An abridged version of this piece has been submitted to be published in issue 9 of Man’s World
“Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains”
- Rousseau
If you are reading this – you’re trapped. You’ve been circumscribed in all meaningful spheres of your life. Your ability to provide for yourself, your friends, and family has been cut-off. You don’t have any of the skills necessary to be independent.
You work a corporate job, tethered to a laptop that’s secretly webcam surveilled and keystroked monitored, or in some open office panopticon - all to maintain mandated health insurance and rent that’s too expensive to pay for outside of a wage-enslaved existence. Or, you work for yourself and have to beg pencil-pushing bureaucrats and inspectors not to shut your business down, constantly looking over your shoulders for auditors. You are completely dependent on the fickle handouts and charity of government bodies and faceless corporations in this Kafkaesque abyss.
Behemoth entities dump Atrazine, Glyphosate, and PUFAs in your food, PFC’s and Fluoride in your water, Bisphenol A, Parabens, and Phthalates in everything you touch, and Mercury and Aluminum directly into your blood. And you are powerless to break out of this.
In all essential ways, your life is critically lacking the volition, vitality, and vigor necessary to achieve any semblance of human flourishing. You are a single pathetic blip in a mass that has been proletarianized, domesticated, and emasculated.
This piece is not a screeching invective about lack of hUmAN riGhTs or the death of dEMocRacy or the cuealty of cLaSs wARfArE – this is about the concrete fact that you are completely out of power in the affairs that dictate your day-to-day.
Your thralldom is rooted in an ethos in society of dependence. People and institutions above and beyond you smother and infantilize you – and you have been brainwashed to believe it is all for the best.
In many ways you are less free than any slave or serf in times past. Slaves and serfs could revolt and upturn - or at the very least they could run away and escape. But you are too broken and addicted to domestication to revolt; and more, look around – you have nowhere to escape to.
This is not a black-pill, it is a chance to educate yourself. If you have any chance to improve your situation, you need to understand the history of how this current state of affairs came about – the history of how institutional forces came to lord over you – and how you and other fellow sheep that make up the masses grew to welcome this all with open arms.
Emancipating Slaves/Enslaving Free Men
Perhaps the history of mass entrapment can be traced earlier to the Poor Laws, or the Enclosure Movement, or the sabotaging of the Articles of Confederation by the Federalists – but the most pertinent place to pinpoint its start is the American Civil War.
The Civil War was not about what you were taught in school. While the planter class in the South had forced secession to protect slavery, the North, to paraphrase Jefferey Hummel, was seeking to cement empire.
In the 19th century, the North had industrialized heavily, and the region had seen rapid growth of big government and big industry both lording hordes of mass laborers using tactics to control and proletarianize them. It was a rebuke of the ideas of self-determination, self-reliance and individual volition and the Civil War was in many ways a conflict over steering the country further down this path. Would this country be one focused around decentralized power and localism – or would it be a collusive nest between large industry and large government? It is telling that the Civil War era marks the time when the phrase nation was first applied to the US, along with calling it the United States (singular) rather than these United States (plural).
The northern Republicans inherited a tradition from the Whigs and earlier Federalists that spurred on the growth of leviathan government to whom the individual was meant to supplicant themselves before. And the Union win ushered in a new manner of governing the masses. As Bensel states in Yankee Leviathan, the modern American state “emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War.”
The war and its aftermath saw many firsts in the growth of big government:
First centrally administered military draft
First federal income tax
First national support for education (The Morrill Act & founding of the Department of Education)
First mandate of passports to enter or exit the country
The first major federal welfare and relief agencies (Freedman’s Bureau and Veteran’s Pension)
The founding of the Department of Justice
The founding of the National Guard
The founding of the National Banking System
This new behemoth state naturally grew in tandem with large industrial interests. The coziness and collusion between big government and big business had reached a new zenith during the Civil War – the most notable example being the ties and growth of the railroads.
Railroads had risen to prominence, becoming America’s first billion-dollar industry in the 1850’s. Already heavy users of government subsidies in the North, they became even more entrenched during the Civil War soaking up direct subsidies, lucrative contracts, and over 170 million acres of federal land grants in the West (larger than the land given away to homesteaders). It is no coincidence that Lincoln himself was a former corporate attorney for railroad interests before entering politics. The ability for large capital interests to intertwine themselves with the state for their own gain (at the expense of the public) first took root at this time.
