Now of course governments have a certain moral duty towards their citizens. For many governments however, this moral duty has blown out of proportion into some of the most crippling welfare state programmes ever seen. Moral duty has extended to paying those out of work, many of whom do not actively seek the employment they lack. Meanwhile, properties are found to house asylum seekers from foreign countries whilst the indigenous citizens of the nation are left homeless on the streets. In England, the number of homeless are thought to be somewhere in the region of a quarter of a million of which 64% are estimated to be white and of British descent.47 In the case of say, the beggar we considered in Book II, it is the purpose firstly of charity to support him, and secondly in the case of dire needs, the state may justify a temporary lodging for him for a short amount of time, from a small amount of property that the state may purchase in accordance with other market regulations, during which time the beggar may endeavour to find the means of working for the money which will permit him to find his own property. A moral safety-net on a small scale is permissible, but not as a system which accommodates every single citizen, should the whole nation require the assistance of the state.
With the advance of technology, however, we may soon see a situation where there is no choice for the state but to provide for almost every one of its people. Recent decades have seen a great deal of automation, with many assembly lines and warehouses being managed by robotic automata. Driverless cars and trains are now in the running for future implementation, and eventually we may see a future where all remaining manual labour will pass to the concern of automata as well. If this is the case, then vast swathes of the population of future nations will have no opportunity to work according to their skill set at all. The governments of the world will have no choice but to offer their citizens an income for no labour, lest they face mass starvation and the complete breakdown of the economic system of transactions. This solution has already been proposed in the form of a Universal Basic Income (UBI), which was rejected (23.1% for/76.9% against) by the Swiss in a 2016 referendum on the issue. Despite the initial disdain of some, it is a very real possibility, with socialist parties in Europe preparing to give it proper consideration. The only people with a potential for work in an automated future will surely be the builders of robots, the engineers who maintain them, and those who wish to pursue artistic careers which rely on the free human consciousness rather than a programmed one.
We are faced with two potential solutions to the problem of automation and UBI. Either the automation of labour and replacement of human workers with automata is to be opposed on account of the future that it offers; or an automated future is to be seen as inevitable and practical solutions to the potential problems with UBI must be found.
It seems to be naturally morally detestable to contend that any individual should be handed money for not doing anything constructive. UBI itself is a proposal steeped in uncertainty: Is it literally to be a basic income where individuals are permitted to earn more on top? Are individuals receiving other forms of income to be barred from receiving UBI? Is UBI to be set at a flat rate, or levelled? One thing is for certain, that the vast majority of recipients of a future UBI scheme will most certainly receive the same flat rate, with only those with skills which can survive the technological age having the capacity to earn more. We may well see the rise of a new form of elite, a technological elite.
Meanwhile, the political advocates of UBI claim that the downfall of traditional labour-based economics will allow the people of the world, who of course would now have copious amounts of free time, to spend their money on education or on philosophical or other pursuits which would lead to great self-improvement. It would further allow disciplines previously off-limits to the underclasses to be enjoyed by all. This, however, relies upon a number of unrealistic assumptions: To look at our world today is to see human life defined by self-gratification. The ordinary man has always been primarily concerned with his own ends, but in the past this meant finding the next coin with which to pay for his family’s food, to provide for a wife and children, to live and get by, not to find his next fix of drugs, or to await the next night visiting a club, becoming intoxicated and bedding the next unfortunate victim of his debased sexual appetite. In a world so morally corrupt, is it reasonable to assume that the people endowed with money for nothing will spend it on things which will improve them? Will they not spend it on alcoholic drinks? On drugs which many countries now seem to be inclined to legalise? On whores and gambling?
This system degenerates rapidly into the physical manifestation of Oceania in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the name of equality and the universal right to life, wealth and property, a new class system arises based not on virtue but control. An underclass of proletarians placated by their new free income will develop faceless and emotionless lives, only awaiting their next fix of the elixir of self-gratification. Meanwhile the party in control of the nations will cream the benefits of this new society, most likely formed of those interest groups which construct the new automata, which in turn mostly likely will not be limited to the world of work, but law enforcement as well, as a breed (if this is the right term) of faster and stronger robotic androids bend the population to the will of their new tyrants. Godwin may have dreamed of a future where equal property and the lack of organised institutions allowed for the intellectual improvement of all men, but the reality is much darker. A modern Gothic dystopia, with metal Frankenstein’s monsters roaming the Earth and checking every house is a very real vision of a future defined by equal income and equal property.
