By James A. Clark

Why is it that politicians feel obliged to lecture people on morality, and clergymen always want to talk politics?

The national media had a field day recently, reporting on South Africa’s second most famous Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s comments at a launch event for his latest book, the Humanist Imperative, at Stellenbosch University.

Though his other comments were overshadowed by his view that white South Africans should pay a sort of collective ethnic guilt tax to atone for Apartheid, they are no less indicative of the Archbishop’s distressing inability to recognise the elephant in the room behind all the problems he identifies.  What is most distressing is that Desmond Tutu is one of South Africa’s leading citizens, as well as a man of the cloth, known to be unafraid of publicly confronting the ANC administration where he feels it has done wrong.  He is not regarded as a mere puppet of the regime, nor of some vested interest, by the average South African.  Tragically, a lot of reasonable South Africans are likely to believe what he says, even if the causes he associates with society’s problems are questionable, and the remedies he suggests utterly absurd.

For Desmond Tutu, everything that is wrong in South Africa today is the fault of the previous government’s policies – the same government which handed over power almost twenty years ago.  Even the fact that Johannesburg’s public streets are known to accumulate litter is allegedly due to the policies of a national government which ruled almost two decades ago.  The solution – to everything – is for the current government to take wealth, at gunpoint, from the children of those who were abused less harshly in terms of the old government’s policies, pay itself handsomely for the effort, and give the residue to the children of those who were worse off.  He claims that poverty itself does not cause criminality or delinquency, and of course that’s true, and yet he seems to think that an immediate reduction of poverty for an individual at someone else’s expense would reduce such tendencies.  Interesting.

Apartheid was not really to the benefit of all white South Africans, nor even most white South Africans.  Indeed, the National Party claimed to be benefiting everyone with its ‘separate development’ policies.  Why discard off-hand their ridiculous allegation that Apartheid was to the benefit of blacks, and then not also question whether the alleged benefits to whites in general might  have been a politician’s promise?  It’s not even as though all the ruling elite, and their minions, were white back then.  What about the rulers of the Bantustans?  Weren’t there a significant number of black individuals who obviously benefited from the old government’s ill-gotten patronage at the expense of the many?  Shouldn’t their children and grandchildren feel guilty?

Apartheid was not a unique political arrangement, as Archbishop Tutu would surely agree, having personally witnessed the situation the Palestinians and the Israelis find themselves in today.  As terrible as it was, it does not represent an aberration amongst states in that it was exploitative of and positively harmful to the vast majority of the national population.  As with any political arrangement – any system of government conceived thus far – it was to the benefit of special vested interests at the expense of society in general.  Employment restrictions were to the benefit of the established unions, who wanted to keep out competition.   This came at the cost of the consumer – i.e. everyone – as well as the black worker.  Apartheid’s racial economic restrictions were to the benefit of the established corporate rent-seeker, at the cost of the entrepreneur and consumer of every colour.  Most importantly, the vast majority of white South Africans were not cliché cartoon ‘capitalists’ crowing over their mine or factory full of poor black workers; they were mostly middle-class people who got their wealth from selling their own labour and attempting to make personal savings and investments based on this income.  If you add up all the various taxes they were paying, not even counting the unseen costs associated with Apartheid’s fascist stranglehold on the South African economy, they were handing over most of their personal productivity, at gunpoint, to pay for the insane eugenic schemes of the Apartheid central planners.  On top of this, a large number of them were conscripted against their will and better judgement to serve in the old government’s army.  It’s not that they all benefited – it’s just that they were not treated as badly.  Now their children should continue to pay, at gunpoint, because others were treated even  worse?

Being forced to do something cannot possibly result in ethical consequences one way or the other.  If a bank teller is forced, at gunpoint, to hand over some of the bank’s money to the gunman, he cannot be held liable as an accomplice to the robbery.  Likewise, if someone is forced to pay some of their own money to what might otherwise be considered a charitable cause, this “donation” of theirs cannot possibly be considered virtuous.  It cannot be considered generous for anyone to lobby for a tax concerning other peoples’ money.

The principle that ethical consequences cannot logically be associated with actions which were compelled by force is so elementary that a very young child will instinctively appreciate its veracity, and yet the overwhelming popularity of the state today indicates that most people think that there is some sort of qualitative distinction between the natural ‘microethics’ they should have discovered as children,  which applies between their own person and other private individuals, and a sort of artificial ‘macroethics’ they are taught about in school and university, which is allegedly applicable to the state and its agents vis-a-vis the population.  They believe that the rules stop where the pomp and ceremony associated with emperors, kings, queens, presidents, parliaments and judges begins.  This is a form of cognitive dissonance – holding two mutually destructive beliefs to be true simultaneously.

Such a tragically pervasive misapprehension of how society must necessarily work is what leads Archbishop Tutu, for one, to conclude that white South Africans should lobby the government for this collective white guilt tax of his.  Yes, we should ask the thug to put the gun against our heads and demand that we hand over part of our wealth to him, so that he can take his slice and distribute the residue as he sees fit.  We have to choose to be forced to do something.  We can’t just go ahead and do it – every person pay a portion of their income they feel is appropriate to causes they feel are genuinely deserving, and be judged individually in accordance with his perceived generosity.  Apparently it is absolutely essential that coercion be involved, so that the gunman can take his share.  It should not be necessary to remind a man of God, but it is not possible to achieve good through evil means, and everyone with their eyes open should realise by now that it is not possible for a government bureaucracy to do anything efficiently.

Of course Archbishop Tutu presided over the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – likely the most Orwellian commission ever named.  This series of political show-trials effectively exonerated a large number of individuals who had genuinely committed crimes in the name of their political beliefs and allegiances – in the name of Apartheid, or in the name of a war against it – and shifted the blame and victim-hood, collectively, onto the children and children’s children of entire ethnic groups.  Future generations get to be whipping-boy because the criminals of that generation were simply too important to get what they deserved.  The strategy of divide-and-conquer was vindicated once more as one of the most powerful weapons in the lazy, unproductive sociopath’s arsenal.

When are South Africans going to grow up?  When are we going to stop trying to right the wrongs of our ancestors by punishing our children?  South Africa is not a closed book distinct unto itself in the library of human history; it is a chapter in a great novel that is still being written.  If we don’t stop now, if we don’t give up our addiction to violence now, there is no reason why we should ever give it up.  The wealth that politicians plot to steal is not a definite quantity existing in nature like a fruit on a tree – it must be generated by us as we go forward, using only the capital we have managed to save up to this point.  This is not going to happen if the government punishes the individual productivity necessary for this to happen, destroys the capital, and rewards unproductive individuals in the name of collective “compensation”.  Our great-grandchildren will still be claiming compensation from each other for the things we are doing to each other now, and the lazy sociopath with the gun will be laughing all the way to the bank at their expense.  He wants us to fight each other so that we won’t notice what he’s really doing.  We must wake up and realise that the state is a scam by nature, and always will be no matter which crew of ignorant smiling suits you vote into ‘power’ to represent the awful machine as its public relations crew.  There is no time like the present; no crime in our past grave enough to indict our children and render their futures forfeit.  We must stop fighting each other, and turn our attention to the man with the gun.  One cannot escape the consequences of their past by refusing to live in the present.

James is currently a law student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and a student of liberty in the Austrian tradition.  Send him mail.