This laid a framework for what would come to be utilized again and again, where small cadres could use focused resources to bend government representatives and agents to their whims – extracting a mulct from the public at large. Because the costs are dispersed, each small instance of the extraction typically goes unnoticed but as they accumulate you grow to have a population of sheep being regularly sheared of the fruits of their labor. The great Robber Barons: Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller all got their starts in government contracting, lobbying, and politicking during the Civil War. The only issue being that bending society to your whims would require even more heavy-handed reforms in American society.
The birth of the Megacorp
Towards the end of 19th Century, the U.S. saw the birth of the business reform movement. This movement provided a path for the large business interest and their counterparts in the government to amass more power and control. This was also the birth of the first combinations or trusts – large agglutinations of numerous businesses into a monolithic entity – these were the prototypes of the mega-corporation conglomerates of today.
Immediately following the civil war were numerous court cases that added to the scaling of institutions at the expense of the individual. Slaughterhouse of 1873 allowed state-chartered monopolies to under-compete independent businesses. Granger of 1877 allowed states to regulate railroads and other common carriers. Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad of 1886 – imbued corporations with constitutional rights.
As Gabriel Kolko points out – the massive push for regulation of the railroad, banking, meatpacking, steel, telecom, and oil industries in the 1890’s-1910’s was really a way for large conglomerates to root out competition. Regulation is a boon to big business in three primary ways:
It raises barriers to entry to smaller competition, who have to jump through (often arbitrary) hurdles and receive limited licenses in order to conduct business all the while often having more limited resources to do so.
It centralizes points of influence and gatekeeping in the regulatory body that can be brought under control through bribes or regulatory capture – easier to bribe one federal bureaucrat than thousands of local mayors or city councils – and the spoils go to the highest bidder.
It provides a subsidy to large corporate interests by screening and verifying their goods and services and manufacturing good-will at the expense of the taxpayer - something that would have to be grown organically and funded out of business’ own pockets otherwise. (You wonder why Zuckerberg and others in big tech now go before congress and beg to be regulated.) It is a disguised form of corporate welfare.
In the late 19th to early 20th century large business interests demanded more regulation. Rockefeller himself called for national incorporation laws and federal regulation around financial filings that would help put a boot down on upstarting competition. Founder of US Steel, Judge Elbert H. Gary put it succinctly:
“I would be very glad if we knew exactly where we stand, if we could be freed from danger, trouble, and criticism by the public, and if we had some place where we could go, to a responsible governmental authority, and say to them, ‘Here are our facts and figures…. now you tell us what we have the right to do and what prices we have the right to charge.”
As Kolko notes, prior to this push for business reform from the proto mega-corporations, the trusts, the trend in American business in the 19th century was towards more decentralization and localism of business affairs – only by using the might of expansive government could this trend be reversed. The market value of US Steel in 1901 was $1.4bn, this was 1,000 times larger than the value of the largest manufacturing enterprise in the 1870’s.
The Progressive reformers (more about whom later) were happy to be oblige these sentiments and work hand-in-hand with these industrialists. Theodore Roosevelt, “the great trust buster,” made J.P. Morgan Partner Elihu Root his Secretary of State, and J.P. Morgan’s top aide, George Perkins, was the chairman of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party.
The Worker Bee
This growth of big business also meant the growth of the wage-earning employee. This was a revolution overturning the American tradition of Jeffersonian self-reliance. Prior to this the republican tradition America held a deep-rooted disdain for employment and believed it slavish. As Thomas Leonard put it: Americans “regarded the wage earner as servile, dependent, and without autonomy. A man dependent on another man for his living was no better than women, children, domestics, sharecroppers, and other inferiors.” The wage-earner’s poverty was a shameful reflection of “lack of gumption, and instinctive servility.”
Despite these strong adverse instincts, with businesses became more concentrated, federal aid undercutting upstart competition, and a national banking system tying credit to urban centers, opportunities for entrepreneurs and yeoman farmers became fewer and more of the American population found themselves corralled into what they once derided as wage slavery. The decades following the Civil War saw 11 million people, over 10% of the population, migrate from rural to urban living, and by 1920 the majority of Americans lived in towns or cities.
The 1880’s and 90’s also saw the birth of Taylorism in the factory system, which led to the systematization and general deskilling of labor. Thinking was to be left for management; most people were simply to be cogs in the machine. The manager class did not want independent artisans, farmers, or entrepreneurs. Variation was inefficient for production at scale. Instead, craftsmanship was atomized, people commoditized, and production automatized. The Results spoke for themselves: a spineless population that would labor tirelessly to produce – and then ultimately consume mindlessly.
