A Closing Word

Two hundred and fifty years ago a failed corset-maker who had been in America fourteen months published a pamphlet arguing that the arrangement everyone lived under was not oppressive so much as absurd — that everyone already knew it, and the only thing standing in the way was the habit of not saying so. It sold a hundred and twenty thousand copies in three months, in a country of two and a half million.

He wrote: a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

That is where we are. Not under tyranny — nobody is quartering soldiers in your house, and anyone who tells you this is 1776 has either read no history or is selling you something. We are somewhere stranger and less dramatic. We have a system that works exactly as built and produces outcomes almost nobody wants, and we have grown so used to it that we mistake its output for our own opinion.

The arrangement was not designed by anyone. It emerged, from a long series of individually reasonable decisions, and nobody chose it. Which means nobody is defending it on the merits, because it has none, because it was never argued for in the first place.

That should be encouraging. A thing nobody chose can be unchosen. It requires no revolution, no violence, and nobody to abandon a single deeply held belief. It requires only that enough people say out loud, at the same time, that this does not work and we are done pretending it does.

The generation that read Paine's pamphlet had no navy, no treasury, no manufacturing, and no experience governing themselves. What they had was a decision.

We have every material advantage and no decision. That is a better problem to have, and a more embarrassing one.