Kant Touch This
'The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must' is the reigning principle. Check (and balances) please - not only in politics but in media and business too
Immanuel Kant, a philosophy influencer during the Enlightenment, said something along the lines of “do only that which conforms to rules that you would want everyone else to follow”. The ‘Kant Position’ seems reasonable. And in day to day life, most normal people come pretty close to following it.
It is so reasonable that even above everyday life, atop the frigid peaks of politics, media, and business, people appeal to the Kant Position. Leaders in these fields (let’s call them Political and Economic Elite People, or PEEPs) are constantly justifying their actions with universal rules and transcendent principles.
Nike would have you believe that they are not just selling athletic apparel. They are uniting the world through sports. Facebook aims to bring the world closer together. CNN strives to present the truth. What could be more reasonable than wanting to bring the world together and report the truth?
But reasonable doesn’t get you far as a PEEP. You can’t make a world-changing omelette by asking each egg if it wants to be cracked. So if Kant can’t be counted on, who can a PEEP turn to?
Greek blogger Thucydides is true north for PEEPs navigating the broad seas of power and principle. Covering the Athenian invasion of Melos, he says:
Since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must
That is the sort of principle that a power-hungry PEEP can get behind. The trouble is that normal people might notice this and eventually take power for themselves. At which point the PEEP would suffer what they must.
Thucydides’ principle
The best recipe then is to act like Thucydides whenever necessary, but cloaked with a phony appeal to one of Kant’s wishy-washy principles.
But Seriously…
…principle is cast aside at the first trade off between principle and power. This is true in politics, in media, and in business. In politics we inherited an intricate system of checks and balances to contain this lust for power. Not so in media and business.
In politics: the filibuster is obviously undemocratic when used against us, but a key check against authoritarianism when used against our opponents. Deploying troops to weeks long uncontained protests is tyrannical, but maintaining an armed presence in the capital for months with no specified threat is fine (above). When our opponents issue executive orders it’s a power grab, but when we do it it just shows how organised we are. Single tips can be used to launch probes into opponents, but widespread allegations of electoral irregularities do not justify any investigation when we won (see But Seriously article here).
So we agree - lots of executive orders shows good momentum? Maybe Kant would agree, but that’s for dummies. The principle is: my executive orders should not be questioned, yours should be used as a weapon against your reputation
This lust for power must be tempered in the political realm by checks and balances. Fortunately, while Kant was busy in Germany writing his prescriptive (but not descriptive) ethics, the Founding Fathers had a more realistic understanding of human nature. Hamilton studied the checks and balances necessary for a government to “tread a middle path between despotism and anarchy.” Adams wrote that “the only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty”. And James Madison said it most clearly when he wrote in the Federalist Papers:
If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.
While the current concentration of executive power is a major problem (see last week’s But Seriously on the topic here) we do still continue to enjoy this intricate system of political checks and balances engineered by Madison and others.
In media: dominant platforms can host genuine calls for violence from brutal regimes around the world, but they will shut down free speech competitors. Publishing leaked private information is fair game when it hurts opponents, but not when it hurts our team (covered previously here).
Nothing says ‘unite the world through sport’ like lobbying to keep using forced labor in your supply chain
In business: Nike may want to unite the world around sports, but it also wants to stop the US government restricting its use of Uighur forced labor. Hedge funds oppose regulations on trading, until Redditors cost them billions of dollars through legal trading.
We need some way of checking concentrated power in media and business, akin to our political checks and balances. Tech companies that have the power to control information flow and destroy competition are not good. And they are unchecked. Concentrated media that can disappear stories and condemn opponents as dangerous are not good. And they are unchecked. Corporations that opaquely buy influence on national trade and fiscal policies are not good. And they are unchecked.
If Facebook can supress major stories at will today, what will it be able to do tomorrow?
Newton’s laws of motion say that a body in motion continues until acted on by another force. In media and business, no such force exists today. It is possible government is not the solution. Platforms like Substack could grow to challenge legacy media. Consumers may shift away from tech platforms. Time will tell.
Thanks for reading this week’s article on But Seriously. If you enjoyed it, share it with friends. And feel free to leave comments below with your thoughts, especially if you disagree. Check out the homepage here for previous articles. And tune in next week, for a special on how fear is used to distort issues and mobilise support.