It is always dangerous to quote someone since one is likely to get labeled with the same calumnies that are heaped upon the principal author.  This is even more the case when one quotes G. K. Chesterton, a writer whose incisive views and powerful reasoning always cause distress (or rapturous joy) in the reader. Chesterton, it might be argued, was the last great writer to both ascertain and articulate the truth about the modern world.  He did this as plainly as he could, but the truth is not always so plain or readily explicable.  Thus, Chesterton became known as the master of the paradox for which he is most loved and reviled…paradoxically!

Today, I will quote at length from Chesterton’s essay, The Servile State Again.  Considering the recent revelations about our ever-growing spy-State, I think his warnings about a “gradually solidifying slavery” to be most current and apropos.

Because he is so often MISunderstood, I simply ask that my dear readers keep an open mind and meditate on his reasoning since the evidence of today seems to vindicate his views.

While I will make a few editorial comments within the essay, I will try to keep those interruptions to a minimum.  My additions will be in RED, but let me make one prefatory remark so as not to destroy the continuity of the great first sentence of the quote below.  It would be too great a diversion to try and define exactly what Chesterton means by “Capitalism”.  And, in this land that considers itself fiercely capitalistic, it may be off-putting that he is condemning it.  Suffice it to say that he is not opposed to free enterprise. In fact, Chesterton would say that the “capitalist” is.  Rather, he sees a similar danger in the aggregation of wealth as in the aggregation of state power.  If you understand that notion, then you understand Chesterton’s “capitalist”.

Finally, I will sum up a practical response to Chesterton’s conclusion at the end of this blog entry.  Now for a little G. K. Chesterton:

But Prussia is Capitalism; that is, a gradually solidifying slavery; and that majestic unity with which she moves, dragging all the dumb Germanies after her, is due to the fact that her Servile State is complete, while ours is incomplete. There are not mutinies; there are not even mockeries; the voice of national self-criticism has been extinguished forever. [Now if one makes a “national self-criticism”, he has to flee his homeland.] For this people is already permanently cloven into a higher and a lower class: in its industry as much as its army. Its employers are, in the strictest and most sinister sense, captains of industry. Its proletariat is, in the truest and most pitiable sense, an army of labour. In that atmosphere masters bear upon them the signs that they are more than men; and to insult an officer is death.

If anyone ask how this extreme and unmistakable subordination of the employed to the employers is brought about, we all know the answer. It is brought about by hunger and hardness of heart, accelerated by a certain kind of legislation [see my last blog here], of which we have had a good deal lately in England, but which was almost invariably borrowed from Prussia. [We have had a good deal here, too.  Think of Social Security and our other retirement plans.] Mr. Herbert Samuel’s suggestion that the poor should be able to put their money in little boxes and not be able to get it out again  is a sort of standing symbol of all the rest[IRA? 401(k)?] . I have forgotten how the poor were going to benefit eventually by what is for them indistinguishable from dropping sixpence down a drain. Perhaps they were going to get it back some day; perhaps when they could produce a hundred coupons out of the Daily Citizen; perhaps when they got their hair cut; perhaps when they consented to be inoculated, or trepanned, or circumcised, or something. Germany is full of this sort of legislation; and if you asked an innocent German, who honestly believed in it, what it was, he would answer that it was for the protection of workmen. 

And if you asked again “Their protection from what?” you would have the whole plan and problem of the Servile State plain in front of you. Whatever notion there is, there is no notion whatever of protecting the employed person from his employer. Much less is there any idea of his ever being anywhere except under an employer. Whatever the Capitalist wants he gets. He may have the sense to want washed and well-fed labourers rather than dirty and feeble ones, and the restrictions may happen to exist in the form of laws from the Kaiser [government] or by-laws from the Krupps [corporations]. But the Kaiser will not offend the Krupps, and the Krupps will not offend the Kaiser. Laws of this kind, then, do not attempt to protect workmen against the injustice of the Capitalist as the English Trade Unions did. They do not attempt to protect workmen against the injustice of the State as the mediaeval guilds did. Obviously they cannot protect workmen against the foreign invader–especially when (as in the comic case of Belgium) they are imposed by the foreign invader. What then are such laws designed to protect workmen against? Tigers, rattlesnakes, hyenas? 

Oh, my young friends; oh, my Christian brethren, they are designed to protect this poor person from something which to those of established rank is more horrid than many hyenas. They are designed, my friends, to protect a man from himself–from something that the masters of the earth fear more than famine or war, and which Prussia especially fears as everything fears that which would certainly be its end. They are meant to protect a man against himself–that is, they are meant to protect a man against his manhood. [End of quote].

 Now “them there is fightin’ words!”  Is he saying that the modern man has lost his manhood?  That he is a coward?  Perhaps.  But he is most assuredly saying that the modern man has been duped into trading his freedom, his faith, his community and individuality for a paternalistic and enslaving collective that falsely promises a security and prosperity for all.

So what do we do about these encroachments on our liberty and the sacrifice of our self-reliance?  To keep this a financial commentary rather than a general social one, I will limit my answers to some specific, achievable individual assertions of manhood.

• If you are rightfully indignant about the unjust searches and spying by our federal government, then throw away your cell phone.  Seriously!  Save yourself $40, $50 a hundred bucks a month and be free from spying.
• If you sense the injustice of a government that seizes an entire segment of our economy (Obama-(non)care) with the full complicity of the insurance bureaucrats, then drop out of health insurance and look into alternatives (here are two: 1 and 2) or go with nothing…we’re all going to die at some point, right? Here you might save $500 to $1,000 per month, will stop supporting a broken and enslaving system and will assert your self-reliance big time.
• Finally, if Google, Twitter, Facebook and the host of Internet Service Providers are going to destroy your privacy, then cancel your internet service.  Yes, you will lose access to my wise words…what a loss?!?….but with the saved time and money you could get involved with your family, community and church and build a truly free economy and society.

If these ideas cause you fear (admittedly, they do me), then you are beginning to sense the great loss that Chesterton warned us about, the loss of our manhood.   Why do we feel it absolutely necessary to our existence to have a phone, an insurance policy or a computer monitor (that’s an interesting word, “monitor”)?  And the fact that we do feel this way points indeed to two great truths:

1. The loss of our manhood; and
2. The loss of faith in God.

Perhaps a few sheer acts of defiance of the dominant propaganda will help melt this “gradually solidifying slavery”!