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Classical Stuff You Should Know
294: The Servile State, by Hilaire Belloc
01:02:24
Get to work, my dude.
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- [00:11]
A
Hey, everybody, and welcome to Classical Stuff. You should know we are a podcast about old books, old philosophy, some thoughts, some architecture here and there, kind of whatever we like that's older than 100 years. That's the kind of stuff we talk about. We also talk about education. My name is AJ Hanneberg. I am joined by Thomas Magby.
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B
Hello.
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A
And Graham Donaldson.
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B
Hi. And.
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A
And today, the whole goal for me and Thomas today is just to serve, like we are here to serve Donaldson. That's everything we want to do. So everything he says, you can expect us to say. Oh, that is absolutely correct.
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C
Can I get you some coffee?
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B
This is amazing.
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A
Do you foot rub while you.
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C
Do we get you a snack? Do you want some pizza?
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B
I do.
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C
More pizza? Yeah. Okay, good.
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B
Yeah.
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A
How many times would you like to be told how attractive you are?
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B
You guys are in quite the state. Yeah. As AJ Is alluding to. We are. I'm going to be talking about a book called the Servile State. And it's a book, but it's also sort of a theory of history, an economic theory, and it's written by a dude named Hilaire Belloc, a dude with a French name, but he's an Englishman.
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A
He sounds like a bad guy in a movie.
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B
I know. He does sound like the bad guy in a movie. Hilarious. Belloc's great. Belloc. He may be Belgian. I can't remember. He's from somewhere in France or Belgium. But anyway, he's English. In the early 20th century, he was best friends with GK Chesterton. Cool. He is part of that. British. He's one of the British Catholics, so he's, you know, there's not very many of them. He is probably most well known for his delightful children's poems about terrible things that. Like cautionary tales for children. Oh, those.
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A
I remember those. I bought those.
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B
They're wonderful. Aren't they great? We're like. A little boy is getting eaten by a lion, and because he ran away from his nanny. Or a girl gets horribly burned to death in a house fire because she keeps calling, she keeps saying that there's a fire when there is no fire. A little boy who eats a little, who has, like a habit of eating little bits of string and then he dies. Anyway, they are delightful little poems.
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C
These descriptions don't go with each other.
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B
And my. My dad read them to me as a kid to go to bed at night. They're very. They're just so funny.
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C
Did that terrify.
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B
Terrify me? They are hilarious, anyway. But Hilaire Belloc wrote a number of books on sort of economics and his. There's one called the Servile State. There's an essay on the. I think it's called like the essay on the reclamation of property or something like that. And he and Chesterton kind of put together they were living in the era of kind of the unfettered robber baron capitalism. So the Industrial Revolution had had its big push and. And they are sort of living in the era of sort of gold standard capitalism in America and in England also the rise of bigger social policies in countries putting together bigger social safety nets. And then of course Marx and Engels had written their works and there was sort of the little. The communist menace was kicking around. And of course I think this book is published in 1911. And so we are about six years away from the Bolshevik Revolution. Right. So there's also that. That is in the air and sort of at the time people had kind of thought that there was kind of really only two ways to think about economics. You sort of have like the capitalist way and then some kind of collectivist way. That's the term that he uses, collectivist. And that encompasses a sort of a softer socialism which is the government is taking control of economic policies or, or a harder collectivism where the government owns everything like in a communism. And Hilaire Belloc is wanting to, in this, in this book, the servile state. He's wanting to posit a potential. And what he thinks is sort of a very highly likely future scenario for Western economies and western civilizations that we are trucking towards what he calls a servile state. It's not communism, but it is a state of being servile. I guess we'll start with that. Like when you hear the word servile, what does that. What does that mean? What do you.
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C
What is servant like you are not. Not free in some important way.
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B
Correct.
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C
I'm not sure in what sense. I guess that's what you'll tell us.
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A
Yeah, your own self actualization is put subordinate to the actualization of some other entity.
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B
That's right. Now we have an old, old episode way back on called distributism, which is what the name that is given to Chesterton and Belloc's ult. But these guys are not economists. These guys do not write big, well thought through arguments about economic theory. This is not. They are, they are not John Maynard Keynes. They are not the same way. There's the same kind of writing as like the, the Austrian school or the Chicago school. They're not even. Who's the dude with the pencil? What's his name? Remember the Chicago.
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C
Milton Friedman.
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B
Milton Friedman. They're not writing like that because he.
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C
Did the essay about where pencils come from. Okay, sorry.
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B
Okay.
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C
The dude with the pencil is a very good description.
