It may not yet be politically correct to say what is about to be said here, since the long tradition of respectability politics makes it easy for the perpetrators to hide behind a façade of reasonable discourse. A well-curated program of propaganda makes what is occurring appear not as wrong, but instead gives it a superficial disguise of being right, making it easy to resort to outrage in defense of the status quo. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
As a long and violent abuse of power is generally the means of calling the right of it in question, (and in matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the sufferers been pushed to the question), and as the president undertakes in his own right, to support himself and the wealthy oligarch class in what they call theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, the people have the right to throw off the pretensions of both government and the billionaire class, and equally to reject the usurpation of either.
In what follows, the Author has studiously avoided everything which is personal among ourselves. There is no partisanship contained in these words. The uncorrupted will recognize the truth of these arguments and do not need to be shown they were wrong through partisan score-keeping. The corrupted and compromised will either be convinced to drop their pretensions or they will be left behind by public opinion, but at this point there is little use in wasting time and effort in converting the unconvertable.
The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of the world. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all humanitarians are affected, and in the event of which their affections are interested. The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against our natural rights, and eradicating the defenders of our rights from the face of the earth, is the concern of every human to whom nature has given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party condemnation, is
The Author.
COMMON SENSE.
ON THE ORIGIN AND DESIGN OF GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL, WITH CONCISE REMARKS ON THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION.
Some commentators have so confused society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; but they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government that we might expect in a country without government, our misfortune is heightened by reflecting that we, through our taxes and our tacit recognition, fund and uphold the means by which we suffer. Government, like clothing, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the gardens of paradise. If humankind were perfect angels, then humanity would need no other law-giver; but since this is not the case, humanity finds it necessary to surrender up a part of its property and its untrammeled freedom to fund and uphold a government for the protection of society; and this humanity is induced to do by the same prudence which elsewhere advises it to choose the lesser of two evils. The government that gives society the greatest security with the minimal cost to the benefits of society, is preferable to all others.
In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and goal of government, let us suppose a small number of individuals settled in some far away part of the earth, unconnected with the rest. They will then represent the first populating of any country, or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A thousand motives will excite them to building a society. The strength of one person is so unequal to their wants, and their social mind preferring the company of others, that a person is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who also requires the assistance and company of others. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness, where one person would be unable to accomplish what multiple people working toward a common goal can. No individual knows how to build and maintain their every need and desire. No single person can excavate the land, cut down the trees, process the lumber, build the edifice of a house, install all the plumbing and electricity, all while securing their own food and water, protecting themselves from disease and infection and the weather and against any other misfortune.
Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form these individuals into society, which would require no government if all possessed a conscience aimed toward, and capable of attaining, perfect morality. Yet humanity is imperfect, and in the face of difficulty will succumb to selfishness and shortsightedness, therefore necessitating a government to reduce the damage individuals can afflict on one another because of their deficient empathy.
Some convenient tree could afford this hypothetical tribe a state house, under the branches of which the whole society may assemble to deliberate on public matters. It is possible that their first laws will have the title only of custom and tradition, enforced by no other penalty than public shaming. In this first congress, every mature person will have a seat.
But as the size of the tribe increases, the public concerns will also increase, yet as more people become members of the society the distance between them also increases. This will make it too inconvenient for all of them to meet on every occasion as they had when their number was small, their houses near, and the public concerns much easier to enforce through interpersonal relations. It becomes clear, then, that not everyone has the time and inclination to take part in the legislative process. They will then leave only representatives, who have similar wants and needs as they people they represent, to argue in the favor of their constituents.
If the society continues increasing in size, it will become necessary to expand the number of representatives, and that the interest of every part of the society may be attended to, it will be found best to divide the whole into convenient parts, each part sending its proper number: and that the representatives work for the interests of the people who elected them and not for the interests of the wealthy or the coercive or for themselves alone. Holding elections, ensuring no individual holds office for too long, and that representatives come from among the people they represent, is found to hold these representatives accountable.
Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, namely freedom and security. And however our eyes may be dazzled with show, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and reason will say, ‘tis right.
I draw this idea of the form of government from the principle which says that the simpler something is, the less liable it is to become disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered. With this maxim in view, I offer a few remarks on the so much boasted constitution of the United States. That it was noble for the dark and slavish times in which it was erected is granted. Given the time and circumstances in which it was adopted, the constitution offered a new and hopeful governing principle, namely reason instead of tradition. Yet, even at the time, it failed to deliver on its promise, doing nothing to abolish slavery and stem the genocide of the indigenous. And more recent times demonstrates that it is still unable to ensure the safety and freedom of everyone subject to it.
