The Secret Knowledge

by David Mamet

  It, therefore, mythologizes uselessness, and praises it.

  We have all seen this phenomenon as schoolchildren, in the insecure and self-hating child, raised to think himself weak, who will shrink from effort and from communal activity, attach himself to authorities—the tattletale and the spoilsport, who cannot take the rigors and tests of the schoolyard—the complainer and sanctimonious prig, forever calling out about supposed slights and injustices—his is the all-purpose complaint of the preadolescent “it’s not fair.”

  For mine is a generation which never grew up. And we have, in our short lives, dismantled that necessarily imperfect system of industry and government for which our parents lived and died. We have awarded ourselves for realizing its imperfections—as if any human act or combination were perfect—and have created a culture of guilt and shame—corrosively and compulsively shaming where any human act of individuality may be indicted as wrong (which is to say, destructive of equality or equanimity).

  But it is the free individual who alone can provide sustenance for the group. For if there is no effort, no use (called “exploitation”), no reward for initiative (called “greed”), where will the food come from? Malthus, before the invention of the improved plow and before scientific agriculture, “proved” that the world must soon starve.

  Socialist Europe is held up as a model of “just behavior”; but the Left forgets that for seventy-five years America defended Europe from the Communist threat, and bore the cost, which would have bankrupted Europe, and which, in the event, bankrupted Communism. The Left looks at the peace of Europe since World War II and forgets that it was not only ensured, but created by American military strength and determination.27 And now the Left has elected a President who thinks it good to go to Europe and apologize for our “arrogance,” who proclaims the benefits of appeasement both at home and around the world.

  This appeasement, called the antiwar movement, the antinuclear movement, One-Worldism, Code Pink, “the end to American Exceptionalism,” is, to the Left, another example of the Correct Thinking of the never-involved. They believe that our enemies, like the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, will be so moved by some unnamable but real excellence on our part, that they will forswear their desire for our destruction (recognizing it, now, as an unnecessary expenditure of effort) and beat their swords into plowshares.

  But the Left does not stop to consider that if we, the most prosperous country in the history of the world, choose neither to exploit nor to defend our property, someone else will take it, and if we announce, indeed, proclaim our passivity, we will only advance that bad day.

  The Left insisted that we abandon, in 1973, a war we had just won in Vietnam, and go on home, as the Left today insists we withdraw from Afghanistan and withdraw from Iraq. Leaving to one side legitimate legislative differences over the strategic worth of any one conflict, what real or potential enemy could possibly misinterpret its possibilities of gain in the light of our absolutely predictable absence of resolve?

  Just as the Left, geopolitically, does not recognize enmity (other than on the part of the Right), it judicially does not recognize crime; or that which, historically, was known as crime (that is, behavior transgressive of those statutes enacted for the protection of society), calling it “error,” or the effect of “environment,” or searching for any artifice to free itself of the mature human necessity of choice and enforcement. 28 So doing, the Left everywhere relaxes those judicial norms which alone can give some measure of certainty to the populace.

  (Note that in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, an 1872 Utopian novel, crime was considered sickness, and the criminal coddled and condoled with, while sickness was treated as crime. I will not belabor the similarity to the Left’s New Age health movement, which, in its charms, potions, and essences and practices, discards science in favor of “ancient wisdom.”)

  My generation huddles in ignorance that is felt, on the Left, as a worship of man’s “natural state,” this supposedly being, all human history to the contrary, one of health and peace, ignoring and in fact rejecting both our imperfections as a species and our differences as individuals.

  The random distribution of abilities and ambitions, which has allowed human beings to thrive and communities to grow, and which gives to the group strength and to the individual the possibility of achievement and, so, happiness in the approbation of the group, is derided by the Left as nonsense. To them, each child is born a blank slate, and any difference in subsequent individual accomplishment, status, or wealth, must, thus, be due to some maleficent influence, which is to say, to exploitation.29 As if we were created to thrive in a society made exclusively of cobblers, or second basemen, surgeons, or deliverymen. The Left sees trade—the source of wealth—as exploitation; and, each child being born equal, all differences in wealth, again, as theft. (Here forgetting the lessons of the schoolyard—that one child may prefer the orange and the other the candy bar, and, so, both may be made happy by an exchange. Is this simplistic? No, it is simple: left to our own devices, we human beings increase our happiness by unfettered trade, and however much we may vote for Government Supervision [state control] we all delight in barter, and the free give and take of the flea market.)30

  To correct this observed inequality, which the Left sees as unnatural, it invented the term “social justice.” But a system of Justice already exists, formulated by Legislature, in supposed expression of the will of the people, and administered by the Judiciary. This is called the Judicial System. What, then, is this additional, amorphous “social justice”? It can only mean, as Hayek wrote, “State Justice.” Here, though the Left will not follow the reasoning out to its end, the State (operating upon what basis it alone knows, and responsible to no law enacted by the people) confiscates wealth accumulated under existing laws and redistributes it to those it deems worthy.