As John D. Rockefeller put it the scaling corporate system created “modern economic administration.” The day of the combination, or large mega-corporation, was here to stay, Rockefeller proclaimed, and “individualism has gone never to return.”
This was the time of squashing of the free man into a worker-ant. It is no coincidence that in the first few decades of the 20th Century the term “Human Resources” was to become popularized by the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) a curious organization on whose board sat such Progressive firebrands as Jane Addams, Paul Kellogg, Louis Brandeis, Woodrow Wilson, and Felix Frankfurter. To understand further how we went from rugged self-reliance to human resources, we must first understand who these social influencers were and what they stood for.
The Hive
In the 1880’s, out of the stock of old 17th Century Massachusetts Bay families came the economic, political, and social reformers called the Progressives. Now used as a catchall term to define the politics of the left – progressivism at its inception was a movement for the political rationalization of business and the bureaucratic administration and scientific-management of the country to help it achieve higher moral and ethical standards. Many of its earliest members were the children of Protestant ministers, or ministers themselves, and they brought the same proselytizing spirit to their intent for social reform.
The high moral goals of the progressives would require immense re-shifting of resources and power in society into highly centralized bodies – these were the spiritual inheritors of the Federalist-Whig-Republican tradition. For this reason, the Progressives and their piety provided the perfect fig leaf for the aims of those political entrepreneurs who hoped to game big government for their own benefit.
One of the first areas progressives targeted was business and labor but even these bleeding-heart champions of the people looked down their nose at the wage-earner. Leaders of the Fabian Society (the founders of the Labour Party in the UK and London School of Economics), Sidney and Beatrice Webb, referred to the working classes as the “industrial residuum.” However, these unwashed masses needed to be dealt with to fit society to their loftier ideals and progressives quickly looked to use Taylorism, labor specialization, and gatekeeping credentialism to further corral man in.
Under progressive reform labor became increasingly specialized to fit into the webs of mass-commercialization – the net effect being that individuals became more narrowly focused and less self-sufficient. In many ways this was by design – John Dewey, the progressive’s intellectual and philosophical North Star saw individual competence and self-reliance as an evil and sought to build a world where every individual was wholly reliant on everyone else. This mantra of interdependence was seen as the path to world peace. The teleological end-state of this project were masses of weak and submissive people – too fragile, infantilized, and incomplete to be able to break out on their own.
Gate-keeping and specialization are two sides of the same coin. Without a level of exclusivity – you cannot keep unwanted people out of vital areas of knowledge and practice. And with both working together you could ensure who would succeed (or even survive) and who wouldn’t in society. In 1865 the first state bar associations came into effect. The law and legal practice were now to be a sequestered region for experts. Similarly, the newly assurgent American Medical Association, with the backing of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other corporate interests lobbied to put in state certified boards, limit the number of medical schools, and narrow allowable practice to allopathy. Though few could see it then, this seeded the ground for the system of medical tyranny we have today.
Outside of medicine and law, many other tracts became narrowly and exclusively professionalized. Economics, political science, and sociology for centuries were the interests of erudite but independent gentlemen, and now became academic professions and disciplines. These fields in academics had been all but nonexistent before 1870 and in 1890 college courses in Latin outnumbered courses in political economy by ten-to-one; but by 1912 only English had more undergraduate majors than economics at schools like Yale.
The growth of these fields buffeted progressives who sought out ways to rationally and deterministically structure society. The manner in which to do it was to create a mass bureaucracy to shape society and to place their new officially credentialed technocratic elite at its helm.
These academic studies hid behind a false aegis of scientism and attempted whenever possible to claim objective and mathematical validity – indeed this age spawned the fetishization of statistical means and methods. But in order to have their mass-social theories be applicable and effective they had to shape man into a mass, a body that followed narrow statistical rules. The idiosyncratic nature of a people rooted in individual guidance just wouldn’t do; the people had to be made hive-minded.
Educating/Taming the Herd
To effect this change there was the creation of compulsory, centrally-planned-and-controlled education. This system was set in place to condition humans to conform to the whims of managers of society. It would dangle as a reward special privileges: degrees, exclusive licensing, and bolstered salaries in exchange for men dedicating the most virile and energized years of their lives doing performative shows of supplication and generally not rocking the boat.
