“Please Don’t Feed the
Cannibals!”
By Butler Shaffer
I have
come to the conclusion that
imperialism and exploitation
are forms of cannibalism
and, in fact, are precisely
those forms of cannibalism
which are most diabolical or
evil.
– Jack
D. Forbes
February 16, 2015 "ICH"
- "Lew
Rockwell" - It is
an unavoidable fact of nature that living
beings can survive only by consuming other
forms of life. Neither dirt, sand, nor
rocks, nor other lifeless matter, can
provide nourishment to maintain the
continuing renewal of energy upon which
living things depend. It is the mark of
civilized people to reject the consumption
of human life in this endeavor. Vegetarians
and vegans would like to extend this
exception to other animal life forms, a
choice that does not negate the underlying
fact that living organisms must sustain
themselves at the expense of other forms of
life. They have simply chosen to confine
their dietary choices to “vegetable” rather
than “animal” categories.
So rare is the practice of cannibalism in
America that the occasional case that does
arise attracts a long-standing public
curiosity. In 1873, the notorious Alferd G.
Packer confessed to cannibalizing men he had
taken on a hunting trip in Colorado. In
1968, students at the University of Colorado
gave the student cafeteria the name it still
bears: “The Alferd G. Packer Memorial
Grill.” Nor has the memory of Jeffrey
Dahmer’s epicurean preferences faded. But
feasting on human flesh is not the only
expression of the cannibalistic behavior
that plagues mankind.
The verb “cannibalize” is often used in
commerce, industry, and technology to refer
to the practice of using parts from one
system to repair or construct another
system. In wartime, badly-damaged airplanes
would often have their usable parts removed
to repair other planes. A business firm that
puts out a significantly improved product is
said to have “cannibalized” its earlier
products. One dictionary defines
“cannibalize” as to cut into; cause to be
reduced; or to diminish.
In some cannibal cultures, the practice of
eating another human being is thought to
transfer to the cannibal the spirit,
strength, power, or other energies of the
victim. Modern Western cultures reject such
direct exploitation of people, but do
embrace the forms of meatless, ersatz
cannibalism that nonetheless consume these
qualities of being human. When individuals
are conditioned and compelled to substitute
institutional interests and purposes for
their own, are they not devoured by the
insatiable appetites of abstract systems?
What could be more dispiriting than to be
forcibly deprived of the control, direction,
and meaning of one’s life; qualities that go
to the essence of being human?
Is not cannibalism a perfect metaphor for
the state depriving individuals – through
its powers of taxation and regulation – of
the products of the energies that are
essential to maintaining one’s life? And how
can wars and genocidal practices be looked
upon as anything but feeding the machineries
of power at the expense of what institutions
regard as collective, fungible “assets” and
“resources” to serve their ends? When, in
2006, White House press secretary Tony Snow
casually dismissed the deaths of 2,500
American soldiers in the Iraqi war as “it’s
a number,” his words reflected the
indifference of human costs in calculating
political purposes. He could just as
perfunctorily have been commenting on the
number of cattle slaughtered at a
meat-packing plant in a given period of
time. So, too, did former Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright express her disregard for
the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children who
died as a consequence of the Clinton
administration’s economic boycott of that
country. “The price was worth it,” she
publicly proclaimed, as though she was
commenting on the beef bourguinon at her
favorite French restaurant. Of course, as
with all political programs, the costs are
always borne by others, never by those who
institute and profit from them! Such is the
character of cannibalism.
The cannibalistic nature of the established
order manifests itself in so many other
ways: churches and schools that do not
inspire, but squelch curiosity and punish
children for the spontaneity that fires the
human spirit. In a year in which one of the
most popular films lionizes the American
Sniper, the quantum change in how human life
is valued is rather evident. When snipers
and drone operators, who kill on behalf of
the state and from great distances, are
treated as “heroes,” the life-destroying
character of our erstwhile civilization is
no longer in question.
Plato provided a politically-structured
model for human society that has long been
embraced by Western culture. His pyramidal
design envisioned, at the highest level, the
men of gold, whose wisdom would make them
ideal rulers; at the next level were the men
of silver, who were the soldiers and other
enforcers of the legislation established by
the rulers; at the bottom level were the men
of brass or iron, i.e., the farmers,
laborers, artisans, and other producers of
the goods and services that would allow the
society to sustain itself.
