Christchurch and the Id of government

Yesterday’s post on Hobbes and Locke started me thinking about a psychoanalytic mapping of the same concepts. In particular, the Christchurch rebuild is a physical manifestation of governing will. In ordinary times, social and institutional inertia put a check on the will of government to impose its vision on a city. Christchurch is not in ordinary times, so the checks aren’t there.

The new decision about Christchurch schools reveals just how much the Id is in charge. A conservative government is supposed to be guided by a few key principles, and these should form its Superego. Some of these principles are local control, smaller government, personal responsibility, and rewarding individual effort. The decision to merge a large number of schools, to develop large-scale campuses, and to push through changes over local opposition, are all contrary to such principles. The disconnect between the expectation and the practice is obvious in this quote:

Principals are also upset they still have no idea about the rationale behind the proposals to close, merge and relocate their schools.

But there is no rationale behind the proposal, because the Id is in charge. We expect the Superego to be strong with this one, but instead the government is trying to take the place of the Superego. All of this was signalled even before the earthquakes, with the take-over of ECan. That move — regardless of whatever fig-leaf of legality was artfully arranged — was completely contrary to what should have been conservative principles.

What we see, instead, is that whatever the Ministers in charge decide to do is A Good Thing because they decided to do it. That kind of behaviour — disordered, impulsive, unreflective — is characteristic of the Id.

It is also the world of Hobbes, in which I do what I want because I want. The control is from outside:  a stronger Id places a limit on mine, and our Egos sort out some rational balance of power. The Lockean world has more of the Superego: we internalise the relationships and order of our society, and they limit our impulses.

All of which makes Christchurch vaguely post-apocalyptic. Instead of relying on the Superego to see the city through, the government has established a rule of the Id. Hobbes and Mad Max are united by the Avon.

Hobbes or Locke?

Crooked Timber has critiqued a post by Brad DeLong in which he argues that economists are Lockean not Hobbesian. This is a continued source of puzzlement to me. I do not understand why DeLong does not understand the US political economy. He has mentioned on several occasions (here and here, for example) that he used to believe a technocratic core of bureaucrats and politicians were interested in maintaining economic stability, including 6%-ish unemployment. To his credit, he seeks to mark his beliefs to market, to update them with new information. But I think he truly believes that a Lockean economics describes the bureaucrats and politicians around him, when it does not.

Which means my response to Crooked Timber is that economists view the world as some combination of Hobbes and Locke because it is.

I should say that this is something with which I struggle daily. I do not know when Locke should prevail or Hobbes. It doesn’t help that New Zealand has found a different point on the continuum than the US, and so my calibration is off. As a result, I try to observe and understand when it is socially appropriate to obey principles and when it is socially appropriate to jettison them. Because that, to me, is the essence of the difference. We are either a society of laws and principles by which we agree to live for mutual benefit, or we are a society in which we seek our own private benefit regardless, and only a stronger sovereign compels us to conform. In practice, we are somewhere in between, and some meta-principle determines when we choose one or the other.

A few incidents over the years have shown me the value of Hobbes’s insights. One was the mining of Nicaragua’s harbours in the 1980s. The US government, acting through the CIA, placed mines in the harbour of Managua, Nicaragua. The US had not declared war on Nicaragua. It wasn’t acting through proxies, or providing materiel. The US government went into another country and placed explosives there. Then, when Nicaragua tried to follow international law and took the US to the International Court of Justice, US simply said that it could and would ignore the Court. A law that can be ignored is no law. It was thus clear that international relations were not about principles and law for mutual benefit, but about a contest for power.

I also read the book Gomorrah. The book discussed the impact of organised crime around Naples, Italy. One of the interesting bits was the description of the changes over time. The modern bosses were interested in wealth — on displaying their success through houses, cars, jewelry, etc. By contrast, the old bosses, according to the book, were interested in power — they wanted to control people’s lives.

That desire for control is much more about Hobbes than Locke (or Adam Smith). Some people do desire unchecked power. They are not thwarted by laws or principles, but by superior power. I think that is a fact about people, and it has implications for society and the economy.

Specifically, it has implications for the US economy. The Republican party is interested in power. The party exists to control government and thereby control people’s lives. It is not in the Republicans’ interest to see the economy improve. It is not in their interest to permit a Democratic president to appear successful. The US unemployed, like the Nicaraguan fishing boats or a Neapolitan crime journalist, are simply collateral damage.