What is the solution? Let us assume that the automation of the economy is inevitable, and no matter how much resistance is offered, UBI is implemented and much of the population lacks traditional employment. If an intellectual future is to be realised then social attitudes towards education must change towards one of value rather than disdain. If virtue is to remain the principal goal of every society, then finding methods of using the technological age for the purposes of that virtue is a categorical imperative. Man remains unequal at his base level, no matter what might be espoused by government concerning equality. What can be done? The most important thing to encourage in the technological future will most certainly be attitude, specifically, the attitude of aspiration. Even if the technological world develops into a world government with a single human empire as its goal, then that goal of higher achievement, for virtue and moral greatness extolled in the epics of antiquity and the poetic Eddas of the Nordic Dark Age must be rediscovered by the people of Earth. The Nirvana of the Buddha, the Lord of Logic that is respected by Zoroastrians, and all the higher powers of Indo-European spirituality must be extolled, and technology seen as the natural result of centuries of human improvement.
Perhaps, in this society of alternative values and a worldview based on spiritual heritage, even if a significant number of people remain only interested in their own affairs, a larger number still will aspire to be the spacemen of the future. As it seems clear that a technological age will seek to explore space and colonise whole new planets and galaxies, some may dream and finally realise this goal. Other men of good moral character may seek to design and regulate the use of robots of humanitarian and life-affirming roles. The principles of aristocracy, kingship, limited democracy and the privilege of virtue need not die merely because technology changes, but they may need to be adapted to accommodate new conceptions of what is ‘virtuous conduct’ in an age of technology. The future is not inescapably bleak, but we stand at a crossroads of human history, and the choice between allowing technology to consume our souls or raise them up to higher planes of existence is already one which many of us are beginning to decide upon.
‘Equality’ and ‘fairness’ will be the watchwords of the future. When these words are used it will be the rallying cry of those who wish to destroy human aspiration and the spirit of progress which has driven us on to so many great things already. A practical economic and spiritual
future is founded in the debate about property and income which conservatives, liberals and socialists alike will be facing in the coming decades.
Chapter III
Luxury and Poverty
We will now consider a few practical elements of the theory of wealth equality. When society permits the accumulation of private fortune and property, or more specifically when inequality is permitted, a distinction will always arise between those with a great deal more wealth than others, and those with next to nothing. The question of luxury versus poverty, whether they are opposed, whether one relies upon the other and whether those in poverty have a right to luxury has always been controversial.
The image of those with luxury stamping in the faces of those in poverty often conjured up by Marxists and economic egalitarians is a disgusting one, and it is of course immoral for any man to deliberately oppress another for his own ends. The moral question, however, resides in whether or not the man living in luxury oppresses the man in poverty by the very reason that he lives in luxury. In one sense, liberty affords men the right to own more property than others, and philosophers such as Godwin who disdain luxury but claim to love liberty seem to be somewhat in conflict with themselves, seeing as we cannot both have our cake and eat it. Once again, the question of what is ‘moral’ for men to do once they have that property is another question, it is a matter of attitude. It is natural for men to be unequal, but it is against the spirit of self-improvement for men with more property to be boastful, to gloat and to use their wealth to prevent others from aspiring to the same position as them.
The true moral problem of our age — the problem of what those in the lap of luxury could be doing for others — is being lost in the face of non-issues such as the gender pay gap. Many feminists complain of the recent study which found that for every $1 a man makes, a woman only makes 78 cents. It may seem callous to say that the answer is to work for an extra 22 cents, but fundamentally this idea is founded in logic. Women have the full right to earn the same as men; whether or not they earn the exact same amount as men is fairly irrelevant, since much of this is a question of circumstance. On average, women tend to earn 22 cents less than men, but this means absolutely nothing about whether or not women could earn an even more similar amount to men if their circumstances were different. These circumstances have nothing to do with patriarchy, and everything to do with biological and aspirational differences between men and women. Ultimately, the point we are making is this: that it is a non-issue, it is not a situation involving any poverty at all, but rather only the envy of a specific group of people.
There is an important distinction to be made between the envy of those who do not have the same wealth as those in luxury and those who are living in genuine poverty and are struggling to survive. In the case of these latter individuals, the concern of good-hearted men should be thrust upon them, and a virtuous society would have the means and individuals within it to help those in poverty through the most difficult of times. The opinions and bitter whinings of the envious, however, ought to be spurned. The question ‘Do they have the means to live?’ is a good first litmus test. Luxury is a right, but poverty is often an unfortunate turn of circumstance. Those between luxury and poverty are making their way towards luxury, but have no right to automatically advance, by the aid of the state or any other institution public or private, to luxury any faster purely because they are unhappy with the fact that another man has already attained greater wealth and property than they have.
