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Nock’s later work Our Enemy, The State focused on the difference between the spontaneous “social power” of individuals coming together for common cause and the forceful usurpation of social power by “State power.” His central thesis was set forth very clearly in the early pages of the book and, in three short pages, Nock compels even the casual, disinterested, or even adverse reader to reconsider their entire understanding of State intervention in human affairs.
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Now one might wonder just what the hell all of this has to do with an (apparently) homeless guy standing on a corner in South Bend, Indiana, in mid-October, as I drove by him over the course of several hours. Fair question. Let me convince you they have something to do with one another. One of the aspects of Nock’s argument that stuck with me was the idea that
…just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.
Our Enemy, The State, p. 5 (emphasis added).
The thesis seems interesting to me, but I wasn’t quite sure what Nock meant by “social power” versus “State power.” I thought I quite understood the latter, but I wasn’t quite sure what the former was. Nock’s examples left me with a permanently-altered view of government attempts to intercede to “help” the citizenry. Nock provided two examples to (then)-contemporary examples to illustrate his point more directly.
…it follows that with any exercise of State power, not only the exercise of social power in the same direction, but the disposition to exercise it in that direction, tends to dwindle. Mayor Gaynor astonished the whole of New York when he pointed out to a correspondent who had been complaining about the inefficiency of the police, that any citizen has the right to arrest a malefactor and bring him before a magistrate. ‘The law of England and of this country,’ he wrote, ‘has been very careful to confer no more right in that respect upon policemen and constables than it confers on every citizen.’ State exercise of that right through a police force had gone on so steadily that not only were citizens indisposed to exercise it, but probably not one in ten thousand knew he had it.
Of course, I had discussed the idea of a citizen’s arrest in law school, but I couldn’t recall much of what was said. My initial reaction was to recoil at the thought that we all had the same powers of arrest as against each other as any officer of the law does, but then again, how much of the current problems in troubled neighborhoods stems from the fact that the local citizens who live there have abandoned even the most modest attempts at reducing the crime, violence, poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, etc., in their neighborhoods? The rejoinder is that the people are not armed and the drug dealers and gangs are and thus the people are at a distinct disadvantage and hence comes the justification for military-grade police forces armed as well as or better than combat troops for the national defense, yet isn’t their something fundamental missing from the analysis? If the drug dealers and gang members inhabit those self-same neighborhoods, who is giving them succor? How do they put their heads on their pillows at night and feel secure in these same neighborhoods where they prowl and prey? These are, perhaps not coincidentally, the very same issues that confronted me while I was in Afghanistan, attempting to “police” a particular area that is rife with terrorism (or narco-traffickers, as well). I’ve watched many a frustrated military member talking to village elders asking, “Why are there rockets being launched from this area at our base every week? How is that happening?? Where do these people come from and sleep??”
Upon consideration, we start to realize that the police do not live in these same neighborhoods that they patrol. In point of fact, they live in suburban outposts, miles and miles from the streets they patrol in their cars, as distant from the citizenry they supposedly serve and protect as they are from the gangs they are supposed to be interdicting. Quite simply, they are temporary tourists and they have evacuated the social power that used to be resident in most neighborhoods.*
Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have been met by a mobilization of social power. In fact — except for certain institutional enterprises like the home for the aged, the lunatic asylum, city hospital, and county poorhouse — destitution, unemployment, “depression,” and similar ills, have been no concern of the State, but have been relieved by the application of social power. Under Mr. Roosevelt, however, the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine, brand new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a living.
Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power; merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government”; and the passage of time has proved that they were right. The effect of this upon the balance between State power and social power is clear, and also its effect of a general indoctrination with the idea that an exercise of social power upon such matters is no longer called for.
Id.
Nock’s second example involved natural disasters and this is a matter I have given some thought, particularly in light of the revelations regarding the Clinton Foundation’s actions in Haiti.
It is largely in this way that the progressive conversion of social power into State power becomes acceptable and gets itself accepted. When the Johnstown flood occurred, social power was immediately mobilized and applied with intelligence and vigor. Its abundance, measured by money alone, was so great that when everything was finally put in order, something like a million dollars remained.
If such a catastrophe happened now, not only is social power perhaps too depleted for the like exercise, but the general instinct would be to let the State see to it. Not only has social power atrophied to that extent, but the disposition to exercise it in that particular direction has atrophied with it. If the State has made such matters its business, and has confiscated the social power necessary to deal with them, why, let it deal with them.
Id.
I think the power of this example is that it has been repeatedly demonstrated through the modern era, considering the strong of well-publicized failed federal disaster relief efforts through FEMA. A fairly comprehensive history of US disaster relief efforts proves the exact point that Nock was trying to make. Over time, as the federal government has increasingly intervened, local disaster relief efforts have tailed off and, in the ultimate slap-in-the-face, have even been prohibited and physically turned away by FEMA, most notably during the Katrina debacle in New Orleans.