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B
They're historians, they write essays. They have broad ranges of thought. And so I think there's been a lot of criticism levied against them that what they're talking about is not a big, long, coherent ism. But they are. But I think. But Hilaire Belloc's argument in the servile state, I think is a really interesting one, quite compelling. The pull quote that always gets taken from. From it is this. If we do not restore the institution of property, we cannot escape restoring the institution of slavery. There is no third course. This is sort of Belloc's view in a nutshell. So before we'll. We'll talk about what he means by the servile state in a second. But before we do, we kind of need to get some definitions of words that he uses because he's essentially going to say a capitalist society. We even need to go and define what that means, is a society that is a placeholder. It is a. It is an era of human history that is moving from one extreme to another extreme. It in and of itself is not a sustainable thing. It is a. It is a. A. A system that. That. That is sort of. That you would call as capitalist is a system that is moving from something to something else and it cannot sustain itself. It is. It is either growing into something or decaying back into something else. He says it cannot sustain itself. And already there, people can maybe take issue with that. This is his point. But anyway, to define some terms. So some of the terms is. Let me just read some of the books. You can get a sort of a flavor for what he's talking about. So here we go. Man, like every other organism, can only live by the transformation of his environment to his own use. He must transform his environment from a condition where it is less to a condition where it is more subservient to his needs. Okay, so man needs to transform his environment where it's less subservient to his needs, where it's more subservient to his needs. Growing food, creating a shelter. The houses don't exist. And yeah, maybe we could find caves, but even that is not good for our needs because they're kind of dank and they're kind of damp, and we can figure out better needs. Right? So that Special conscious and intelligent transformation of his environment. Which is peculiar to the peculiar intelligence and creative faculty of man, we call the production of wealth. So anything that you are doing in order to transform the environment, to make the environment more subservient to our needs, we would say is we are producing wealth. That is what we would call a wealth. Wealth is matter which has been consciously and intelligently transformed. From a condition in which it is less. To a condition in which it is more serviceable to a human need. Without wealth, man cannot exist. So thinking of the. Like the plowed field or the garden plot. Or the wood being turned into a house, shelter, clothing, jackets, when it gets really cold, we would look at all of those things and we would say that those are according to his definitions. We call that the production of wealth. Things that. That make our lives sort of easier and are. And that are making nature subservient to our needs. So he says the production of it is a necessity to him. And though it proceeds from the more to the less necessary. And even to those forms of production which we call luxuries. Yet in any given human society, there is a certain us, though the word didn't translate well, and a certain amount of wealth without which human life cannot be lived. As, for instance, in England today. Certain forms of cooked and elaborately prepared food, clothing, warmth and habitation. So you. You can have varying degrees of, like, necessary wealth. And maybe what you would call unnecessary wealth, which are more luxuries, but they're sort of the need to haves and the nice to haves. But you would still call those things luxury. Or still call those things wealth. But they probably have some sort of, like, hierarchy of needs in terms of wealth. Something that can sustain your life. Is more necessary than something that can make your life more enjoyable. True. We're tracking. We're tracking. Okay. That's what we mean by wealth. Therefore, to control the production of wealth Is to control human life itself. To refuse man the opportunity for the production of wealth. Is to refuse him the opportunity for life. And in general, the way in which the production of wealth is, by law, permitted. Is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist. So the way in which the production of wealth is by law permitted. Is the only way in which the citizens can legally exist. So the way that human beings can produce wealth in the definition that he gives is the way that we exist is the. Is the way that we exist. So whatever the societies take or law is in regards to how we can become wealthy Is the way that we exist in that society there is a really great. I can't remember his name. He's a German economist. And he. When he was asked for a definition of money, which we'll get to what money is, capital is in a second. His definition of money is. He says it is a society, a way that a society. What does he say? Like speaks about their moral value or speaks about like. It is a way that society, like, transmits their. Their sort of, like, social value, not in terms of buying things, but in terms of, like, what they believe about their society, whatever. So he says wealth is by law, the way that you can make money. The way that you can have wealth in your society is the. Is the way that you exist in that society. Society. All right, a couple other words, other definitions. There. So then you've got. So you've got wealth. The means of production is what is that instrument or that kind of thing that is used to generate wealth. So the example that he gives is always the. Is the very agrarian one. You have a farm, and on that farm you have the actual land. That is a means of production. You have the barns, wherein you can keep your animals or you can keep your. Your storehouses. That is a means of production because it helps the farm grow. You have the tools. Even though the tool by itself doesn't do anything. It is a handmaiden to producing wealth. So it is a means of production. And so the means of production are the things that a human being can apply himself to in order to generate wealth. The thing that we. That the human being applies himself to to generate wealth, he calls labor the work that we do. So you. So AJ Has a shovel, and with that shovel he can dig up a field, and he can put a plant in that field. And that plant grows, and he has that. His labor has now produced wealth. And the wealth is the food that he has that gets to sustain his life. Capital. Money is the thing that we use as sort of like a placeholder for wealth. Let's see if we can find the good to such wealth reserved and set aside for the purposes of future production and not for immediate consumption, whether it be the form of instruments and tools or in the form of stores for maintenance of labor during the process of production, we give the name capital. So I guess he calls instruments and tools capital, which I guess makes sense in the form of stores for the maintenance of labor during the process of production, we give the name capital. So, and so there are thus three factors in the production of all human wealth which we may conveniently term land. Capital. And labor. These three things. Okay. When we talk of the means of production, we signify land and capital combined. Thus, when we say that a man is dispossessed of the means of production or cannot produce wealth saved by the leave of another who possesses the means of production, we mean that he is the master only of his labor and has no control in any useful amount over either capital or. Or land, or both combined. So if you have capital but no access to land, you lose the means of production. If you have access to land but you don't have the capital, whether that's the tools or whether that's the means to acquire the tools, you have been dispossessed of your means of production and you are no longer being able to produce wealth. We tracking.
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C
Okay. Yes.
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B
So he distinguishes between private property. So property is a term used for that arrangement in society whereby the control of land and of wealth made from land, including, therefore, all the means of production, is vested in some person or corporation. So we call property that which is some sort of, like, productive thing that can produce wealth. We call it property. There's private property. So AJ Owns a farm, or AJ Owns a shop through which he sells things, so which he sells tools. So he would be selling something that would be considered capital to somebody else to use in their production of wealth. And then there is public property. The public property. Is owned by sort of the. The city. What distinguishes private property is not that the possessor thereof is less than the state or is only part of the state, but rather that the owner may exercise his control over it to his own advantage and not as a trustee for society nor in the hierarchy of political institutions. Thus, Mr. Jones is a citizen of Manchester, but he does not own his private property as a citizen of Manchester. He owns it as Mr. Jones. Whereas if the house next to his own be owned by the Manchester municipality, they own it only because they are a political body standing for the whole community of the town. So if AJ Owns his farm, he does not own his farm as an Austinite or as an American or as someone in Travis County.