Authoritarian governments (though the disgrace of human nature) have the advantage of being simple. One person can be both the cause and cure of society’s ills. An authoritarian ruler does not require permission of a majority to carry out an agenda, whether that agenda is to aid the people, or to enrich the wealthy, or to aggrandize the tyrant. But the constitution of the United States serves as the edifice for a state apparatus so byzantine and ripe for corruption that, over time, the people began to pine for a tyrant who can at least instill in them the feeling that he can cut through the tangled knot of complexity erected haphazardly over the past two centuries.
I know it is difficult to get over local or long-standing prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the United States, broadly speaking, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new Republican materials.
First, the government itself.
Second, the wealthy oligarchs.
Third, the people.
In the United States, the government is designed to be three coequal branches, each of which checks and balances the other. But there has always been an imbalance, even from the start, which has been exploited by that branch with the willing concession of the other two. This is, namely, the executive branch, headed by the president. One man – for it has, as I write this, always been a man, and if events continue apace, will remain a man – has the ability to act decisively in a way that a committee of nine, or of one hundred, or of four hundred thirty-five, simply cannot.
A one-man executive also has the benefit of attaining familiarity among the people. The office can be easily conflated with the man, personified by the man, and all successes and failures (even those ostensibly outside the executive’s purview) attributable to the man. This prepares the office of the president, and whoever may be occupying that office, for the allures of authoritarianism. And the office of the president, decorated as it is with the trappings of power and prestige, draw in men and women already inclined to seek and award themselves with ever greater power.
Congress, often finding itself deadlocked with conflicting interests – both political partisanship and between their constituents and corrupting influences – is unable to act, prompting swift and decisive action by the president to break through the impasse. With no way of effectively ensuring and overseeing the enforcement of any laws the congress does happen to pass, members are incentivized to surrender the legislative powers to someone willing and eager, namely the president.
The supreme court, which can only adjudicate on cases brought before it by those with the resources and interests sufficient for long, drawn-out proceedings, is meant to be above petty partisan squabbling and the corrupting influence of special interests. Yet, even if this ideal situation were the case, which it is evidently not, very few people will ever possess the time and money to have their grievances addressed. But one person, the president, who both appoints the justices and exercises discretion in how to execute the laws being adjudicated, can always make his own grievances heard before the court and thus enshrined into law.
As no person at first could possess any other government office than that to which they are elected, so the constituents which elected them to high office could have no power to give away the right of posterity, and though they might say “We choose you for our president,” they could not without manifest injustice to their children say “that your chosen successor and their chosen successor shall reign over our children and our children’s children forever.” Because such an unwise, unjust, unnatural compact might (perhaps) in the next succession put them under the government of a rogue or a fool. The wise, in their private sentiments, have ever treated authoritarianism with contempt; yet it is one of those evils which when once established is not easily removed: many submit from fear, others from superstition, and the more powerful part shares with the dictator the plunder of the rest.
Thus, to say that the constitution of the Unites States establishes a union of three coequal powers, reciprocally checking each other, is farcical. Either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions.
No distinction is made in the United States constitution between the wealthy oligarchs and the common people. One of the guiding principles, that all men are created equal, sought to replace noble privileges and hereditary titles with equal rights and meritocracy. Yet the nobility against which the Patriots fought was simply the institutionalization into law and rhetoric what was de facto social reality: the wealthy and well-connected enjoy, and feel themselves entitled to, privileges already inaccessible to the common people. Efforts to curb this state of affairs are always met with an overwhelming resistance by those who possess the resources and connections to obtain the reification of their position, whether through corruption of the government or campaigns to influence the common people.
To say that wealthy oligarchs are not a modern manifestation of nobility and landed gentry, that wealthy oligarchs rank among the common people by virtue of not holding government office and thus wield no real power, presupposes three things.
First, that wealth and power are mutually exclusive.
Second, that wealth is equally accessible by all people, whether office holders or not.
Third, that wealth does not grant access to either government offices or office holders.
The first assumption can be dispensed with by simply noting that bringing lawsuits, or defending against them, requires not only money, but also time that common people are, through only a choice between survival and destitution, to spend in making money. The threat of lawsuits by the wealthy, and the inability of common people to likewise employ lawsuits to hold the wealthy accountable, weighs government power heavily in favor of the wealthy.
Further, the total reliance of the common people in the United States on personal wealth, as opposed to social safety nets, for their own health and wellbeing, renders the common people utterly dependent on the whims of those who employ them. As a consolation, common people are convinced they hold power through a relentless marketing campaign that sets them against one another over partisan politics and culture war issues. By encouraging the common people to identify with a coalition headed by wealthy oligarchs, the common people are too busy harassing one another to notice they are being played for fools.
