The Masses as Goats and Dogs: Townsend and Sade’s Doctrines Rule the World
Who knew that goats and dogs were so important to the development of today’s economic practice?
The founders and practitioners of free-market ideology have finally succeeded in turning the individual intellect, and the collective that is Western civilization, into little more than value-objects. Now, all are witness to the reality that everything, everyone, every emotion and even every movement has a price and a cost.
Western society and individual thought has, at long last, become totally materialistic; which is to say, completely economic according to practices decidedly informed by 18th and 19th Century philosophy (often misinformed).
There is nothing current in 21st Century academia or journalism that addresses the Sadistic now which has become a perpetual moment-in-motion in which history is despised for its reality and the future lies someplace in the fantasy notions of a pre-history. Perhaps humanity’s fate is a pre-history.…Malthus and Darwin owed their inspiration to this source [Townsend’s goats and dogs, see below]. Malthus learned of it from Condorcet, Darwin from Malthus. Yet neither Darwin’s theory of natural selection nor Malthus’ population laws might have exerted any appreciable influence on modern society but for the maxims which Townsend deduced from his goats and dogs and wished to have applied to the reform of the poor law…
Here was a new starting point for political science. By approaching human community from the animal side, Townsend bypassed the supposedly unavoidable question as to the foundation of government and in so doing introduced a new concept of law into human affairs–that of the laws of nature. — The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (1944).
In this excerpt from A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by Robert Townsend (1786), the masses get their come-uppance. When reading the views of Townsend it is important to note, as Polanyi points out, that in the United Kingdom at the time, “poor” meant anyone who did not have the wealth to be leisurely 24/7. Just 15 percent of those in the United Kingdom were allowed to vote at the time.The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action-pride, honor, and ambition. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labor
…Who is most worthy to suffer cold and hunger, the prodigal or the provident, the slothful or the diligent, the virtuous or the vicious?
In the South Seas there is an island, which from the first discoverer is called Juan Fernandez. In this sequestered spot, John Fernando placed a colony of goats, consisting of one male, attended by his female. This happy couple finding pasture in abundance, could readily obey the first commandment, to increase and multiply, till in process of time they had replenished their little island. In advancing to this period they were strangers to misery and want, and seemed to glory in their numbers: but from this unhappy moment they began to suffer hunger; yet continuing for a time to increase their numbers, had they been endued with reason, they must have apprehended the extremity of famine. In this situation the weakest first gave way, and plenty was again restored…partial evil was universal good.
When the Spaniards found that the English privateers resorted to this island for provisions, they resolved on the total extirpation of the goats, and for this purpose they put on shore a greyhound dog and bitch. These in their turn increased and multiplied, in proportion to the quantity of food they met with; but in consequence, as the Spaniards had foreseen, the breed of goats diminished. Had they been totally destroyed, the dogs likewise must have perished. But as many of the goats retired to the craggy rocks, where the dogs could never follow them, descending only for short intervals to feed with fear and circumspection in the rallies, few of these, besides the careless and the rash, became a prey; and none but the most watchful, strong, and active of the dogs could get a sufficiency of food.
Thus a new kind of balance was established. The weakest of both species were among the first to pay the debt of nature; the most active and vigorous preserved their lives. It is the quantity of food which regulates the numbers of the human species…
And some wisdom from the Marquis ...
The religious chimeras must be replaced by the utmost terrors. The people must be freed from the fear of a future Hell. Once that is destroyed they will abandon themselves to anything. But the chimerical law must be replaced by penal laws of enormous severity which apply of course only to the people since they alone cause unrest in the state….What do the rich care for the idea of a leash they will never feel themselves if this empty semblance gives them the right to grind down those living under its yoke?"
The conspiracy of rulers against peoples implemented by relentless organization finds the enlightenment period no less compliant than the bourgeois republic. That spirt is hostile only to authority when authority lacks the strength to enforce obeisance and to violence only when violence is not an established fact. As long as one does not ask who is applying it, reason has no greater affinity with violence or mediation…it presents as peace or war, tolerance or repression as the given state of affairs…Reason as a purely formal entity is in the service of every natural interest. Becoming simply an organ, thinking reverts to nature. For the rulers, however, human beings become mere material as the whole of nature has become material for society. — Horkheimer and Adorno quoting from Juliette by the Marquis de Sade (1797)
The more things change the more they stay the same