Forced schooling from its very beginning was a means of social control. This is a topic I have written at length about before but will go over in brief here. The American public school system was styled after the Prussian education system (indeed many progressive reformers went to Prussia themselves to study). Johann Fichte, the architect of the Prussian system spelled out exclusively what he envisioned as its main goals:
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished … When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
Compulsory schooling was first put in place in Massachusetts in 1852 but only reached all US states in 1918 after concentrated pressure from focused interest. The ultimate flavoring of US education was little different from its Prussian prototype – as William Torrey Harris, US commissioner of Education from 1889-1906 put it:
“Ninety-nine out of a hundred people in every civilized nation are automata, careful to walk in the prescribed paths, careful to follow prescribed custom. This is the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual under his species.”
Or as Woodrow Wilson stated in a speech titled The Meaning of Education the intention of schooling was to get a large swath of the population to “fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks… we are trying to make skillful servants of society along mechanical lines.”
The spread of mandatory schooling was backed by the interest of industrialists and their do-gooder lapdogs. Rockefeller dedicated an unprecedented $100mn dollars in 1902 to establish the General Education Board. Our large system of teachers and university pensions was put in place by the Carnegie Foundation, which promised fund to colleges if they would require high school education for entry.
The progressive acolyte and father of academic sociology E.A. Ross in his bluntly titled book Social Control remarked that the goal of schooling was “To collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading-board.”
This age also saw the birth of mass media. The timing could not have been more perfect as these reformers and social shapers had an obsession with bending the populace to their whims but required a conduit to change minds en masse. Industrial interests like the Rockefellers helped bolster the likes of Edward Bernays the father of propaganda, and Ivy Lee the creator of the craft of Public Relations, not to mention the workings of Ivan Pavlov (the dog-bell ringer), and Frederick Osborn the director of the American Eugenics Society who was looking to breed more pliant, malleable, and docile human beings.
The idea was to create a reflexively obedient and unquestioning population – one that would resolutely and simply follow commands passed down from on high. I challenge you to look around, witness the mindless flip-flopping of opinion on needless wars, on the health-industrial complex, on the definitions of recession or inflation and ponder to what extent they were successful in this endeavor.
Crisis & Leviathan:
The progressive ideal was the strict ordering of society, taking it away from demagogues and the rabble and placing it in the hands of technocratic experts under a schema of expansive bureaucratic administration. While progressive reformers held the puppet strings to presidents like Theodore Roosevelt and Taft – they finally got a dyed-in-the-wool ideologue in the election of Woodrow Wilson to the White House. Wilson was an academic whose passion was social engineering – indeed he is referred to as the father of public administration.
And under his guide and using the crisis of WWI, Wilson was able to shift the ideals of an expansive state from pet project to actuality. During The Great War, Wilson eradicated any semblance of laissez faire, turning the US into a command economy under the direct authority of the War Industries Board (WIB). Schedules were set for approved meals and diets, all shipping was nationalized, and there was full censorship of postage and the press. But even prior to the war, expansive social reforms were put in place: minimum wage laws were enacted in many states along with the nationwide prohibition of alcohol.
The direct control over the economy by the government in crisis would further habituate large business to cozying up to government, and leave a lasting impression on the US citizenry, making them more passive and submissive in accepting these actions. Historian Robert Higgs notes that Bernard Baruch, the head of the WIB and de facto dictator of the U.S. Economy under Wilson, was eager to gloat that his work “had effected a revolution in the public’s attitude toward government.”
The sine qua non of any expansive state is a means to fund itself. One of the largest lasting legacies of the Wilson era was the establishment of the federal income tax. The tumor of bureaucratic government had found a vital artery to source sustenance from the American citizen, and the means for an entrenched deep state to grow on had been established. The population was to be milked like cattle to fund the goals of these ideologues and control freaks. In 1880 the US government raised 90% of its tax revenue form custom duties and excise taxes, by 1930 60% came from income taxation.
In what is likely his most important achievement, Wilson also oversaw the founding of the Federal Reserve System – an official cartelization of the nation’s banking and currency. Mayer Amschel Rothschild once stated, “Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws.” Now a few select banking institutions were able to direct the entire country by controlling its financial lifeblood. In many ways this made permanent corporate gamesmanship to control the economy and the country.
A Revolution in the Forum
When Frederic Delano Roosevelt took the helm of American government 12 years after Wilson, America was in the throes of another national emergency, but this time it was an economic one. And like his progressive predecessor, he was sure to not let the crisis go to waste. He quickly moved to again take the reins of the economy under the NIRA (modeled after the WIB), cartelizing all major industries and putting at the helms of management dollar-a-year men. He aimed to drive crop and commodity prices higher through the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. Private holdings of gold were made illegal, and private securities markets were now heavily regulated. As John Maynard Keynes, Fabian Socialist and an architect of the New Deal, noted they were seeking the “socialization of investment;” your money was only to be utilized so long as it led to positive social aims.
