Market Theocracy

What, exactly, is society?

The answer to that question depends — of course — on who you ask.

Ask a liberal democrat and you’ll more than likely get a bizarre fairy tale concerning some overarching godthing that matters ever so much more than the disposable, puling individuals that just so happen to make up their imaginary hoodoo fetish.

Ask a conservative republican and the answer will differ only in rhetoric. They’ll spin it a different way — adding high flown words about ‘values’ and traditions’ and, more likely than not, whatever religious variant they happen to claim faith in.

Ask a libertarian or an anarchist and you’ll at least get some heat. A measure of cynicism concerning the concept, perhaps even outright anger. It won’t be positive, at least. Unfortunatly, it will still involve the overarching hoodoo — as a devil rather than a god, but hoodoo nonetheless.

Big, invisible, inescapable thing that subsumes and commands individuals.

Nonsense, if you ask me.

This ’society as whole organism’ concept is what Rose Wilder Lane blew big smoking holes through when she penned these beautiful, utterly true words in 1943:

To think of human society as an organism, developing, progressing, or retrograding, is to think like a bee — if a bee thinks. It is to think as a pagan thinks. It is to imagine a fantasy.

In the human world there is no entity but the individual person. There is no force but individual energy. In actual human life the only real Society is every living person’s contact with everyone he meets.

So far as Society has any real existence, it exists when boy meets girl, when Mrs. Jones telephones Mrs. Smith, when Robinson buys a cigar, when the motorist stops for gasoline, when a lobbyist tips a bellboy and when he meets a Congressman, and when the Congressman votes on a bill; when the postman delivers the mail and the labor bosses discuss a strike and the milliner brings another hat and the dentist says, "Wider, please." Human relationships are so infinitely numerous and varying every moment, that no human mind can begin to grasp them.

To call all these relationships Society, and then discuss the progress or welfare of Society, as if it existed as a bee-swarm does, is simply to escape from reality to fairyland.

– What Was Wrong With The Old World?, Rose Wilder Lane


This concept is what Ludwig Von Mises devestated again and again in Human Action:

Individual man is born into a socially organized environment. In this sense alone we may accept the saying that society is–logically or historically–antecedent to the individual. In every other sense this dictum is either empty or nonsensical. The individual lives and acts within society. But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort. It exists nowhere else than in the actions of individual men. It is a delusion to search for it outside the actions of individuals. To speak of a society’s autonomous and independent existence, of its life, its soul, and its actions is a metaphor which can easily lead to crass errors.

– Human Action Chapter VIII


It’s odd that even the most diehard liberal or conservative will agree with Von Mises that society is, at base, the process of individuals interacting. They have to. As RWL astutely observed, to disagree is to ‘retreat into fantasy.’ If said diehards did indeed disagree, one would merely have to ask them to point to their society. To draw a picture of it. To describe its shape and form and function, to explain its mechanics, in simple descriptive terms.

They can’t, of course. Mired as it is in dogmatic political nonsense, society becomes a non-concept — a mystical concept as blind faith based as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Unlike those harmless conceits, however, the political definition of society is dangerous. It has, in fact, been used for centuries as the big club, the truncheon, in the ongoing devaluation of the individual. When you hear ‘for the good of society’, beware. It almost always means your individuality — and your wealth, health, and dignity — is in danger.

But, if society is the process of individuals interacting, how can it be somehow ‘more important’ than those same individuals? How can something created by the actions of individuals be used to belittle and harm them?

Because society as defined by the collectivists and powermongers and control freaks is an outright lie. Amusingly (if the bleakest of black humor amuses you)it’s not even a well told lie. It is a ridiculous, inept, un-clever, clumsy lie. Loki himself would speak truth before he used such pathetic trickery. Satan would bow before heaven rather than resort to such childish fibbing.

Society, as posited, praised and worshipped by the beehivers and leash-holders, simply does not exist.

Society as it is, however, does exist. It is as real as math and music and logic and language. Far from devaluing individuals, it glorifies them. Rather than being ‘more important’ than our flickering firefly selves, it is our servent and greatest tool. Instead of beating us down, it raises us up to great heights and allows wondrous achievement.

Because I can point to society. I can draw you a picture of it. I can describe its shape and form and function and explain its mechanics, in simple descriptive terms.

Society is a map.

A map of mankind.




NEXT: How The Map Was Drawn