Anantonese Journal of Economics and Theory

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Morality as Order: A Comparative Systems look at Illiberal Regimes

Written by Dr. Constance Bauer
Dept. Of Political Science
Duchy of Vrassa University, Vrassa Free City, Kalistan

originally published in Hoy Gazette of Theory, April 30, 5664

Acknowledgements
This article is written in direct response to the article titled "Against the concept of 'democracy': An article regarding our notion of democracy and why it is not the 'highest morality'" in Gazeta Socjalistyczna (April 5664). In this article, Chancellor Iwan Nowik makes the case for communism and communist ideals as a more important, and more moral force in Valruzian politics contra liberal democracy. The thesis of the Chancellor was that democracy is routinely labeled as the ideal, but it is communism, and in fact communist morality that is actually a far better for the people. We have been tasked with writing an article to conclude that the Chancellor is correct, but at the same time, the focus on communism is limiting, because it doesn't preserve order in society.

While not aiming to fully contradict the conclusions of the Chancellor, we simply wish to respond that using a revolutionary ideal that focuses on material considerations rather than moral ones as a guiding and organizing principle for the society is perhaps not itself ideal. What is placed by a revolution can be unplaced by a revolution. It is far more important to institutionalize and preserve the changes that have been made to the betterment of the lives of individuals, and that mindset necessarily runs counter to the revolutionary imperatives of the communist ideology. We thank the Chancellor for the inspiration to write this piece reflecting the Imperial perspective. --CB

Introduction: Kalistan's Flirtation with Democracy
The argument has been proposed that democracy, while universally lauded as "the best system", is in fact, not even close to the ideal system, if your goal is to do more than simply enabling elites by cloaking their actions in the legitimizing fabric of a popular election. Elections do not determine good leaders, but merely popular leaders. And it is no surprise that the same elites who represent the people in a democracy happen to be the ones who the Parties, and the TV stations, and the paid advertisements tell you to vote for.

In fact, during Kalistan's recent flirtation with liberalization of the political system--A mistake on a number of fronts-- Kalistan saw direct mailing volume increase by 2350%. This stat from the National Mail Service is not inflated: in fact during campaign season you can see the number of items mailed jump from an an average of 230,000 items in a day to several dozens of millions of items in a day as politicians from all stripes attempted to hit ever house with junk political mail, all either slandering their opponent, or promising voters something that it was not within their power to grant, or both. The goal was not to suggest a positive vision for the nation, but to keep a person's name and image top of mind when voters went to the polls.

And who paid for those ads? Certainly not the person receiving them in the mail: In fact, we know who paid for them because campaign contributions are a matter of public record. Many times it was industry organizations, or long standing interest groups who paid for them, but often is was shadowy political action committees with names like "Kalistanis for Choice" (which is an industry organization made up of groups promoting free trade and preferential taxes for investors), "Libertad Suldanor" (a staunchly anti-monarchist group), of "The Kalistani Fun Association" (a group that sought to turn publicly funded schools into private, for profit institutions). These groups dumped tons of money into the campaigns, and most Kalistanis didn't even know it.

What that system would offer Kalistan is government of interest groups and aligned, self interested blocs. That is what democracy is in our world today. It is a political system that tricks people into voting for things that they don't know they are voting for. It doesn't provide them with good government, only self-interested government. When I use the term "good" I don't mean efficient. I mean it in a moral sense: as in Well Ordered Government. A government that legitimately does the business of the people, without regard to internal struggling and jostling for an iota more power than your opponents, a system that is not limited in its focus to just the next election, but to seven generations down the line, and a system which can think with a unified concept and strategic vision for where the society is headed. Democracy does not provide a competent pilot for the ship of state. It only provides the person who can trick the plurality of people who neither know how to sail the ship themselves nor care, into selecting them.

Though it is a fact that democracy provides bad government far more often than good government, what we wish to focus on here is specifically illiberal systems and the term "well ordered". While communist systems can also provide leadership with a clear and unified vision for the society, they are necessarily a revolutionary ideology focused on parochial interests of only a segment of society. Without disparaging the communists, in this way they are also the same thing as the Fascists. And I suppose the Absolutists as well. All have a guiding principle. Communism is proletarian revolution, fascism is enforced unity of race, of thought, and of deed. But Absolutism, such as exists in Kalistan, unites people under the concept of good order. And I believe it is this good order which is the more morally preferable principle to the others. Without good order, there is no society. Without a well-ordered polity, there can be no liberty. In this sense, therefore, the well-ordered society is the more moral state.