Chapter IV
Sloth
We have discussed aspiration as the driver of progress in society at great length, and the existence of inequality has been judged to be part of the means of encourage aspiration among the general population of a society. However, when considering a future where property, or at least the means of obtaining property, is equalised, we must also consider whether blights such as sloth could easily take hold of the population and grind further attempts at human self-improvement to a halt.
In Chapter II we considered a future where the population spent its UBI on self-gratifying things, with no vision for their future or their children, living from one moment to the next and wallowing in the most detestable forms of debauchery. Let us imagine, however, that the future is not as debauched as this potentiality makes out. Let us imagine that individuals do indeed spend their money and use their property purely for the purposes of maintaining their families, sending children to school, paying for food et cetera. Even if this were the case, the parents of families would still have no job to go to during the day and would retain the free time they would have had regardless of what they spent their money on. Either the people would spend their money on practical things, perhaps constructing things, attending a University or lecture of some sort, educating themselves or pursuing artistic careers; or they might simply sit at home and indulge their sloth.
In the French economist Frédéric Bastiat’s essay Justice and Fraternity, he argued that government ought to be limited to its ‘essential functions’:
[its essential functions are] to guarantee the security of people and property, to prevent and repress violence and disorder, to ensure for all the free exercise of their faculties and the proper reward for their efforts.
Government, however, cannot ensure for all the proper reward for their efforts when there is no effort involved. Even if a workless future was used as an opportunity for more time with the family, it would still be a workless future, with citizens offering no practical benefit to society. Labour as an action is a form of wealth creation, since the labourer not merely procures wealth for himself in terms of wages, but for the economy as a whole by his labour, creating some intellectual, financial or physical material. No matter how much we might be inclined to dream of a more intellectual future, the reality (due to the natural inequality of mankind) is that there will still be relatively few, even when people have more free time, who have an interest in intellectual pursuits. Fewer still will have artistic talents, and the option of an artistic career will be closed to many. Individuals in this future society will therefore either indulge in debauchery or in sloth.
A lack of aspiration among the people of society will leave nothing but these two options. In tackling this issue of sloth, we must therefore look towards historically informed solutions. We have discussed how community can be used for the maintenance of morality and duty and can even aid in the policing of society based on the traditions of our European ancestors. Community could well save the people of future societies from sloth. If free time is to be given the people of a workless future, then work ought to be created for them by their communities. The industries of the nation will likely be taken over by automation, but there will still be work to be done in the communities of the nation. Those finding themselves without the need to commute to work any longer will be forced to get to know people in their local area on an even more intimate level. The building of trust and interpersonal relationships among these new communities will facilitate communitarian forms of work — with members of the community supporting each other in times of crisis, such as natural disaster, or when the machines that will inevitably govern future life break down. Sloth must be replaced with new attitudes towards the community, and if the state must pay individuals for nothing, then aspiration must be combined with the societal bond of community.
It is not wholly right to say that every person is at risk of becoming debauched and slothful in the future, but it is equally not right to say that moral improvement will come about naturally purely because individuals are suddenly endowed with free time. Different attitudes must be encouraged, and nations should think about encouraging these attitudes now if the future is to remain communitarian rather than individualistic. The future poses a number of troubling problems of its own, and on the day that the automatons break down, any right-thinking society would surely prefer to have its people associate together to keep the world turning, rather than seeing that world grind to a halt
in blind panic and personal anxiety.
Chapter V
Permanency and Vice
In a future of equal wealth rather than natural inequality, the permanency of such a system must be called into question. An objection that Godwin considers to his own system of equal property is that concerning the nature of man. If a system of equality was to be introduced, then everything that the richer members of society had purchased over time would be seized and redistributed. However, in day-to-day life, it is surely inevitable that as people came by different things and claimed them as their own, other people envious of them would demand to have the same, since they would be aware that the right to equality entitled them to it. Soon enough, society degenerates into bitter barbarism and anarchy of the worst kind as friends and neighbours turn on each other in order to claim what they feel ought to be ‘theirs as well’. As we can see, such a situation leads to both the end of equality and the propagation of vicious behaviour. Perhaps one member of a community will purchase a robot with his state income — soon enough, the whole street will demand a robot. Perhaps one man will upgrade his robot, soon enough the whole street will demand an upgrade. An arms race between individuals ensues, and the potential for war between members of the community itself becomes very real — and we know full well what the value of war is. These dangers are not to be dismissed.
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