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The 'We' Word:
And the Tyranny of the Majority
Roger Kerr
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False collectives-what Americans call 'weasel words'-poison the language we use
to talk about public affairs by cobbling together spurious majorities, writes
Roger Kerr
2003
marked the centenary of George Orwell's birth. Orwell was
one of the most profound writers of the 20th century. His
two satires on Soviet totalitarianism-Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty Four-were antidotes to the attractions of ideology
and, in the case of Nineteen Eighty Four, to attempts to
use language as a form of thought control.
We are
still familiar with the two features of totalitarian thinking
that Orwell exposed, namely, 'doublethink' and 'newspeak'.
Doublethink refers to the capacity
to subscribe to two contradictory beliefs at the same time, as in slogans
like
'war is peace', 'freedom is slavery', and so on; newspeak was the regime's
official language which, by controlling and limiting speech to an officially
approved and crudely simplified vocabulary, would make dissenting thoughts
literally inconceivable.
Another
thinker who was alert to the political implications of
language was Friedrich Hayek. In his last book, The
Fatal Conceit, Hayek devoted a chapter,
titled 'Our Poisoned Language', to the collectivist bias in the way we
talk about public affairs. This is part of Hayek's wider
argument that socialism
is a throwback to primitive tribalism, in which the tribe could survive
only by acting as one.
The
central word here is 'society', which of course refers
to a group of people but which
is often used, tacitly and even unconsciously, to refer
to more than
that-namely, to a group that has an overriding, collective goal and therefore
has to make central decisions, even though societies can and do exist
without having collective goals and without central decision-making.
In
modern speech, Hayek writes, the adjective 'social' is
applied indiscriminately to a huge number of nouns in
a way
that undermines
their original meanings and recruits them into a collectivist cause.
Take the idea of justice. Let's say that this means the fair and impartial
application
of legal, moral and perhaps customary rules. But precede it with the
word 'social'
and everything changes. Social justice may require redistributing property
and treating people unequally. In this way the word 'social' empties
the nouns it is applied to of their meaning. Hayek goes on:
. .
. it has in fact become the most harmful instance of what,
after
Shakespeare's 'I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks
eggs' (As You Like
It, II, 5), some Americans call a 'weasel word'. As a weasel is alleged
to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can
these words
deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly
leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to draw the teeth from
a concept one
is obliged to employ, but from which one wishes to eliminate all
implications that challenge one's ideological premises.1
Another
term that has been almost completely emptied of meaning
by being called social is 'right'. A right properly means
a sphere of
freedom
that is protected
by law, or a just claim. But nowadays, by being prefixed with 'social'
or related words like 'welfare', a right is taken to mean a claim
to redistribution that
the law enforces. The right to work, for example, by being made
a 'social' right, has ceased to mean that the state should
not interfere
in voluntary
labour contracts, and has become a demand that the government guarantees
a job to everyone who wants one. This, taken to its logical conclusion,
could
mean the central direction of labour and severe restrictions on
the freedom to enter into labour contracts.
What
we have here is a form of linguistic piracy, in which the
favourable
connotations of a word are hijacked and used for purposes
that are
often the opposite of
those suggested by its original sense. No-one wants to be opposed
to rights, but plenty of people are opposed to the limits on
government that rights
imply. The word 'social' conjures those limits away.
A related
example of this sort of chicanery is the idea of 'fair'
trade. Advanced as an alternative to free trade, fair trade
simply means protection.
Yet free
trade is perfectly fair in the sense that it takes place under
the rule of law and on a level playing field. But the very
term 'fair
trade' subtly
implies
that free trade is unfair, and who wants to be seen to support
unfairness? So as the term gains currency, the burden of proof
is quietly passed
from the advocates of protection to the advocates of free trade.
Hayek's
analysis of the collectivist bias of language and especially
of the word 'society' can be extended to a range of related
and common words.
We
all know that the communists shamelessly used the term 'the
people', in phrases like 'people's republic', to pretend
that their regimes
were genuine
and
legitimate
expressions of the collective will of their subjects. Yet
in the West we often use such terms in similarly distorting,
if
more subtle,
ways.
In
the public
meetings that precede planning decisions, opponents of a
proposal to build a supermarket, or a road, or whatever
in a locality
typically say things
like 'the government should listen to the people'. But supporters
of
the proposals
may well say the same thing. When public opinion is divided,
each side likes to enlist the notional support of 'the people'
to legitimise
its stance.
What the advocates really mean, of course, is that the government
should
listen
to 'me'.
Again,
take the term 'public'. 'Public spending', for example,
should literally mean spending undertaken
by members of the
public. But
it has come to mean
government spending, regardless of whether the public wants
it or approves of it: all the public has to do with it
is to pay
for it.