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A
Teacher at Veritas.
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B
Teacher at Veritas. He owns it as A.J. the man.
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C
Right.
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B
Whereas if a. A government. If a. If a corporation owns something, or if the public. Maybe no, we should. Public property. If. If the city owns something, they own it as being sort of the. This institution of. Of the whole. AJ can move to Florida and still own his property, but Austin can't move to Florida and still own their property.
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C
Sure.
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B
Does that make sense? Okay, Cool. Cool. All Right. Then we have something, what he calls. We have a. Let's see, he's just continuing to define terms at the beginning of the book. And so I know it's kind of maybe boring because we're not really at the interesting parts yet, but I think it's kind of really important for us to define these terms. An ideal society in which the means of production should be in the hands of the political officers of the community, we call collectivist or more generally socialist. So if the means of production is all basically public property, or if the means of production is in the hands of the municipality or in the hands of the state, we call that. He calls the old term collectivist or socialist. Okay.
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A
And that's what he's for.
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He know, the thing is, he is not saying what he's for or against. Now ultimately we're going to find out. He does. First of all, he doesn't think pure collectivism or pure communism will ever work or can ever work. But he's, but his, his fear is not in collectivism. He's not scared. This is not a red scare book. He's not scared of communism. He's scared of the servile state, and he's getting to talk about what that is in a second. He sort of, at least in this book, he kind of hand waves collectivism away. He thinks that like a hardcore communist society where the, where the, the, the means of production are owned by the state, he doesn't think will ever work. And he thinks that any kind of attempt to move a capitalist system, which we're about to define in a second into more of a socialist system is actually just hastening on servility. Okay, so we'll get to that too.
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C
Servile is not one of these two poles. It's something else.
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B
Yes. Okay. And so if we, if you want to know exactly what he's for, ultimately, Hilaire Belloc wants to have the means of production as widely distributed in society as possible. But, but he's not really making that argument in this book. He was. So we talk more about that in the distributors episode like six years ago. Whatever. All right, Yeah. A society in which private property in land and capital, that is the ownership and therefore the control of the means of production is confined to some number of free citizens not large enough to determine the social mass of the state, while the rest have not such property and are therefore proletarian. Proletarian are people that don't own property but work for wages.
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C
Right.
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B
We call capitalist. So the society in where The. The means of production and the ownership is owned by a group of people that don't make up the vast majority of the state. We would call that. We call that capitalist. And the method by which wealth is produced in such a society can only be the application of labor, the determining mass of which must necessarily be proletarian to land and capital in such fashion that of the total wealth produced, the proletariat, which labors shall only receive a portion. So in that sort of society where the means of production is owned by a few, what the vast majority of people have is all they have is they have their labor, they can apply their work to something and they get some fruits of that work, but the fruits of that work, but they are not the owners of the means of production.
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A
So the majority of the fruits go somewhere else.
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B
The majority of the thing is, you could even be in a capitalist society where the majority of the fruits go to you, but you still don't own anything. Right? But that which we call a capitalist society is where, yes, the vast majority of the ownership of the means of production is in the hands of a fewer people. And therefore the vast majority of people in that society, all they have to apply into the world is their work, is their labor, and they get a wage. And he's also not saying that that's bad. In fact, later on he says the servile state may not even be the worst thing in the world. But he says, but it's definitely not free. Yeah. Okay, the two marks then, defining the capitalist state are one, that the citizens thereof are politically free. It's very important, okay? So you can be. You can work for a wage, and you can. All you have to do is. You're selling your time for money to. We're defining the capitalist state, not the capitalist state. We're not getting to. The serval state is you are politically free. You can vote, you're free. You are free to not work if you don't want to. You're still free, I. E. You're politically free, I. E. Can use or withhold at will their possessions or their labor, but are also too divided into capitalist and proletarian in such proportions that the state as a whole is not characterized by the institution of ownership among free citizens, but by the restriction of ownership to a section markedly less than the whole or even to a small minority. His definition of the capitalist society, and it can be very. We can actually argue, if we think we live in a society that he defines as capitalist, we may not actually, according to his definitions, but he says capitalist societies where people are politically free. AJ you don't have to work if you don't want to. But the vast majority of the ownership in that society is lopsided. The productive assets are owned by a small. And so the tenor and sort of ethos of the society is governed more by people working for wages. Labor, proletariat. Right. That's the capitalist society. Are we tracking?
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C
Yeah, I mean, that describes us, right?
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B
I think that describes us.
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C
Okay. Yeah.
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B
The vast majority of us work for a wage. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
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C
And it's not good or bad.
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B
It's not good or bad. That's just what he calls a capitalist society. But what he does is going to say is a society that works like that can't. Doesn't remain stationary. Okay. It always moves. And so my last definition concerns the servile state itself. So here we go. And since the idea is both somewhat novel and also the subject of this book, I will not only establish but expand its definition. The definition of the servile state is as follows. That arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labor for the advantage of other families and individuals. And as this as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labor, we call the servile state.
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C
That's not anything people have to work, they're not allowed to own.
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B
So there's like. I guess we.
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A
How's that different than the capitalist?
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B
Well, we could talk about that. There is sort of a. Well, the capitalist would be. The politically free would be that all of a sudden it's illegal for you not to work. Got it. And we don't have that. That would be sort of a hard servile state where it is illegal for you not to be a productive member of society in that sense.
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C
But then who owns. Are there individuals that own companies or own the means of production or corporations? In the servile state?