Nock’s final example of this diminution of social power was the one that stuck with me, though. Writing during the horrors of the Depression, Nock opined:
We can get some kind of rough measure of this general atrophy by our own disposition when approached by a beggar. Two years ago we might have been moved to give him something; today we are moved to refer him to the State’s relief agency. The State has said to society, “You are either not exercising enough power to meet the emergency, or are exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way, so I shall confiscate your power, and exercise it to suit myself.” Hence when a beggar asks us for a quarter, our instinct is to say that the State has already confiscated our quarter for his benefit, and he should go to the State about it.
Id.
And NOW we come back around to our homeless man on the street in South Bend, Indiana. (Thanks for sticking around).
As I drove by him for the final time, it was past sunset, but not quite fully dark yet. He stood there in the same place holding the same sign. I couldn’t even tell if he had moved. I started to reach for my wallet but then the light turned green, so I accelerated away, leaving the man dwindling in my rearview mirror.
“Aaaaahhhh….” I looked in the mirror as I went under the overpass, headed toward the comfort and warmth of my hotel. It was a rather warm October night, one of those last gasps of Summer before Fall fully settles in, he’d be alright… I thought of Nock’s words. “Fuuuuuck….” I muttered, rubbing my chin.
I made an abrupt U-turn like any person who learned to drive in Rhode Island would, went past him, “banged another U-ee,” and there I was – and there he was – still holding his sign. It wasn’t the nicest part of town, but it wasn’t the worst, either. All I had was a ten dollar bill and a twenty in my wallet.
While stopped at the light, I looked left quickly where another car had pulled up to the light. There were three young black kids, all teenagers, ranging from perhaps thirteen to seventeen. The car was a bit dented up and they were watching me as I fumbled with my wallet, then to find the window unlock in my rental car. I managed it and motioned the man on the corner over. I handed him the ten. He didn’t see it at first in the dark, but as he stepped back he said, “Oh My God, thank you. Thank you.” He started to walk away and I could hear his voice crack as he said: “I’ve been standing here for hours…”
“I know,” I started to say, but it died on my lips. I’d driven by him all those times…
I looked left and the three black youths were holding their thumbs up. The young kid in back was clapping. I just shrugged sheepishly. Then the car door opened and for a moment I thought, “Aw, fuck. Here we go. He’s going to ask for what I have left.” Then it became clear as I looked at the car it was because the window wouldn’t roll down. The teen leaned out and yelled: “I wanted to give him something, but I don’t have any money!”
“Well…good on ya.” I said back. I couldn’t think of anything clever to say. “He needed that more than I did,” I yelled. “And I had it, so…” They smiled, waved, honked, and drove away as the light changed.
And that was it.
At a time when our country is rife with divisions over political parties, where we are told which lives matter, where we are no longer allowed to speak without fear of retribution if someone should be offended, where “hate speech” is now all the rage, and where I am told a car full of black teens should concern me because they are “superpredators,” where statisticians write papers claiming that abortions of black kids have helped drive down crime rates, where 1 in 4 or 5 or 7 homeless folks are military veterans, I think the “soft revolution” is what I hope for…
I hope that people will recognize that we all could and would be far more inclined to be charitable to our fellow man if we got to keep even more of our hard earned money, if government wouldn’t tell us that IT is the ONLY possible solution to our problems, and if we all decided to simply act more charitably toward our fellow man – to take back our “social power” instead of waiting for the State to fix whatever the need is of the moment.
Individual US citizens gave $258 Billion (yep, with a “B”) in 2014 – a record. At a time when the economy isn’t exactly humming. We should be proud of that, but how much better could we do if we got to keep more and decided to “just do it” ourselves, locally?
Regardless of which shitheel gets elected, we should ignore their grand plans to “cure” _______ (drug use, poverty, racism, school shootings, or whatever the issue du jour is) and start exercising our social power. We don’t need to be told what the right thing to do is. We don’t need government to tell us to be kind to one another.
We need to realize that we have to be the change we seek in the world and start doing it in the small ways that we can. Maybe eventually we’ll figure out we don’t need a three or four or five-letter federal agency to fake like it’s doing something while it hands out contracts to favored political donors and the people who really need help go wanting. Else I fear we risk continuing to ignore those in need among us because we have the excuse that “someone else” – like some bureaucratic agency or even the police – is going to do it. They’re not and they never have – and even if they did solve a problem, when was the last time you heard of some federal agency announcing that it had accomplished its purpose and thus was folding up so as not to waste taxpayer money? I won’t hold my breath waiting for the numerous examples…I’ll just try to exercise Nock’s social power to make the world around me a little bit better.
* The same was true of the military units attempting to police these areas with terrorists. Until it revived the Combat Action Platoon (CAP) tactics of Vietnam, the US military was in much the same boat.