A similar distortion appears with
the terms 'public sector' and its counterpart,
'private sector'. Some people
genuinely believe that the 'public sector'
is so called because it embodies the interests of the people
as
a whole, in contrast
to the 'private sector', which embodies the
special
interests of private businesses. 'Public' is a
term that nowadays
subtly shifts
us from talking about the people as a whole
to talking about the government and its agents and employees,
and into assuming
that
anything done by arms of the government is
by
definition
in
the common interest.
Another
such term, much loved by politicians, is 'community'. A
community, strictly
speaking,
is
a group of people
with common interests and experiences,
and probably some face-to-face contact. A community so
defined has to be rather small: a village,
say, or a
profession, like 'the
medical
community'. But sometimes
the word is stretched to cover what we should call, perhaps,
'the nation', or 'the general public' if
we could trust
ourselves
to use that term
properly. The members of a nation are mostly
anonymous and unknown to one another,
and have diverse opinions, preferences and
experiences. Although they share an
historical national identity and a common legal identity
as citizens, to describe such a group as
a 'community' is to pretend
to a higher
level of collective
sympathies, interests and goals than in fact exists.
It tends therefore to expand the agenda of collective
decision-making
beyond what is necessary,
and encourages acquiescence in the aggrandisement
of
the state.
Of all
such terms, 'we' is the most subtle and troublesome. It
is a term
that we-so
to speak-cannot
dispense
with, and so we risk being trapped into
connotations
that we don't intend or are unaware of. 'We' can be
used in an individualistic sense: 'we' taken as
individuals, who can act and make decisions
on our own behalf. But it can also be used
in
a
collective
sense,
meaning that on each
issue 'we' have to make a single decision that applies
to all of us.
For example, after a natural catastrophe,
someone might say, 'we should all
help the victims'.
The words by themselves don't expose two crucial distinctions:
whether assistance should be by each of
us as individuals or
organised on a collective basis;
and, if collective, whether it should be voluntary
(through donations) or involuntary (through government
action financed
out of taxes).
But
my deeper point is that this ambiguity of 'we' can lead
us into collective thinking
and
coercive
action where it
isn't necessary. Political rhetoric
is full of phrases like 'we as a nation must decide
whether we want
a national airline/film industry/manufacturing
sector/whatever'. This assumes that
'we' have to make a single, collective decision as
voters, whereas in
reality 'we'
as individuals are making that decision every day.
If consumers prefer a
domestically manufactured product to an imported
one, a domestic manufacturing industry
or firm will be there to meet the demand; if they
prefer the imported product it won't. The demand
that 'we
as a nation must
decide' is to call on people
to decide through the political system things that
they can readily resolve as individual
consumers.
The 'we' word may also be used by members
of groups that are smaller than, and
contained within, the
wider society.
In a system that encourages
lobbying
by special interests and institutionalises 'disadvantaged'
minorities, spokespersons of those groups
may
be tempted into a false collectivism.
The media encourage
this by commonly treating any member of a disadvantaged
minority as automatically representative
of that sub-set,
as if all its members
were unanimous
about every issue.
Underlying
the individualist and collectivist senses of 'we' is the
distinction between what
David Green
calls 'corporate
association'
and 'civil association':
A 'corporate
association' is composed of persons united in pursuit of
a common interest
or objective
. . .
In the pure
form of a nation as a corporate
association, there is but one overriding national
objective.
In a
nation of 'civil associates', people are united not because
they share
a concrete goal,
or are
engaged together
in a substantive
task, but because
they acknowledge the authority of the rules
under which they live . . .
The
task of government under a corporate association is to
manage the pursuit
of the common goal
and to direct individuals as
appropriate . . . The task
of the state under a civil association is
to maintain and enforce the
laws, and to supply services such as defence,
which must be financed from taxation.
The role of government is limited and subject
to the law.2
As Green
notes, if we take society to be a civil association rather
than a
corporate
association, the role of what
'we' collectively have to decide
is
limited to genuine public goods like law-enforcement
and defence-since these are goods that
we
individually can't
otherwise produce
in
the desired amounts-plus
some form of collectively provided social
safety net. There are not many genuine
public goods, and the number
is shrinking
with
advancing
technology.
But the
constant use of the collective 'we' in
political debate tends to push out the
agenda of government into areas
where we
as individuals are
capable of looking
after ourselves.
Indeed,
most of the time the 'we' word is really a disguise for
the 'it' word:
the
government.
Those who
argue that
'we as a
nation' must decide
whether we
want a manufacturing industry are really
saying that, since 'we' as individual
consumers have
shown that
we prefer
imports, the
government
should override
those preferences and protect domestic
manufacturers from import competition.
The scope for special interests to advance
under the cover of the 'we' word is obvious.
It
is true that sometimes such government intervention does
appear to command a
degree of popular
support, and it is
a huge advantage
to a
special interest
seeking government favours when this
is the case. Indeed, not only special
interests
but governments
themselves
are constantly
in
the business of
testing 'public opinion' with polls,
consultations, focus groups, and so
on, trying
to come up with putative majorities
to legitimise
their proposals instead of seriously
demonstrating that they
serve genuine
collective interests.
