The Control Imperative

On my private bench of the accused, next to selfish human nature, stupefying propaganda and economic ignorance (whose guilt I consider to be only partial and even unnecessary), I would like to seat another culprit--this element of human nature that I would call “the control imperative.” I would describe the control imperative as a natural tendency of most people to approve of controlling the actions of others and a spontaneous inclination to try to engage in such practices. What is important is that it need not be physical control--most often it is visual, or, more broadly, informational control. Perhaps the most common manifestations of the phenomenon in question are nosiness and gossip. Huge multitudes of people are eager to poke their noses into the lives of others--both those of their most immediate neighbors as well as those of the so-called “celebrities” and icons of mass culture. What is typical of the individuals who succumb to the control imperative is that they are progressively less concerned with themselves and their own desires, but progressively more concerned with the desires of others, as well as the means of their satisfaction that they have at their disposal. Consequently, we should not associate the described phenomenon with the aforementioned egoism, since a paradigmatic egoist does not care about the lives of others and finds no interest in them, thus not needing to exhibit any sort of regulatory urge.

As was correctly pointed out by Ludwig von Mises in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, the fundamental source of what I termed the control imperative is envy and malice, oftentimes coupled with a hypocritical rationalization, according to which the superior position enjoyed by some must necessarily result from an act of fraudulent appropriation of what (for rather unspecified reasons) is taken to belong rightfully to others. The strength of the above-mentioned rationalization is often so great that the rationalizers indeed begin to believe that a higher standard of living available to certain groups is not a well-deserved reward for their diligence and resourcefulness, or even a gift of propitious fate, but an unjustly acquired privilege, which should be accessible to all. The appetite grows while eating, especially if it is others who are eating, whereas we are just licking our lips behind the restaurant window.

And yet, nonetheless, even the most convoluted and two-faced rationalization is usually incapable of putting to rest the overwhelming feeling that the forcible expropriation of the “privileged” is to be considered an extremely wicked and undignified deed, or at least an action that is likely to bring severe ostracism upon the expropriator and hence should be thought of as prudentially inadvisable.

That is why the easiest way to transform purely visual or informational control into physical control is to cede the task of creating the latter onto external forces, especially those working at the behest of an impersonal and de facto ownerless entity. No other institutions are better suited for such a cession than the institutions of representative democracy--their character allows an envious and greedy individual to merge his own envy and greed with that exhibited by millions of others, and then use it as the material to forge a redistributionist system by the hands of those who can no longer be called robbers hired by Mr. Lazybones to loot the resources of Mr. Diligent, but should be called the executors of the common will instead. As soon as this happens, all potential pangs of conscience and fears of ostracism disappear--acts of plunder and predation (henceforth known as acts of rectification) are no longer committed by any particular, individual person, but only by a vast, collective immaterial entity, whose corporeal representatives are to be regarded as tools of historical justice. The whole process is complemented by far-reaching ritualization of the actions of the abovementioned entity, as well as by the attendant series of semantic distortions, which make unequivocal identification of aggression, violence, coercion, theft and enslavement (let alone successful elimination of these phenomena) incomparably more difficult than it was before.

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