Peace or Politics; F. Chodorov

The law of association - the supreme law of Society is self-operating; it needs no enforcement agency. Its [73 ] motor force is in the nature of man. His insatiable appetite for material, cultural, and spiritual desires drives him to join up. The compulsion is so strong that he makes an automobile out of an oxcart, a telephone system out of a drum, so as to overcome the handicaps of time and space; contact is of the essence in the market-place technique. Society grows because the seed of it is in the human being; it is made of man, but not by men. The only condition necessary for the growth of Society into One Worldism is the absence of force in the market place; which is another way of saying that politics is a hindrance to, and not an aid of, peace. Any intervention in the sphere of voluntary exchanges stunts the growth of Society and tends to its disorganization. It is significant that in war, which is the ultimate of politics, every stra tegic move is aimed at the disorganization of the enemy's means of production and exchange - the disruption of his market place. Likewise, when the State intervenes in the business of Society, which is production and exchange, a condition of war exists, even though open conflict is pre vented by the superior physical force the State is able to employ. Politics in the market place is like a bull in the china shop.

The essential characteristic of the State is force; it orig inates in force and exists by it. The rationale of the State is that conflict is inherent in the nature of man and he must be coerced into behaving, for his own good. That is a debatable doctrine, but even if we accept it the fact re mains that the coercion must be exercised· by men who are, by definition, as "bad" as those upon whom the coer[74 ] cion is exercised. The State is men. And the doctrine of the super-personal State cannot cover up that disturbing fact. Getting down to the facts of experience, political power has never been used for the jOjOgeneralgood," as advertised, but has always been used to further the interests of those in power or those who can support them in this purpose. To do so it must intervene in the market place. The advan tages that political power confers upon its priesthood and their cohorts consist of what it skims from the abundance created by Society. Since it cannot make a single good, it lives and thrives by what it takes. What it takes deprives producers of the fruits of their labors, impoverishes them, and this causes a feeling of hurt. Intervention in the mar ket place can do nothing else, then, than to create friction.

Friction is incipient war. [ 75] THE INDIVIDUAL IN SOCIETY THE words freedom and liberty signified for the most emi nent representatives of mankind one of the most precious and desirable goods. Today it is fashionable to sneer at them. They are, trumpets the modem sage, "slippery" no tions and "bourgeois" prejudices. Freedom and liberty are not to be found in nature. In nature there is no phenomenon to which these terms could be meaningfully applied. Whatever man does, he can never free himself from the restraints which nature im poses upon him. If he wants to succeed in acting, he must submit unconditionally to the laws of nature. Freedom and liberty always refer to interhuman rela tions. A man is free as far as he can live and get on with out being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people. In the frame of society everybody de pends upon his fellow citizens. Social man cannot become independent without forsaking all the advantages of social cooperation.