  History proves that the worthiest in these Marxist schemes are, or quickly become, those in charge of distribution, which is to say “the State,” its constitutional powers usurped by those we know as “dictators.”

  To the Left it is the State which should distribute place, wealth, and status. This is called “correcting structural error,” or redressing “the legacy of Slavery,” or Affirmative Action, or constraining unfair Executive Compensation; but it is and can only be that Spoils System which is decried at the ward level as “cronyism,” and lauded at the national level as “social justice.” It is nothing other than the distribution of goods and services by the government for ends not specified in the Constitution; and in response to pressure from or in attempts to curry favor with groups seeking preferments or goods not obtainable either under the law, or through those practices of mutual benefit called the Free Market. What obscenities are created in the name of “social justice?” What could possibly be less just than policies destructive of initiative and based upon genetics? (As Thomas Sowell writes, “Are we to say of two babies, born on the same day, that one is born owing something to the other?”) Can this Social Eugenicism possibly be corrective of anything?

  But how, to the Left, to explain the difference in status, in wealth, in happiness, among human beings? (And let us note that the Left, though decrying inequality in the abstract, contains none or few who are willing to redress the differences between their financial state and that of any of their less favored brethren by putting the wealth of the two into one pot and each taking half.)

  Proverbs informs us that the poor will always be with us; that, just as one may not, as a judge, favor the rich, neither can one favor the poor, but must do justice according to the law—that is to say, that one must judge whether the law has been transgressed, a consideration in which the state of the offender (past his mental competency) must play no part.

  The Bible is the wisdom tradition of the West. It is from the precepts of the Bible that the legal systems of the West have been developed—these systems, worked out over millennia, for dealing with inequality, with injustice, with greed, are reducible
to that which the Christians call the Golden Rule, and which was, previously, propounded by Rabbi Hillel: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.”

  These rules and laws form a framework which allows the individual foreknowledge of that which is permitted and that which is forbidden. This foreknowledge, a real right-of-property, is that upon which the individual makes decisions. It constitutes a practicable system for dealing with a tragical existence and a deeply flawed human nature: it asserts not the perfection, but the imperfectibility of Man. These assertions (and their attendant investigations and observations, known as philosophy and religion) may be called, in their entirety, the Tragic View.

  The Left has abandoned the Tragic View,31 and considers life and man as unconstrained in our ability to understand and to supersede all strife and inequality. The Tragic View, however, holds that life is complicated and man flawed, and so, our actions must be guided by laws difficult both of formulation and of observance; that these laws, being the product of Man, will, themselves, be flawed, that they will not cover all instances, that their observation and correct application will often cause anxiety, and, indeed trauma, but that the health of a society (both moral and material) must rest on the attempt to do so.

  The tragic view recognizes that it is possible to obviate the necessity of choice only by surrender of responsibility (worship of a dictator, or charismatic figure, guru, politician, or theory)—that between Good and Evil there is no choice, and thus moral choice means a choice between two evils.

  Having renounced the necessity of dealing with complexity, the Left imagines and endorses a “post-governmental” era, in which the individual need not consider the economic and social results of his actions and his vote. He may choose not to choose, and merely endorse “Change,” and reject any request for information about the actual mechanics of this “Change,” by referring to “Hope.”

  In this post-societal world of the new cult, we are told we need not produce, but may merely hope, we need not defend, but may hope, we must not consume, but are allowed, somehow, to hope for sustenance—this sustenance, magically, deriving from some unspecified actions of a government which, all observe, is at best incompetent and, more usually, self-serving and corrupt, whoever is in power.

  From the Left’s point of view one need not work, and may not only Hope to be provided for, by this government, but may insist upon it. This new post-governmental America, then, may, without guilt, apologize for the arrogance of its prosperity and the beauty of its traditions and culture, and plead with the weak of the world to be allowed to join them.

  8

  THE RED SEA

  There is another possible interpretation of the parting of the sea by Moses.

  Rather than intervening to create a path in a unitary substance, it could be said that he demonstrated that freedom lay in the ability to see distinctions; that is, that life could be seen as divisible into good and evil; moral and immoral; sacred and profane; permitted and forbidden—that the seemingly unitary “sea” of human behavior and ambition could actually be divided.

  A slave is not permitted to make these distinctions. All of his behavior is circumscribed by the will of his master. The necessity of making distinctions is the essence of freedom, where one not only can but must choose.

  This revelation of the long-denied, long-lost necessity was, to the escaping Jews, something of a miracle, inspiring awe, fear, and an attendant shame—shame that they had submitted to enslavement, and shame that they had forgotten the essence of freedom so completely that its possibility seemed to them supernatural. Moses told the Jews to look back at the pursuing army, and said, “Those Egyptians you see today you will never see again”—that is, they would be freed from not only the fact but the shame of slavery as soon as they recognized in themselves the possibility of choice, which is to say, as soon as they entered the sea.