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B
Yes, in the servile state for sure.
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C
It doesn't have to be the government.
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B
The servile state is not communism. Yeah, servile state can be. Basically, you could think of it as a corporatism or you could think of it as like a small number of people or a small number of companies are owning all of the sort of means of production. And we sort of. And a complete servile state is like we are required by positive law to actually have to work for these companies. But then there's also a. So that would be now a legal. A legal serval state. Is what he calls a slavery. So that when you've codified into law that you have to work for somebody for the rest of your life. That's, that's what we call slavery.
- [24:25]
C
Yeah, sure.
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B
But the servile state, he says you can have a hoff version, a sort of a weak version of slavery, which is not by law, but it's by de facto. Like so you are not a slave by legal law, but you, but you.
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A
Can'T really get away with not doing it.
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B
You can't get away with not interfacing with the proletariat kind of society.
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C
But is that so, like things cost money. I get my money from working. That's the servile state kind of.
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B
But he's, that's a weaker version. That's a weaker version. So let's. Yeah, so let's keep on going with this. So the serval state is you actually you're legally free, but you're essentially managed and forced to play the game or to work, to work for this cap, for this system. Okay, right. So I forgot to print it off and look at it. I have this, this, this description that I found of somebody was talking about life in this small town of Appalachia before the coal mining corporations came in. Where most people just based on how the geography of Appalachia was, was most people were just on small little self subservient freeholding farms. And they sort of described the daily life of a person. And you know, you would look at them and you would say they were poor, but everybody sort of had the same level of income because there was not enough room for them to grow and expand to like get bigger farms and whatnot. Basically the geography of the region kind of constrained people just to have self, sorry subservient farms. And even in the like the mid 19th century you still had people that were like making their own clothes and tanning their own leather and you just. Roads weren't going in their stores weren't going into their. People were basically like survivalists and growing food and, and, and hunting and fishing and whatnot. And I wanted to, to, to read it because that description of that little, that little life was kind of like a great example of, of the, of the, the property owning freedom that, that Hillary Bellock's talking about. Again we may look at that and say like, I don't want to live a subserve, a subsistence lifestyle in the mountains of Appalachia. Like my modern economic world that I live in is pretty awesome. Yeah. And Hillary Bellock would Say, you're probably not wrong, but it's not. But it's not as much. But it is A, not a free or free society as it could be. And B, it is also maybe moving towards a harder form of civility if we're not careful. All right, so let's keep on trucking here. So we've got our terms now. And so he gives this. He says when it comes to thinking about servile or slave, he says you could very easily go and talk to. He says, yes, you're not legally a slave, basically be by in the servile state, but you could go and talk to a Roman in maybe the second century A.D. and say, like, hey, is Rome ruled by a king? And they'd be like, no, we're Rome. We hate kings. We abolish the monarchy. Oh, by the way, I love the emperor.
- [27:45]
C
That's right.
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B
Yeah. And so he says, like, oh, if you live in the servile state, are you a slave? And be like, no, we abolish slavery. We don't have slavery in our society. Oh, by the way, like, I'm in debt and I have to work.
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A
I have to go to work.
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B
I have to go to work, and there's nothing I really can do about it. So he sort of says, you know, let's. He, he says, like, we. There's again, there's positive law and then there's de facto and anyway, so, okay, where do we want to go from here? Let's talk a little bit of more.
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C
You'll get there eventually. But I'm like, not. I want to be convinced the servile state is bad because, like, what have we lost? We get wealth, we get things. And like, people probably always have to work. Like, even in your Appalachia example, you have to like, get your food right.
- [28:33]
B
Yeah, it's that. It's that you are not dependent on a third party get telling you how much you get. So in like a pure capitalism. So this is, so this is how it goes. So in like a pure capitalism, you have to go work at the factory and then the boss comes down, he's like, you're, you're making $3 an hour. And the only way that you can get more than $3 an hour is you need to sort of like form a labor union. And then you have to like, stand in a picket line and get your head bashed in and fight for sort of more money. Or you need to go and lobby your government and the government needs to come on your behalf and say, hey, capitalists you need to pay them more. We're going to create a law that requires you to pay them more. In both of those cases, like, you either need to go and like fight against the factory owner and this is, you know, this is the story of 19th century America, or you need to go and you need to hope that the government is going to go fight on your behalf. In the app, in the, in the example of where you own the means of production yourself, you are, you get 100% of what is produced for good or for bad, which could be Starbucks. So if you have a bumper crop, it's all, it's yours. If. As opposed to if you. And if you have a plague of a potato famine, you, you are in trouble.
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A
Right.
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B
So whereas like Thomas, if you work better at your job and you make the company more money, they will only give you more money if they sort of realize that that's probably like a good thing to keep you on board. But, but unless they've structured their, their company in such a way where, yeah, you have a share in the company.
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C
Right.
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B
But otherwise, like, if you work harder, you don't necessarily make more money. If the company makes more money, you believe that.
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C
I don't know, people get promoted, they get paid differently.
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B
Well then that's the thing. And then, and these are the.
- [30:36]
C
But that's more capitalist as opposed Servile is like you're stuck in this spot, you're told how much to work. Work is mandatory.
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B
Okay. Yeah.
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C
So it is more. Yeah.
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B
Okay.
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C
It's worse.
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A
Or he's responsible capitalism without the opt out.
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B
It's capitalism. Capitalism.
- [30:55]
A
I can be like, screw this. I'm going to like.
- [30:56]
B
All right, I was going to say I was my example of what I. Of how the servile state could go in the modern world to the end. But maybe this is a really helpful way to do it. Okay, so let's say that there's a. Let's give me a second, I need. I was going to work my way up to it, but let's see if I can find that, find the quote where he talks about this.