This obscene farce is abetted by the second assumption – that every common person has been equally granted the opportunity to ascend to the ranks of the wealthy oligarchs, if only they try hard enough – where wealth and privilege is dangled over the common people like a toy meant to pacify an infant, allowing but a few to leak through the thick membrane of class division. The common people are convinced that they should want what the rich and powerful have, but they can only get it by following the rules set down by the wealthy. This is a lie, because the wealthy will never allow more than a trickle of the common people to become equally as powerful than themselves, but instead they will sell, at a premium, a fantasy of being powerful. If the common people will subjugate one another in the name of their wealthy patrons, they will enjoy the fleeting placebo of power and yet will be doubly subjugated, by both the wealthy and by their fellow common people fooled by the pretense of social mobility.
The falsity of the third assumption, that wealth does not grant access to either government offices or office holders, is evident to all. The wealthy exploit it, the common people begrudgingly accept it as normal, and partisans demand that this assumption obtain solely for their preferred oligarchs, recognizing its obscenity only when perpetrated by the common people they have been convinced to despise.
An inquiry into the constitutional errors in the American form of government is at this time highly necessary; for as we are never in a proper condition of doing justice to others, while we continue under the influence of some leading partiality, so neither are we capable of doing it to ourselves while we remain fettered by any obstinate prejudice. And as a man who is attached to a prostitute is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favor of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.
Inherited wealth, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and imposition on posterity. For all people being conceived of as equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up their own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and though an individual might deserve some decent degree of honors among their contemporaries, yet their descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them. One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of inherited wealth, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving humankind a degenerate oligarch for a president.
This is supposing the present class of wealthy oligarchs and the predecessors from whom they have inherited their wealth have had an honorable origin: whereas it is more than probable, that, could we take off the dark covering of antiquity and trace them to their first rise, we should find the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or preeminence in subtlety obtained them the title of chief among plunderers: and who by increasing in power and extending depredations, overawed the quiet and defenseless to purchase their safety by frequent contributions. Yet the common people who gave rise to the oligarchs could have no idea of giving hereditary right to their descendants, because such a perpetual exclusion of themselves was incompatible with the free and unrestrained principles the common people professed to live by.
Wherefore, inherited wealth in the early ages could not take place as a matter of claim, but as something casual or complemental; but as narratives dispensed by means of their wealth overtook reality, the history becomes stuffed with lies, and so it is easy to trump up some superstitious tale conveniently timed, nationalist-like, to cram the myth of the noble oligarch down the throats of the common people. Perhaps the disorders which threatened, or seemed to threaten, on the collapse of those deemed too big to fail (for bailouts among, and social safety nets for the common people, were deemed too dangerous for the established order) induced many at first to favor the pretensions of wealth accumulation by the few; by which means it happened, as it has happened since, that what at first was submitted to as a convenience was afterwards claimed as a right.
What, then, to be made of the distinction between the government and the oligarchs? While often appearing at odds, the revolving door of the wealthy becoming politicians and politicians becoming wealthy suggests a collapse of this partition. The presidency has been beaten into a sword and placed into the hands of the wealthy to wield against the common people; the courts cast into a shield against accountability. Meanwhile, the congress has degenerated into a corrupt tax collector rubber stamping a massive program of regressive wealth redistribution, where the common people pay to bestow ever greater honors and privileges on the wealthy oligarchs while receiving as services rendered only lies and contempt.
In the United States a president has taken it upon himself to make war and enrich a select few; which, in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set the common people against one another. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed to enrich himself through corruption and be worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest person to society, and in the sight of posterity, than all the wealthy oligarchs that ever lived.
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For those who don’t know, the above I adapted from “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine (Jan 10, 1776). You can read the entirety of Paine’s original version here. The pamphlet was widely read within the 13 colonies at the time and aided in making the Patriots cease to view King George III as their sentinel who would guard the Americans against the excesses of parliament, but instead view the king as a tyrant (with the the king’s rejection of the Olive Branch Petition and the British declaring that any slaves that aided them against the Patriots would earn their freedom being two of the other major reasons why Patriots began viewing the king as a tyrant).
The above does not adapt the entirety of “Common Sense” into more modern issues. I’ve left out the large section at the end where Paine discusses more concrete military and logistic matters pertinent to his time, matters that he viewed as making American secession from the British Empire feasible. Some parts of the above are direct translations, with simple word alterations to make it relevant to modern issues, while other sections are wholly my own, but with similar structuring to the original. Some directly translated paragraphs have also been moved to maintain cohesion in the subject matter being discussed in sections of the essay that are of my own invention.