  The sea was not the path to freedom, the sea was freedom. The essence of freedom was and is choice.

  The Jews spent four hundred years as slaves. They were freed with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, by God; and the world’s three Abrahamic religions are founded upon the wisdom text whose center is this story. But when the Jews, within the lifetime of many contemporary readers of story, were again slaves in Europe, suffering and dying, and when we were freed by the West, and formed our own State, much of the West (including, to our shame, many Jews) rejected the lesson of the Bible, and turned our back on the revelation of the possibility of choice, and called this heresy enlightenment, and denounced the State of Israel.

  Is the State of Israel imperfect? All the works of Man are imperfect.

  The Jews were led through the Sea of Reeds and, in the desert, complained, and wished to return to Egypt and slavery. Life in Egypt was by no means perfect; its only attraction was the absence of the necessity of choice. But it made all people equal. No slave need choose between good and evil, morality and immorality, all such anxiety had been usurped by or surrendered to the masters.

  The Left embraces Socialism, the herd mentality of slavery, as it offers the, to them, incalculable benefit of freedom from thought. There are, to them, no more disquieting choices, no contradictions, there is only submission to the Group in which the ideas of all (being the same) are equal.

  The French Jacobins, similarly, discovered a way to do away with inequalities of stature: they cut off the offenders’ heads.

  The State of Israel is, in itself, an incurable affront to the Left, for it is a demonstration of the possibility of choice. The slave not only need not persevere in the face of his masters’ displeasure or disagreement, he cannot—it would cost his life; but the free men and women of Israel persevere in spite of the Left’s casuist carping and bellicosity and displeasure, backing their convictions with their lives. An intolerable affront to those preferring equality to liberty.

  The urge of the Left to surrender choice and self-government for illusion, to insist upon Statism and Government rule, rather than a Government of Service, is a rejection of the lesson of the Exodus.

  For it is obvious to the meanest intellect that the Government cannot make cars, health care, industry in general, better than would individual human beings not only interested in but inexorably tied to the outcome of such operations. The endorsement of the Socialist, Statist system, then, is not a desire for more or better goods and services, but a surrender of this desire in return for an obviation of the necessity of personal choice.32 It is a regression not to the tribe, but to the herd.

  (I am indebted to my son, Noah, for his exegesis on the parting of the Red Sea.)

  9

  CHICAGO

  The men of my own stock

  They may do ill or well,

  But they tell the lies I am wonted to,

  They are used to the lies I tell;

  And we do not need interpreters

  When we go to buy and sell.

  —Kipling, The Stranger, 1908

  Someone once began a question to me commenting that I was from the Midwest, and I interrupted, correcting him, that I was not from the Midwest, I was from Chicago.

  It was a rough city, ruled by the Machine Politics, which ruled the state, and currently rules the country. But a turkey at Christmas and a job for your kid on the Force were and are better than the phony-baloney tax rebates, and Alternative Tax “givebacks,” and Government “programs” which, in toto, will be less and less important than the Christmas Turkey and the Job.

  Folks in my grandfather’s generation spoke lovingly about Al Capone and his generosity, but, then, in my experience, most criminals are sentimental. But I would rather deal with a crooked cop than a bureaucrat, and I’ve had the experience of both. And I loved the rough, matter-of-fact Chicago of my youth, and preferred it to the clean, orderly, self-packaged city of today. When the streets’ nicknames go up on the lampposts, the city is dead.

  The City then was not the promise of snow removal and an absence of litter, but an amalgam
of strivers and hucksters, and I found it, thus, either much like myself, or, more likely, I became schooled by its culture, just like the Mayors Daley and then–State Senator Obama and all the governors and councilmen who went to jail, and Hugh Hefner, building whorehouses which sold everything but sex, and the inspired and depraved of that toddling town. For, of course, the athletes and the gunmen and the politicians and the businessmen sat down for a drink together; and the celebrities on the way from New York to L.A. changed trains, and took their doxies to the Ambassador East, and had drinks in the Pump Room with Irv Kupcinet, the talk of the town, and in short it was a growing entity, growing according to the rules of self-interest and self-preservation.

  It was so young. When I was born, many were alive whose parents had dealt with the Sauk Indians.33

  And there was the Lindbergh Beacon, the most powerful aircraft signal in the world, its light visible for forty-five miles, atop the Palmolive Building, sweeping the sky once-a-minute to make the night safe for air traffic.

  Hefner bought the building in 1965 it was renamed the Playboy Building, and they put their logo up, and I used to work there. And the great entertainers worked for him at his Playboy Club around the corner, staffed by the Bunnies in their abbreviated costumes, ears, and cottontails, who were prohibited from dating the customers, but were not prohibited from dating me.