- [31:10]
C
If you want to work up to it, we can get.
- [31:12]
B
No, it's fine. I think I have it because he spent. He spends a delightful time talking about the Middle Ages and why we didn't have the same kind of slavery in the Middle Ages as we did in the classical world. But let me see if you just.
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C
Is it because. Because you're working, you have to make a certain amount to give to the owner.
- [31:34]
B
Okay, now we'll get to that. So, all right, let me. So here's the example of like maybe we can think about it in the modern terms. So we have a concentration of property in the hands of fewer people and they employ people to work and shoot, I really do need to find the quote in order to say this. Sorry guys, here we go. All right, so this, he, he talks about this when he says when the. When you have a government that comes in and they are trying to give socialist policies to help the worker, you actually further entrench humans dependency on the structures that are going to lead to servility. Yep. So here, here's the example. You can say to the capitalist, I desire to dispossess you. And meanwhile I am determined that your employees shall live tolerable lives. The capitalist replies, I refuse to be dispossessed and it is short of catastrophe, impossible to dispossess me. The catastrophe being like the complete taking of the private property. But if you will define the relation between my employees and myself, I will undertake particular responsibilities due to my position, subject the proletarian as a proletarian. Due to my position, sorry, subject the proletarian as a proletarian and because he is a proletarian to special laws clothe me the capitalist as a capitalist and because I am a capitalist with special converse duties under those laws, I will faithfully see that they are obeyed, I will compel my employees to obey them, and I will undertake the new role imposed upon me by the state. Nay, I will go further and I will say that such a novel arrangement will make my own profits perhaps larger and certainly more secure. So the capitalist owns the factory and he's sort of like screwing over the worker. And the government comes in and says nuh, not anymore, we are not anymore we're going to have minimum wage laws or you need to guarantee health care, or you need to make their lives better. And the capitalist may originally be like, or we're going to take your factory away or whatever. And he says okay, well I want these things, then we're going to hash out how these things are going to be favorable. So, so now we create. So okay, fine, then the inter. Then the interface that most people have in society is going to be through me, their employer, or through some sort of employer. That means that people in that society need to accept the available jobs that are there or they sort of lose their access to capital, money or insurance or definitely stability. And if they don't play the game of being employed well, then they have the freedom to drop out of that society, which is kind of a crappy freedom. Well, the state so. And then now the state steps in and says like the state steps in not to restore ownership but to manage the, this dependent relationship. And so they come in and they say like, okay, well we're going to lessen the effects that you have and sort of raise the floor for the workers. But by so doing you make employment to the company. Like the main interface of society which is, you know, and you're not currently.
- [35:12]
A
Talking about our, like capitalism, our society.
- [35:16]
B
It's up to you to decide, I guess.
- [35:17]
C
But it would be a capitalist society. It's further entrenching this requirement.
- [35:21]
B
It's for further entrenching this requirement. Well, he basically says that capitalism just becomes servile unless we, unless we read, unless we figure out a ways to promote property ownership. So insofar as the, as the vast majority of people in society are working for wages and don't own means of production, you are in a capitalist society that is moving towards the dangers of servility where it can either be enshrined into law or it can be de facto. You just have to, you basically just like you have to have a middle class, you just have to have a job in order to exit to survive. You can't survive. Yeah, you need to like that's, that's the main way we get your insurance. That's the main way where you negotiate health care. That's the main way where you, where you sort of the things about you as a, as a citizen are even known. Like your taxes are sort of through. Most of these things are sort of through your employer. So anyway, those things can become unbalanced and the owners end up sort of like screwing over the worker. And, and then the government comes in and says, we're going to manage this relationship. But, but they don't come in to restore ownership. They don't come in to say, like, listen, well, what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to get as many people out from working as you as possible and starting their own kinds of things. They say, no, we're going to try to manage to make their lives better under you. And the capitalist says, cool. Write laws for them that they need to follow as employees. Write laws for me that I need to follow as a capitalist. And now you are further entrenching those two camps in the.
- [36:58]
A
I'm all for it because now, because now everything I'm doing is like legal.
- [37:02]
B
Now I've got actually positive law that is making my ownership of these assets even, even maybe more secure, like more thorough. Yeah. And so then you have laws that enshrine this dependency employees. So you could have things where it's like employees actually have to have insurance or.
- [37:23]
A
But to make it truly servile, would it be, have, would it be people have to have insurance?
- [37:28]
B
Well, it's just you, you have laws wherein, and this is probably not where we're at, but you have laws where you can say things like we definitely don't have this, but you can have it where it's like you need to be working to vote.
- [37:40]
C
Right.
- [37:41]
B
Okay. Or you need to be working, you need to have a job in order to get a credit score in order to buy property. There's no other way to get it. We, we don't have that now.
- [37:51]
A
We kind of like you're not going to get a loan without a job.
- [37:54]
B
You're not going to get a loan without, without cash flow for sure. Yeah. You can't just hold up your potential future labor as collateral for your. You can't just say I'm going to work really hard.
- [38:07]
A
So. Because if you don't have a job, you essentially end up on the streets. Are we in a servile state? Is this the question we're sort of leading up to?
- [38:16]
B
If we made homelessness illegal in that sense, it's like if we force people to work, then we're in a servile state. Right.
- [38:21]
A
So the moment we make homelessness illegal.
- [38:23]
B
I don't know about that. But the thing is we could be already de facto in a servile state because the two options are. Well, the thing is, and this is maybe the genius of America is that there's always a third option of like we do, we have kind of figured out how to leverage loans to make small businesses. So a small business is where you as the owner of that small business are the, you have the right to all of those profits that is more, according to Belloc, more free than working your job.