Order as Morality
From a morally objective point of view, there is a Capital G Good. The degree to which moral behavior conforms to that Capital G good is the degree to which it is considered ethical. This is Ethics 101. There are some that will take a more situationalist approach, but the one thing which is clear is there is a moral standard which is external to all which determines right action.

Another thing we know is that morality is not determined by a majority. Majorities across history have determined that slavery was good. They were wrong--Slavery is always immoral. Majorities support war routinely. They are wrong--Killing people to promote geopolitical interest is immoral, whatever moral accoutrement its hawks want to attach to it to justify their cynicism. There are some things that are good and some things that are bad, but the goodness and the badness of something is not set by a popular vote. It is not determined by the market. Liberalism that proports to apply market principles to public policy guarantees at best mediocrity, and at worst, outright wickedness because egoist people learn how to game the system for their own advantage, but it only ever accidentally produces good government.

Inherent in the ethical standard of aligning with the Capital G Good, or the external standard by which actions can be judged to be ethical or not, is the concept of order. Society can and should be ordered in a way where alignement with that standard can even be possible. Imagine if you lived in a society which was addicted to the concept of people getting to choose what they thought the government should be doing. You have one part of the society pulling this way, another pulling that way, and another pulling some other way. How does this provide good government? It only provides stagnant government. A well ordered society, on the other hand, has every part of society doing their part for the maintenance of the social order, that is the source of their liberty. A society at war or in fear of repression is not a society at liberty. The only way to preserve the liberty people seek is one that is by design, tranquil and well ordered. Chaos and self-interest shows itself therefore to be the enemy of liberty, not absolutism.

The Kalistani system is superior in these provisions above all. The monarch has one job, and it is not to aggrandize herself or her power. Her job is to ensure tranquility and good order within the Empire. Her only focus in her capacity of absolute monarch is to consider justice as an imperative, and justice in Kalistan is determined to be correct order. It is therefore her single solitary task to do what is absolutely necessary to ensure that the people are at max liberty, bound only by the moral imperative that they are prevented from infringing upon the liberty of their neighbors or reducing their neighbors for their own benefit. In short, the Sovereign's job is to ensure that the society is a moral one, committed to correct action in accord with the Capital G Good. For one and for all. A democracy can not, on its best day get anywhere close, when it cannot not see beyond a debate and a contest of ideas, and get to the actually truth of some matter.

Comparison to other Illiberal Systems
While morality through correct order is the driving force of the Absolutist system we see in Kalistan, communism and fascism, both totalist, as opposed to absolutist, fall short. We can take the easier one: Fascism is an immoderate totalist ideology aimed at giving the state all power to think for the citizens. It posits that the state, and only the state, and in fact, the leader of the state and the apparatus of sycophants around the leader, maintain uniformity in thought and deed. It demands conformism, not order, as its moral imperative. Taking the fascist argument seriously for a moment, the thought is any deviation is weakness, and any weakness creates an existential threat for the society. This is fascism at its core.

Therefore, who is to ensure conformity? The voters? That is obviously ridiculous. It must be the state, and overseeing the state, it must be the leader. Therefore, it is imperative for the leader to enforce complete uniformity. This in and of itself might be a type of order, but not one that ensures liberty for the people or peace and tranquility for the society. Instead, it requires upheaval and war. It requires aberrant people, or aberrant ideas to be removed, often permanently from the society. It sees any difference or distinction as a threat. And it requires maximum force to achieve. Because liberty, even in thought, is an existential threat, it guarantees max surveillance upon the society and expulsion or extermination of difference. It turns the society into a prison. That's order of a kind, but at the expense of liberty and freedom, and therefore can be considered slavery.

Nor should we assume that the state will keep institutions that do not allow it carte blanche in its dealings with the population. It twists and perverts all institutions it keeps and wipes out the rest, without regard to the pain and suffering that that action causes the people. This is a fundamentally revolutionary ideology that ends up only destroying for the single solitary imperative of God, Leader, State. With no regard whatsoever for the people. Except that the people are needed to supply food for the Leader, the ideal fascist society would be one man, and the rest merely resources for that one man to consume.

Communism is better, but only slightly, in that it also serves an ideal, but that ideal is a humanistic focus rather than a metaphysical one. It is explicitly a revolutionary ideology, in that it wants to erase the institutions of the past and replace them with a dictatorship of the proletariat. Two things about this present an issue: First, what of all those who are not members of the proletariat, and second, who is to say that the proletariat are not just as self interested as the capitalists who used to exploit them for their own personal gain.