But the
further away 'we' collectively are
taken from 'us' individually, the more contrived,
artificial
and
fragile is the 'majority'
that is formed
in our
name.
For
example, advocates of bigger government like to cite opinion
polls that appear
to show that
a majority
approves
of higher
taxes to finance
better
health, education or welfare benefits.
Four major objections can be raised
against this. First, the question
itself assumes
that it is axiomatic that higher
taxes actually
result in better
services.
They may well
not, but the
opinion pollsters
don't normally accommodate this possibility.
Second,
the polls typically present a bogus
either-or choice between
raising
taxes and leaving
them unchanged. They exclude the
entirely feasible
options of charging for
some services
and
lowering taxes to allow more individuals
to make private arrangements. So
the majority for higher
taxes is largely
contrived. Third,
some of the many
beneficiaries
may expect others to pay the higher
taxes: 'we' doesn't include 'me',
as it were.
Finally, we
tend in the
privacy of the
polling booth
to vote against
higher taxes, whatever we think we
should say
to opinion pollsters. Several Western
political parties
have lost
elections in recent
years after promising
to increase taxes, or after increasing
them when they had promised not to.
It is a major
problem
for opinion
polls
that respondents
may not
reveal their
true preferences but express preferences
that are socially fashionable.
Again,
the collective 'we's that are constantly
cobbled together in
support
of some proposal
or other are
highly dependent
on the phrasing
of whatever
it is that is being put to us.
The question 'Should
we protect our manufacturers from
import
competition?'
may be
supported
by a majority. But if the
question were rephrased
'Should the government raise the
prices of manufactured
goods
by levying
a tax on
manufactured imports?',
the majority would
be smaller or even non-existent.
If
the 'we's that opinion polls record are so precarious,
it's
not surprising that they
can
be contradictory
as well. A good
example comes from
the United States in the mid-1990s.
In
1994, a new
Republican-dominated Congress
thought it had a clear
mandate to move towards a balanced
budget. It duly put
up proposals to reduce the
growth rate of some welfare entitlement
programmes.
But no sooner
had the proposals been passed
than President Clinton vetoed them,
invoking the support of
a new majority
opposing them.
Which did US citizens
want? A balanced
budget or
guaranteed entitlement levels?
They wanted both. The 'will
of the people' may be systematically
ambiguous on
the decisions that
governments make
on a daily
basis.
The
truth is that few consequences
for the
respondent hang
on the answers
given to an
opinion pollster,
and there
is little incentive
to make a considered
judgment.
This
is largely true
of voting as well,
since a single
vote hardly
ever determines the outcome
of an election. But
there is
some evidence
that people
take voting
relatively
seriously.
Devotees of the
'we' word might
therefore
be challenged to consider making
more use of
the system of citizens
initiated referenda.
They are
unlikely to do
so because, unlike with
opinion
polls, the results
of a referendum
cannot be easily manipulated.
But the
challenge
could at least
inject a little linguistic
hygiene
into
the Towers of Babel
that politicians,
lobbyists, intellectuals
and journalists
have constructed
in modern democracies.
This
is not to suggest that the
collective 'we' must be
confined
to the limited
range of collective
or public goods that a
government has
to fund or produce in a civil
association.
Although
the members
of a
society like Australia or
New Zealand
are for the most part
unknown to one another,
we have common
bonds and share a common
destiny. A
civil association does not
conscript its members into
overriding
collective purposes, but
nor is it merely a collection of
atomised individuals
who have nothing to do with
one another. We have
our voluntary
collective activities, like
sports, churches, associations
of all
sorts, and our annual
timetable of festivals
and rituals.
When
referring to
our common life, we can use the
'we' word
without ambiguity or sleight
of hand. The
problem
arises when
our common life
is made the
basis
for what
are usually spurious
majorities for expanding
the scope of government beyond
its necessary
limits. Such
majorities typically reflect only the
shifting and temporary
coalitions that our political
system produces, and government
that is beholden to them
ceases to be the agent of the society
and
becomes an
instrument of
coercion.
So beware
the 'we' word in
politics,
since, despite
its apparently
communitarian
connotations,
it
so often portends
a weakening
rather than
a strengthening
of social cohesion. A key
feature of
constitutional democracy is
the
protection
of minorities
and the rights
of dissenting,
law-abiding
individuals. Exercising through
politics the
so-called
'tyranny
of
the majority',
and trampling
on individual
rights, are
recipes for
social discord
at best and
a
slide into
an Orwellian world at worst.
Endnotes
1 F.A.
Hayek, The Fatal Conceit:
The Errors
of Socialism
(Chicago:
University
of Chicago Press, 1988),
pp.116-17.
2 David
Green, From Welfare State
to Civil
Society: Towards
Welfare
that Works in
New Zealand
(Wellington:
New Zealand
Business Roundtable,
1996), pp.5-6. The
Author
Roger
Kerr is Executive Director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable.
This is an edited version of a speech delivered to a recent
ACT function in Wellington.
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