- [38:58]
A
So it could be a perfectly fine capitalist society depending on if you can own a small business. So, so where does it become?
- [39:06]
B
A lot of society has ethos towards more widely distributed business ownership. So distributors policies or policies that Hillary Belloc would think would be good for human freedom would be policies that prevented monopolization or big companies eating up smaller little companies. Got it. Okay. Walmart coming in and ruining six family owned small businesses in your small town. But they are bringing in their supply chains and their cheaper prices and their. And then instead of you working for your dad's haberdashery, you now wear a little yellow vest and work for Walmart for Walmart hats. Yeah. Again, Hillary Bellock's not saying that that's bad. He's just saying that the person who's wearing the vest and working for Walmart is the goodness of his life or the tolerability of his life is going to be managed by people outside of his control.
- [40:03]
A
Right.
- [40:03]
B
More like he, he either has to lobby the business to make his life better or he has to lobby the government to make his life better. Whereas, and maybe this is romantic and people have, have accused Celia Belloc of being romantic. Whereas the person. If you have the complete. Me, if you have the complete control over the means of your production in many ways, like outside, you know, famines and forces and no rainfall or whatever. Like, if you like, what makes your life better is the amount of work that you're putting into the thing that you own. And he's going to give the, he's going to talk about a period of history that he thought was the most distributist period of history. And it was the period when he thought that servility and slavery was at its lowest. He says servile states are the norm through history. Now he's, he's mainly talking about Western civilization. He says Rome, servile state, like small amount of people owned the villas and the vast majority of people were either like, were either positively legally slaves or were people who were sort of dependent on wages. And he says it is no coincidence that as, as things became as sort of a more capitalist model became more enshrined after the Renaissance, that you had a massive explosion in growth in global slavery. He says, and he says people tend to think that the reason why we have capitalism was because of the Industrial revolution. But he says it's the opposite. He says capitalism actually, and that sort of, that consolidation of assets actually ends up producing technological advances. It's not technological. Technological advances don't come first. It's that they come from people that are getting factories. People are pulling capital and saying, like, man, how can I make this cheaper for myself? Yeah. And so he says, and then, and so when you do that, like when you pool a bunch of your resources and you say, man, I got a lot of farmland and I personally can't manage this myself. I need people to do this. You either need to pay those people or you need to, or you need to force those people to do it. And so he says when you have the centralization of capital and productive land and productive assets, he says, it is a pretty easy jump to start having slavery make a comeback in a big way. And this is the history of the 16th and 17th century. Is the history of global slavery on the rise now? He says he makes a defense for when the servile state was at its lowest in Europe and that was during the Middle Ages. Let me just look at if I can find what he says about this. It's very interesting. Okay, here we go on his chapter three of the book is called how the Servile Institution Was for a time Dissolved. He said the process by which slavery disappeared among Christian men, though very lengthy in its development, it covered about a thousand years and though exceedingly complicated in its detail, may be easily and briefly grasped in its main lines. Let it first be clearly understood that the vast revolution through which the European mind passed between the first and the fourth centuries, that revolution which is often termed the conversion of the world to Christianity, but which should purposes of historical accuracy be called, the growth of the Church, included no attack upon the servile institution. So in the first 400 years of the Christian Church, no Christians stood up and said, like, we got to get rid of the, the, the economic forces of Rome, our corporate overlords. Correct. We don't need to get rid of. We don't need to abolish slavery on dogmatic grounds. We don't. We don't need to abolish like people selling themselves into, into ways of making money. Human says for 400 years, the church doesn't stand to do that. No dogma of the Church pronounced slavery to be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labor upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right. He said in early, in the early Church, there was no. Against human bondage Papal documents. And he's not wrong. So don't think that this is Christians coming in and having some sort of view of, of the, of the human person that abolishes slavery. The emancipation of slaves, he says, was indeed regarded as a good work by the faithful, but so it was regarded by the pagan. It was on the face of it, a service rendered to one's fellow men, like pagans. And Christians saw liberating somebody from slavery as kind of like a nice thing, as a good thing. The sale of pagans, of Christians to pagan masters was abhorrent. Let's just jump over that. But he says, but what ended up happening was in the dissolution of the Roman Empire is that the very important thing is that men, human beings, began to be associated with pieces of land. So people weren't mobile, people stayed working the same plot of land for generations and generations and generations. And he says the slave was still a slave, but it was both more convenient in the decay of communications and public power. So you have this sort of breakdown of a well functioning empire and more consonant with the social spirit of the time, to make sure of that slave's produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues, the slave and his descendants became more or less rooted to one spot. Some were still bought and sold, but in decreasing numbers as the generations passed, a larger and a larger proportion lived where and as their fathers had lived. And the produce which they raised was fixed more and more at a certain amount which the lord was content to receive and ask no more. The arrangement was made workable by leaving the slave all the remaining produce of his own labor. So in other words, as time went on, people began to be synonymous with the place and they didn't move and, and yes, so you, you ended up having sort of three kinds of, of, of sort of social bodies that took place in the Middle Ages. You had the serf, which is the person that lived on that land, has always lived on that land, has always worked that land, doesn't own the land, sends a portion of his, of his, of his goods to the owner of that land and gets to keep the rest. And in the Middle Ages, this is debatable, Hilaire Belloc says, and in the Middle Ages, the amount of produce that the serf got to keep was, was quite a bit something like it, like a 10% went to the Lord and 90% went to the serf.
- [47:06]
A
Pretty good.
