Scott is a professor at Yale, not your typical anarchist breeding ground. Studying marginalized primitive societies living between modern nation states, he realized how much of society evolves between the cracks of formal government. Studying revolutionary history, he came to the conclusion that in every historical revolution it was the State that had always ended up eventually expanding in either scope or scale politically, usually both. “The more highly planned, regulated, and formal a social or economic order is, the more likely it is to be parasitic on informal processes that the formal scheme does not recognize and without which it could not continue to exist.” The State becomes an appropriator, an arbiter, not an innovator. Channeling Hobbes, he suggests, “Leviathan may have given birth to its own justification.”
How is the individual to fight back? Scott initially suggests small scale, barely noticeable, jabs at the regime. Living in a just-unified Germany in 1989, he suggested its citizens drive five miles over the speed limit, jaywalk at a crosswalk at midnight, because, “one day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality…. You have to be ready.” More seriously, in Albert Hirschman’s words exit is often better (or at least less risky) than voice for the small fry. “Desertion is a lower-risk alternative to mutiny, squatting a lower-risk alternative to a land invasion, poaching a lower-risk alternative to open assertion of rights to timber, game, or fish.” Over time “this ‘ceded space of disobedience’ is, as it were, seized and becomes occupied territory.”
Another zone of conflict is between standardization vs. the vernacular. From city planning to forestry growth, top down planning has nudged its way past local understanding. “The fatal assumption [is that in] any such activity there is only one thing going on, and the objective of planning is to maximize the efficiency of its delivery.” Another mistake is equating visual order with functional order. Central planning assumes too much- too much of the knowledge that is diffused, tacit, generational, and implied. Setting up “best practices”, “harmonization”, and international standards removes the core of local knowledge and particular circumstance- the imbedded proclivities and limitations of that situation. One of the biggest errors of progress is the standardization of the human being. Whether through the factory system, the collective farm, or the public school we seek to create the basic components for the replaceable man. On the other hand, “small property has the means to elude the state’s control: small property is hard to monitor, tax, or police; it resists regulation and enforcement by the very complexity, variety, and mobility of its activities.” That is one reason the enemy of modern States have been migrant laborers, nomads, itinerant salesmen, pastoralists, and gypsies. In fact, the individual has often fought and given up income and wealth for his freedom and autonomy- the small stakeholder who resists becoming a tenant farmer or factory hand at any price.
However, the tide is against the holdout. The State is winning. As Robin Hanson has documented, “workers in rich nations today accept far more explicit dominance and ranking at work than most foragers and farmers would have accepted.” Today it is easier for the State to kill the autonomous individual to create a cog in their machine- all for his own good, of course, just as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, “killed the Indian to save the man”- all in the interest of progress. The technocrat’s dream has no place for the value of choice for choice’s own sake or for the dignity of uniqueness. To use Sartre’s words, it is a world devoid of contingency: where costs and benefits are objectively preordained, everything of worth has a monetary price, and value systems are ascertained from above, instead of by the subjective human preferences revealed through action.
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