they are selected.

A king, for example, may be good or bad. Historically, bad ones could always be assassinated and replaced with someone better, but they could do a lot of damage in the meantime. Ordinary people have no problem with a good king, and I’m sure many in history have agreed with me that in principle, there’s nothing wrong with a good aristocracy, either. We have had both ever since our level of social organization reached a certain threshold of size and complexity. But some elites are better than others, and a bad batch of them is like a bad king, with the added disadvantage of being more difficult to replace.

The problem is selection. Even assuming some sort of half-way decent sorting process for the initial formation of a social elite, over the generations the quality of this class will degenerate. And when the aristocracy ceases to be a function of “the best,” and falls into the grip of the three egos (egotism, egoism, and egocentrism), everyone suffers, including, eventually, the bad aristocrats themselves. During these times, people sense there is a problem, something fundamentally wrong with the organization of their society. They may see a bad ruling class or king and give their support to a group of counter-elites to replace them. Or they may revolt against the very idea of a small group with many rights (and an equal number of responsibilities, which they neglect) and who misuse those rights to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of the common people (and the counter-elites who want what they have).

The commoners and the counter-elites come to see this as unfair or otherwise reprehensible. Some conclude that one man or one small group should not have more value or rights, that the process by which they acquired that position is vague and incomprehensible, and that more people should have a say who leads them. Rights and power should be distributed more equally. From a small pool of voters, the franchise extended in the U.S., for example, first to more men, then to women, then to younger adults. Now everyone over a certain age (with certain exceptions like felons and a tiny few declared mentally incompetent) can vote.

One such political overreaction has been that because a small group (or a single man) misused their power, small groups or individual men should be barred from holding that power. But this is a profound misreading of reality, and has resulted in the pendulum of rights swinging too far in the direction of equality.

The issue is not that no one should (or does, in fact) have more value or rights than another. Some people do have more value, and should have more rights (in proportion to their duties and their capacity to discharge them). Such people form the class of natural aristocrats. The problem is when the wrong type of people acquire such rights, as in the mutant son of a line of decent kings, or a genetic aristocracy that has lost its excellence over time.

And the issue is not that no one is prepared to wield even near-absolute power and its attendant responsibilities. It’s that we abhor the experience of an evil or weak person from holding such a position. The experience of tyranny has been enough to put some societies off the idea entirely, but to their own detriment.

So new systems are formed, systems which bar one man from ever holding such power (we install “checks and balances” to limit such things), and which ostensibly give people (everyone) the right to remove elites regularly at the ballot box and put others in their place. These arguably have the benefit of preemptively hamstringing many potential tyrants, and circulating many nonentities out of office. But they have the disadvantage of neutering any potential natural leaders from actually ruling and limiting their period of influence to a mere handful of years.

Some may argue that such caution is the better of two evils. And perhaps it is, until we can decide on how to properly select elites and ensure they have access to the rights and responsibilities proportional to their worth and ability. No one would complain if their leaders were decent and competent. However, until we gain such a skill, we are doomed so suffer other forms of evil: mediocrity and the influence of those unscrupulous manipulators who know how to game the system, carving out niches of corruption and self-gain while masking themselves in a disguise of values and democracy.

In fact, universalizing the franchise has the entirely predictable effect of opening it up to the entire class of “potential bad kings.” Whereas previously the closed ranks of the elites at least had the benefit of blocking a large proportion of stupid and evil people from participation in politics, now the way is wide open.

Lobaczewski identified the root problem of this cycle as political psychopathy. One psychopathic king, or an increasingly psychopathic ruling class, triggers a reaction to eliminate the possibility that such a thing will happen again. But while the new systems designed to prevent such pathocracies may succeed for a time, they eventually become dominated by the exact same type of individual.

Western democracies in particular are particularly susceptible to this. The incentive structure for politicians is perverse, rewarding shameless lying, endless grift, and gross incompetence. Not only is the resulting political class subpar; it is easily manipulated by all manner of private interest groups and foreign lobbies.

Revolution and political reform have often been a blind reaction to the psychopathy of elites. When they succeed in staving them off for a period of time, they still open themselves up to future “infection” of the same disease. And when they don’t succeed, the revolution itself brings about an even more concentrated form of the problem, as in the case of the French and Russian Revolutions.

Lobaczewski thought it was time for a new political form designed specifically to prevent the root of the problem. Maybe he was right.