- [47:08]
B
So in other words, the dues which he was customary bound to pay were but a fraction of its total produce. He could not always sell it, but it was always inheritable from father to son. So you have this inheritance rights. If you were a serf, your kid was also going to work that land. Even if you didn't, even if the land was owned by somebody else, it was inherited. And in general, at the close of this long process of a thousand years, the slave had become a free man for all the ordinary purposes of society. He bought and sold, he saved as he willed, he invested, he built, he drained at his discretion. And if he improved the land, it was to his own profit. And so he says, by the end of the Middle Ages, you kind of had these three people, the Serf who didn't own the land, but was what got to enjoy the fruits, the vast majority of the fruits of it. The freeholder, the person who did own the land and got to have a. And was. And had to pay no money to no man, except maybe small taxes to his king for like the maintenance of the woods and the roads and that kind of thing. And then the guild. The guild was the place where you would go and you could learn to do trades and practices. And the guild had its own ownership of things. And that was more of public property was the guild.
- [48:22]
A
Right.
- [48:23]
B
So he said you have those three things. The rest of the book of Balak is his argument of history where he says the great thing that ended up destroying and creating the servile state was not the industrial revolution, but was when was a couple of land reform acts that Henry VIII made in the 1500s or 1600s, saying that we needed to consolidate the farms in order to make them more productive. And he gave those farms in basically one generation. The farms went from being this patchwork of tiny little homesteads to I think 13 lords owned like the vast majority, like owned the majority of the land. And then that. And then they decided that they were going to sort of like, what they did was they. They cut down the hedgerows which were sort of separate the plots to sort of say like, this is my big piece of land that had ecological problems which took them a long time to rectify. But you sort of had this, this kind of like way of life devastation that came through a consolidation. Now that consolidation was messy, but it also, it moved us towards a capitalist society, moved us towards innovation, it moved us towards technological advances. And if you want to be positive for this, it moved us towards a higher standard of living for people. But Belair Heller Belloc says, but it definitely moved us away from a freer society to more of a managed. A society that required more management of labor than otherwise had been before. A medieval lord didn't really think too much about the work of his serfs. Yeah. As long as he got 100% right. But the owner of a thousand acres of land has to think to himself, like, I really need to figure out how to get these guys to work better. And you can do that in a humane way or you do that in an inhumane way.
- [50:25]
A
Yeah.
- [50:26]
B
And the history of the consolidation of assets is rife with both examples. Humane people figuring out how to make lives better for people who work for them, and then also the stories of people who don't. So Hilaire Belloc's whole point in this is to say that a servile state, maybe you may think it's better than a medieval living off the land. But, but he says that as time goes on and as, as more and more consolidation happens, society basically moves to what happens to every family game of Monopoly. Either one person owns up everything and everyone feels kind of ends. Wherever one person owns everything, the game's done. Or Monopoly ends in socialist revolution and someone flips the board and says, I friggin hate this game and leaves. I'm not paying $700 to stay your stupid hotel. And Belloc says that this is the problem is that when you have, if you're going to have a society where the vast majority of productive property is owned by smaller and smaller people, you need a bigger and a bigger government hand to either play referee between capitalist and proletariat. And, but you are just, he says, slowly, slowly you are going to be enshrining into law. So it's like, all right, Thomas, you capitalist, here are all the rules you need to follow for your employee. And Thomas says, okay, I'm going to follow those rules, but in order for me to follow those rules, I need to, you know, there need to be rules on, on my worker so that like, I need to know that he's going to be coming in, you know, and so, all right, so now AJ you've got some rules you need to follow and we can get to the point where we realize, man, the only way that I can exist in society is I need to like, be working a job and I need to be selling my time for wages and I'm either skilled enough to be able to sell my time in such a way where I've got leverage and I can make a lot of money, my skills are needed, or frankly my skills aren't really needed. And I, for whatever reason, and now like, I'm just sort of resigned to a cap on my, on my salary, on my wages. And that's sort of, and I'm now like beholden to, to a company. Hillary Belloc says you could totally, he says you could totally imagine a scenario where somebody realizes that he is on the, he does not have a strong hand in order to negotiate his labor for a wage. And when an employer comes and says, hey, I'll give you a job for life, A.J. i'll give you 60 grand for the rest of your life. Google says, I'll give you $60,000 for the rest of your life. You have to work for me. You can't quit quit. You have to stay in the, the place where I need you to work. So you need to stay in Austin. You can't move, but you get a guaranteed job for life. The amount of people willing to sign that contract is not zero. Right. But that is. Hiller Belloc says, like call what you want, but you're now a slave. You, you sold your life to somebody. He doesn't get into the idea that with debts being passed down in families that you can create that sort of de facto slavery where it's like all of a sudden you need to work because you are already behind the financial eight ball. Like you have debt, you need to pay back. Hilaire Belloc has not conceived of having to spend $80,000 to go to college to get a career. And then you have to find a job to be able to start paying that back. But people have pointed to that as a potential servile state kind of problem. And he says eventually something sides got to give. Eventually the government gets so frustrated with the capitalists that it says we're just going to do all of this. And they become a socialist state or collectivist state or communist state or the capitalists. The capitalist side of things becomes more efficient and better at negotiating this kind.
- [54:22]
A
Of stuff or gain so much power.