While not as dire as the fascist model, in that it doesn't seek to eliminate differences among people, it still only promotes the interests of a class. While Kalistan says that the Capital G Good is what the government should be focused on, and ordering society to conform to that, the Communist says that the material interests of the ruling class, whom ever that happens to be at the moment, is what drives the state. They seek to make the proletariat the new rulers, to replace the bourgeoisie, to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. But that arrangement is focused on material interest of a material class. It is not focused on correct order. It is democracy in another form: The thinking is, the working class is the majority, so they should be able to outvote the bourgeois, who are the minority, and our society needs revolution because that is not the case.

In fact, democracy and rule of the majority is at the core of the Communist organizing principle. When we demonstrate above that majorities cannot be relied upon to vote morally. Let's suppose the proletariat get into power and vote, as a bloc to execute all those bourgeoisie who don't agree with communism. At that point, in moralist terms, how different are they from the fascist who demands conformity of thought and world view? How does that ensure the liberty of all parts of society? It cannot, nor can we say that even if 99% of the society turns against the last remaining members of the old ruling class, that the majority acts morally. Who cares if everyone supports slavery, if you are the slave?

Conclusion: Absolutism as an Alternative
A well ordered and tranquil society being absolutely necessary for both ethical behavior and maximum liberty for the people, I can say that Kalistan above all states, democratic states, republics, fascistic abominations or valiant experiments in varying kinds of communism, provides the necessary ingredients for those necessary characteristics. The people get the opportunity to have some say in the administrative operations of our society through free city Councils, but meanwhile, an aristocracy oversees and coordinates the actions of the multiple municipalities under it, while a sovereign, whose only job is the consideration of Justice and the Capital G Good sits above it all.

Our Empress does not require conformity of thought, word and deed as a fascist states does. And our Empress does not look only to the material interests of one group within our society above all other things, even to the detriment of all else. In fact, our Empress focuses her sight on the Good and orders the society in accord with that. And somehow, miraculously, people from all walks of life live a better life as a result.

Its not miraculous, actually: it is what one would expect with just government and well ordered society. This is the outcomes we should expect in this situation. Sure people don't get to vote for the Empress. But really: If we did vote for the Empress, we would have the very real chance of electing a fascist, which would be the opposite of moral, the opposite of just, and the opposite of Good. Because fascists have demonstrated that their revolutions come AFTER they have fully infiltrated and perverted democracy. They are always the first to scream that they came to power as a result of an election, and so therefore what they are doing as a result of the election is legitimate.

We could also end up with a communist in power, who will focus the entire power of the state toward uplifting a portion of the society at the expense of everyone else, based on a material relationship to the means of production, rather than anything that is morally and ethically correct. Either way, the society is not at liberty. It is at war with itself, and eventually, is at war with the world, as they will eventually need their totalist ideology to spread internationally.

The Absolutist model, untainted by republican notions, or liberal market ideology, but one which focuses on the public order and domestic tranquility, is the model which can maximize liberty for all in society, that can most easily generate general prosperity and happiness, and can leave the people free to pursue their own individual dreams, whether it be to be an artist, a machinist, or a member of the Institutional Party in the National Assembly. There is no other system that can even come close. A well-ordered society and peaceful society is one which can guarantee liberty for all, justice for all and the pursuit of happiness for all.

So ironically, Kalistan comes far closer to the so-called "ideals of liberalism" than even liberal nations in the world, who may fail, either deliberately to hold to their own ideals, or simply cannot reach them because they give people who are, by definition, ignorant of public policy (hence their only passing interest once every two, four or six years with the government) the right to weigh in on who should be President. Seriously: Would we ask a random selection of people at the mall to weigh in with an opinion on how a neurosurgeon performs his task? Do we really care about the myriad opinion of the majority when it comes to how a football team should run its offense? Do we ask a group of businessmen how a mechanic should fix a car?

If we are not willing to submit the correct way to do something as mundane as brain surgery, or football, or auto mechanics which only affect the lives of one or a handful of people, to the vote of the mob, why would we tolerate it in something like public policy that affects us all? It is important to have that guiding sense of order and correctness for liberty and justice in our society, and Kalistan's system, alone among the illiberal governments of the world, can provide that, more than communism, and certainly more than fascism. Because our goal is correct order and domestic tranquility--Liberty and Justice spring from those two conditions.