With the outbreak of WWII FDR went full-tilt and was granted dictatorial emergency powers under the First War Powers Act. He enacted probing censorship regimes and enacted price controls and schedules for goods, wages, hours, rents and even profits.
The war also saw the perfection by the government of the art of the indirect sanction: imposing a penalty on actions explicitly banned or implicitly not favored by the powers that be. Someone who caused trouble may never even see a day in court. They may simply have their livelihoods in the form of government contracts or benefits programs taken away. A small business owner who violated a regulation of the Office of Price Administration may not face a judge and jury but instead would have his allocations of resources and raw materials blocked by the War Production Board (WPB). FDR’s WPB relied so heavily on indirect sanctions to gain compliance that when congress considered banning the practice the board protested that such restrictions “would destroy our control completely. We might as well close up the Compliance Division.”
Because he was the latest in a long line of reformers, FDR’s effects on American society are seen as perhaps the longest lasting and most influential. Remarking on the FDR years constitutional scholar Edward S Corwin observed: “The change which the views of a dominant section of the American people regarding the purpose of government underwent during this period was nothing short of revolutionary, and it was accompanied in due course by a corresponding change of attitude toward constitutional values."
FDR created a plethora of alphabet agencies under the executive branch that set in motion the growth of the behemoth deep state of today. He further extended the extractive tax apparatus of the IRS – before the war fewer than 15 million individuals filed an income tax return, by 1945 about 50 million (over half the adult population) did. And a list of SCOTUS rulings from a court of his appointees effectively ceded indefinite scope of powers to Congressional legislation.
Government was now seen as market and economic regulator, responsible for spurring growth and maintaining price levels. Corporations are expected to chip in and act in tandem to do their part. Perhaps more than anything else FDR habituated the belief that big government and big industry must do something in response to every action taking place in the modern world. The individual was to only be a passive play thing. If any crisis came about or any change needed to be enacted, individuals should sit idly by and let the powers-that-be take action or instruct them in how to behave.
FDR’s presidency has been regarded as a revolution in the forum for America – it represented the apotheosis of 8 decades of social transformation that slowly worked to whittle the pioneering American into a domesticated serf. Much of what has happened since 1945, from Johnson’s Great Society to Citizens United is only a further snowballing of what was laid down during that time. I do not have the space here to go through the next 80 years but suffice it to say that a Pandora’s box had been opened between the Civil War and WWII – one that few, if any, see hope in closing.
Then & Now
A sword of Damocles now hangs over your head. You and everyone else are ensnared in such a nebulous web of self-contradictory regulation and taxation that you can be prosecuted and thrown in prison if any law enforcement official simply spent enough time and effort to take a look through your affairs. And even if found innocent, you still go through the hectoring and costly scrutiny of courts and lawyers: the process is the punishment. So you make sure never to rock the boat.
Further, whether through government handout programs or corporate welfarism, you likely even gain in some small way suckling at the teat of this leviathan. You are afraid of change or speaking up because it might turn off the faucet of your paltry benefits, even as it demands a more straight-jacketed and HR-ified life. You have become complicit in your own imprisonment.
Since a young age you have prided yourself on your liberty and freedom – despite being part of a citizenry more in bondage than any before them on Earth. You cannot speak or write what you want, and any private property you “own” can be seized if it does not go towards approved social goals.
You live on a knife’s edge – where the whims of bureaucrats hundreds if not thousands of miles away can take your job, shelter, or family from you. They can poison your air, food, and water – and what recourse do you really have?
The most disgusting aspect of it all is that everyone relishes in it. Americans have fully embraced the Nanny State and Nanny Corporations. They are trapped within a milieu you are fully blind to. The actions of large institutions are now believed to be the only options to solve any issues in the world. We cheer when our personal views are echoed from a corporate brand or when laws are put in place to punish those we disagree with. The state and the corporation are how we talk to each other. In the pivotal eight decades between the Civil War and WWII – the ideas that voluntary bonds, social institutions such as family and church, or the individual could help themselves have been destroyed.
The decisive moments of life are completely out of one’s hands – man has been made craven and pathetic. Our world is now the breeding ground for the weak and the cowardly. This is the age of the last man – and ressentiment has become the law of the land.
This piece is not a pessimistic black-pill. I will follow this with another essay on what is to be done. The above is meant to educate you etiologically on your condition – again if you are reading this you are trapped, but at least you know how you got here.