- [54:24]
B
Gain so much power that you become, become a corporatist state. And you basically are run by these megacorps and you and the mega corps in fact themselves are more powerful than the government. And, and we're now living in some sort of like cyberpunk dystopian corporate future. And, and, and so this is what he means when he says that, like that's that sort of pull quote that it says if we do not restore the institution of property, we cannot escape restoring the institution of slavery. There is no third course. Belloc's criticized us saying like he just wants us to go be farmers. And Chesterton became famous by saying that his political, his economic theory was 2 acres and a cow. That was his, his theory. But that's not necessarily fair. There are examples of basically economic and political freedom needs to be measured by the ability, by the sort of the, the, the freedom that you have over your time and over your labor and your ability to not work. So people dream of fu Money, right? Like people dream of having enough money in the stock market that they can live off their dividends. That is a, you could say that. That is a. Belloc will look at that and say like that man is free, right? That he has a means of Production, basically he's owning shares in companies of people of lots of these people who are producing for him. But, but anyway, this is. He says that like a capitalist model is moving towards servility and even wealth. The wealth thinking people who are trying to make the lives better for the worker are just further entrenching a system and it's very hard. Or, and he's even saying it may not even be desirable to go to a more free society economically. Economic freedom also means like the freedom to starve, the freedom to fail, the freedom to not be successful. Whereas when you live in a more dependent society, like, yeah, say what you will about having to work 40 hours a week, it's just only 40. Or say what you will about having to. I always think of office space. Office space is always my thought of this. Like Office space is a movie about people realizing that they live in a servile state. Right. Like that is, that is. And then like I'm realizing that they, they want economic freedom. But as Belloc himself says, it's not necessarily the worst way that human society can exist. But we need to be clear eyed as to what it can easily grow into. Right. And, and people who think that they are actually lessening the effects of the capitalist servile state by making governmental policies that make it easier for workers to work are in fact further entrenching people into that kind of society. If people really wanted to be free, people would be working towards owning something that gave them wealth in the way that he has defined it, which is the means to, to sort of fare for yourself. So I don't know how much time we have left.
- [57:47]
A
Like four minutes.
- [57:48]
B
Yeah. So in my, like, in my daydreams, I romantic I very much. We've talked about this on, in betweens, on other episodes. I always sort of like romanticize living in a cottage on a lake that has a lot of fish in it, like in Canada, because those things are everywhere. And I just love the idea of like, maybe we talked about this in Thoreau. Like you're having a little, you're having a little vegetable garden and you have like, you, you have a freezer and you've like hunted your food and you can go fishing, but there comes a point where you have clothes and you have your home and you have a firewood and you have everything that you need for your living, your subsistence. And if you have a couple of books in your, on your bookcase, like you get to a point where it's 11:30 on a Wednesday and you have Everything that you need and you can do what you want. As opposed to 1130 this, you know, this coming Wednesday. Everyone who's listening to this, unless they're in that position, you know, has sort of these kind of complicated obligations. Now, that's a very romantic picture. I, I understand that, that, like, you know, things are more complicated than that. And, and when I really think about it, it's like, do I. Is that really the vision that I think is good for human society is just to all us live in these sort of. The sort of like small pastoral lives. Part of me says, yeah. And then part of me says, like, ah, that's not realistic. That's not.
- [59:19]
C
Isn't your time better used by being at the school and like, teaching the next generation? Like, isn't that.
- [59:25]
B
Yeah, yeah, but, yes, but, but the other thing is, like, there's so much time wasted at school. Like, could I also teach the next generation in the leisure that comes with. I don't know that. With wealth, with having, with having true wealth, which is the, the, you know, access to my own means of production that produces the things that I need. Do we get into the sort of hedonic treadmill of modern life where we have to like, buy your car to drive to work? Drive to work to pay for your car? Right? Like, that's the. To steal a line from Metric, a Canadian punk band. I guess they're not punk, they're kind of like new wave, you know, Metric.
- [60:00]
A
Yeah, I know.
- [60:01]
B
Okay. Metric. Yeah.
- [60:02]
C
I do not know Emily Haynes.
- [60:03]
B
I had massive crush on her when I was young.
- [60:06]
A
And on that note, anyway, we can.
- [60:08]
B
Talk more about this in between, but that's. That is Hilar Belloc. It's a great read. I wouldn't say that he has like, masterful command over the English language just because, like, it reads kind of like point form notes, as you maybe heard as I read it. But that is, it is a great book. It has been very influential in my life. I am no collectivist, I am no communist, I am no socialist. But I'm also. I've always chafed at the idea that the alternative just has to be like, like pure free market capitalism, because there's. There are intolerances to human life and human dignity and the human person in that system as well. So if you have ever felt that, that the tension between, you know, the horrors of communism, but also the, the seemingly. And just thought that, I guess, well, just pure free market capitalism had to be the lesser of two evils. Read some bullet, read some Belloc. On this. Read the Servile state. Go read an essay on the restoration of property. That's it. It's good stuff. Personally, I'm still, like, on the fence. I'm like, is he naive? Or maybe he's right in saying that economic freedom is, like, harder and dangerous than we think it is. And maybe we don't want it. Maybe we do want to be governed and maybe we do just want to sell our. Sell our time for 80 grand a year.
- [61:28]
C
Let's talk in the. In between. All right. Let's figure it out.
- [61:30]
B
Ciao.
- [61:30]
C
All right.
- [61:31]
A
This has been Classical Stuff youf Should know. You can find us a few places. You can email us@theguyslassicalstuff.net we will respond to you if we can. We read them, but we don't always have time to respond. You can find our website@classicalstuff.net you can patronize us at patreon.com classicalstuff where you can find in between episodes, we're about to make one right now. And you can also find a monthly AMA and occasionally a few other things that we want to throw up there. And then you can also find us on the tweeters. Lsscal stuff. And I think that's it.
- [62:03]
C
That's it.
- [62:04]
A
That's it. Bye bye.
- [62:12]
B
Sam.