Dear friends,
It seems to me, there’s a reason most revolutions end in more despotism and not less. It is because most revolutionaries want to replace the people who write, and thus benefit from the laws… instead of create a moralist society. The US founding fathers were singular in this regard. They openly sought to create a moral society capable of self-regulating. Mao, on the other hand, wanted to apply law to solve all of society’s problems as he saw fit. The US for awhile was a moralist nation with few laws. China under Mao became a legalist despotism so utter that tens of millions of human beings were murdered by it. The human hearted goal then should be to move our societies from legalism, to moralism… without the collapse it usually takes.
A revolution is always fueled by resentment. Happy people have little incentive to undergo life threatening travails for nebulous benefit. Contented people are generally content. Revolution, though, requires people to resent those in power. To that end a demagogue is the ideal tool. You might say Thomas Paine served as the rabble-rouser in the US revolution. The demagogue, however, makes a poor leader. Such myopic vision leads one to tragic mistakes. That was shown when Thomas Paine backed the French Revolution. This is because the nearsighted can only see the close at hand, they lack the ability to see the distant landscape. The result is that people who lack vision only see a group of people in the way of universal brotherly love, so… kill them and everything will work out.
Armed conflict selects for those with martial ability, not moralist thinkers. Lenin was ruthless in his usurpation of power. Any one or faction that stood in his way faced the most brutal death imaginable. This application of brutality has been emulated by revolutionaries across space and time, obviously, because it works. If brutality didn’t work then it would quickly be discarded as a tactic let alone a strategy. This gives those without humanity an advantage in ascending the power structures of a revolution. The humane and human hearted, like George Washington, need to be wise as a serpent, fast as a cat, and as ethical as a saint. Such men are few and far between. The heartless ones are a dime a dozen though… so they make up most of the marshal men in a revolution.
The one kind of revolutionary then seeks to create a human hearted civilization, while the other seeks to exploit the legalist power of the system. As we discussed above, most revolutionaries are heartless demagogues, only the rarest are human hearted. The result is that most revolutions create even more despotic conditions. Tyrannies where the top extracts from everyone else at the point of a gun. Such legalistic systems even twist filial love into a tool of the state. They do this by imprisoning family for three generations for the slightest wrong-speak. This perverts even the love for family into a legalist trap. A few rare examples replace legalist systems with moralist ones. The one kind of revolutionary then rules by the brain, and the other by the heart.
Moralist systems by their nature are not extractive. This is because the laws are few and only needed to control the uncontrollable. Strangers can do business with little friction, tragedy is taken care of locally and personally, and communities stay close knit. No system is purely moral or legal however. Peak prosperity comes at a point close to moralism but far from legalism. As in the early years of the US when labor couldn’t be found. There was too much opportunity to work for wages. Legalism, on the other hand, allows the Thrasymachians of the world to exploit the law. The more laws, the more extraction. Legalism becomes a boon to despots and curse to the people. This explains why so many revolutions fall short of their early promise. It’s the nature of revolutions.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