For my purposes, I would transpose Plato’s
characterization of a political hierarchy
into these levels: the ruling cannibals, who
will be the principal beneficiaries of the
coercive transfer of energy and other
resources from others; the vultures, (the
soldiers, police, bureaucrats, judges, and
other functionaries of the state) whose
function is to forcefully harvest the
zombies (the productive people) of their
energies, wealth, other resources, and
obedience to state authority. Members of the
zombie class must, of course, be conditioned
in the virtue and necessity of accepting
their subservient role of producing the
wealth that others will consume! Within the
vulture class will also be found members of
academia and other teachers, the mainstream
media, writers, and others who will provide
the conditioning.
Plato’s own words reveal just how irrelevant
his 2,400 year-old ideas are to modern
society. He declared: “a state comes into
existence because no individual is
self-sufficing; we all have many needs.” The
industrial revolution made evident to
intelligent minds that free markets, not the
supposed wisdom of philosopher-kings, was
the most effective system in which
“individuals” with their “many needs” can
each pursue their respective interests and,
in such a pluralistic process, generate an
abundance of material wealth that elitist
rulers will always be incapable of matching.
Twentieth-century experiences with
centrally-planned economies revealed to
intelligent minds – with the same certainty
as the proposition of 8 being the square
root of 64 – that the liberty, spontaneity,
and respect for private property that are
implicit in marketplace systems, is the most
effective means of fostering human
well-being.
The study of physics informs us of the
fundamental truth that actions have
consequences. Those who fail to understand
the causal connections that allow men and
women to produce the values – be they
material, spiritual, aesthetic, or otherwise
– upon which civilized society depends, hold
mankind hostage to their ignorance. Franz
Oppenheimer’s distinction between the
“economic means” and the “political means”
of acquiring wealth, has particular meaning
here. The economic means is premised on the
production and voluntary exchange of
resources through which people endeavor to
maximize their respective
self-interest-driven well-being. The
political means, on the other hand, is
nothing more than a system of spoliation,
with force being used to transfer resources
from productive to non-productive persons.
To enervate the creative energies of some in
order to allow the privileged despoilers to
sustain themselves at the expense of the
productive, is but to engage in a
sophisticated form of cannibalism.
Slavery, conscription, eminent domain, asset
forfeiture, war, taxation, govt.-mandated
insurance, the state’s creation of rules for
uniformity and standardization of products
and behavior, involve some living at the
expense of others through forced transfer of
resources and energy. There is more than
just hyperbole involved in regarding such
behavior as a form of “cannibalism.” That so
many of these practices are carried out by
people who self-applaud themselves as
“public servants” should remind us of the
Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man,” in
which aliens from another planet come to
Earth with promises to end wars, hunger,
resolve health problems, and other benefits
to humanity. They have brought with them a
book, titled “To Serve Man,” that earthlings
try to translate. As a number of humans are
being loaded onto the spaceship to take them
to the alien’s planet, one man figures out
that “it’s a cook book.” “Serving mankind”
is a political mantra that could be
inscribed on every cannibal pot!
A business firm that begins to consume its
own investment capital is on the way to
extinction. So, too, is a culture that
undertakes to consume the principles,
values, expectations, and other conditions
that foster its vibrancy. The health of a
civilization depends upon its being able to
produce the values that sustain it, a truth
acknowledged by a number of eminent
historians. Arnold Toynbee observed that the
collapse of a civilization arises from a
“loss of creative power in the souls of
creative individuals;” a movement “toward
standardization and uniformity” ending with
a “forcible political unification in a
universal state.” Will and Ariel Durant
concluded that the health of a civilization
depends upon “creative individuals . . .
capable of effective responses to new
situations.” Jacob Burckhardt advised that
“the way of annihilation is invariably
prepared by inward degeneration,” while
William von Humboldt stated that civilized
cultures depend upon “human development in
its richest diversity.” More recently,
historian Carroll Quigley offered an
analysis demonstrating how the structuring
of societies to achieve equilibrium weakens
and destroys the “instruments of expansion”
i.e., the systems that produce the values
that sustain the health of a civilization.
The erstwhile centers of industrial
production in America that have devolved
into the current “rust belt,” provide a
concrete example.
If the assessments of such historians are
correct, it should be clear that cultures
whose foundations are deeply set in
violence, war, centralized power, fear,
disrespect for life, along with the looting
and scavenging which, alone, can sustain a
privileged caste of cannibals, are fated for
collapse. When cannibals have finally
despoiled the well-conditioned zombies of
the life-force and other energies upon which
all of life depends, they will, like other
parasites, have to look for new hosts upon
which to feed their voracious appetites.
Butler Shaffer [send
him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern
University School of Law. He is the author
of the newly-released
In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign
Against Competition, 1918–1938,
Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to
Peace and Human Survival, and
Boundaries of Order. His latest book is
The Wizards of Ozymandias.
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