Once I was born a British citizen, and enjoyed the suzerainty of a long-standing liberal democracy. I knew my liberties as they were embedded in common law and understood the rights and privileges which were my birthright. This was a common culture that was shared in many forms by my fellow pupils at school, by my family and by those who desired to make this country their home.
In 1997 I was still a citizen. Now I am a subject: not a subject of the Crown but the subject of a new beast, one that stretches from Whitehall to Brussels. Roger Scruton has defined a subject as follows:
Subjection is the relation between the state and the individual that arises when the state need not account to the individual, when the rights and duties of the individual are undefined or defined only partially and defeasibly, and where there is no rule of law that stands higher than the state that enforces it.
This is a contentious argument, but our rights are overdetermined and overdefined on paper, arbitrary in exertion, incompetent in execution. Moreover, the European Union under the Treaty of Lisbon confers the authority of a bureaucratic state based upon a law no higher than itself, which can annul and strike out all rights, as power overrides law.
In practice, bureaucratic accretions, quangos and the vomit of regulation have encouraged a culture of subjection. This may have roots prior to New Labour but it acquired its final flowering under this pestilent regime, and discarded the final brakes upon its power: demanding that we are subject to them, civil servants in name, masters in form. ID cards, databases, surveillance and dependency.
The final transition can never be dated. It is not in the interests of the Tories to row back on such change, as they will lose the power that they have looked upon so enviously for a decade. So, when I vote in 2010, I will know that we are each capable of acting responsibly as a citizen, but we are now viewed as subjects, to be feared and controlled.
Nice parody
the man with a gun is a citizen; the man without a gun is a subject.
In the US these days, we are seeing an unusual phenomenon—ordinary middle class people protesting in the steet about the monstrous explosion of state power and expenditures that has occurred under both the republicans and democrats over this last year.
It is not difficult to see the very clearcut fear in the collectivist press and political commentariat, expressed generally as a scornful disdain, often combined with vaguely threatening anger that anyone would dare oppose the new messiah’s programs.
Not being psychic, I have no idea where this is all going, or how it will resolve itself in the future. We are all in unexplored territory, and I can only guess based on past history here, and in other countries, what might happen.
The situation now is, on the protest side, a somewhat formless and undefined anger brought about by several issues which have combined to energize a great many people who do not normally engage in this type of activity. Depending on what type of leadership finally emerges, we may have anything from Solidarity to just another adjunct to one of the political parties.
On the statist side, which includes the media and political entities, there is a concerted effort both to pretend the protests don’t really matter, and to demonize them as a right wing hate movement aimed at whatever sacred cow the particular commenter feels a need to protect.
Individuals who dare to stand up and demand rights and liberties that might interfere with the schemes and plans for accumulation of additional power on the part of the ruling elites have always generated fear and hatred. In the past, the state could often eliminate these dangerous individuals.
I don’t think we have come to that point quite yet.
Compliant subjects are never feared, only despised and ignored.
Free men and women may very well be subjected to derision and contempt by the great powers that are trying to control everything, but they can never be ignored, and they are always feared above all else.
Whenever you see a philosophy which hates, fears, and wishes to do violence to the independent human mind and spirit, you can be sure you are in the presence of a malevolence that is a deadly threat to the existence of men and women as anything more than faceless cogs in the societal machine.
The anti-mind is the anti-life.
Oh how profoundly I wish it was that simple.
During the times of our greatest freedoms all Britons were subjects exclusively. Being a citizen was associated with the excesses of (French) repression, and as we became citizens of the United kingdom, instead of purely subjects of the Crown, so it has been proved.
Contradictory huh?
I am entirely naive on UK politics and structure, so, this is a sincere inquiry:
Subjects may be subject to the Crown, or more realistically, to the bureaucracies which have grown to unmanageable size, but, cannot not subjects make things extremely difficult for those same bureaucracies to function, while at the same time, working on voting the bastards out who keep swelling them?
I am talking about really gumming up the works. Flinging mud on traffic cams, submitting hundreds or thousands of bogus forms at every level of government to slow things down… getting in the way of functionaries going about their business, hell, i dont know. Making every act of enforcement slow to glacial pace. Just talking out loud here.
veryretired–so, soooo true. What I have seen the last few months scares me deeply. I am steeling my nerves for what might become necessary. I need to get a poster of the lone person in front of the tank in Tianenman Square.
The media died, and they are merely a JournoList megaphone and instrument of the state. Roesgen’s abominable behavior was NOT reporting. It was advocacy. She’s a hacktivist.
I tweeted up a storm on April 15 and was RT’d into twitterfame…and I tweeted that I’m probably on Janet Napolitano’s Most Dangerous List because of it. (Even though I’m a registered Democrat!)
I sometimes get tempted to shut my mouth and play along and suck up to the new Diktatoriat to ensure my own position in life…but I just want to cry thinking about it. I can’t do it. I have to raise my fist and my voice for freedom. My citizenship is hard-won and I had to deserve it. I have to stand in front of the tank.
I will grab the pearls back from the swine.
FREEDOM!!!
Darryl, great ideas for the resistance!
Liz, with respect to “the resistence”, I just got myself one of these little “wrench in the machine” stickers for my bumper. Perhaps we should all have them, as a reminder of what we should be doing in these troubled times. Just a thought.
One could argue this “citizen versus subject” thing the other way.
A subject has a government (tradionally a monarch) but it is government limited by tradition and by institutional limits (such as the power of the Church and of the nobilty, and of the associations in the towns and so on).
Custom, tradition, and “old rights” were no perfect defence against monarchs in the Middle Ages (far from it) – but modern Constitutions have proved no perfect defence either.
Despots do not have “subjects” – to them there is no difference between people and physical objects (no difference between people and things – no subject object distinction).
As for “citizens”:
This can be a good term (imploying rights – although after the rise of the Emperors Roman citizens had no real rights against them).
But it also means a person can not really be outside the state.
Traditionally a monarch did not care what a subject did as long as they did not revolt.
But a citizen has to be involved in the “life of the state” (at least according to some traditions of this form of thought) – whether they wish to be or not.
After all a government of citizens is not supposed to be distant thing – “the government is you and you are the government” and other creepy stuff.
All the above being said:
There is still more good in the tradition of the Republic (of the Res publica) than there is bad – and the Roman thinking in it is a lot less collectivist than a lot of thinking in the Greek Polis.
There were Greek thinkers who held that a Polis should only use force against those who violated the bodies or goods of others – but a more common view was that Polis should control the lives of people in all sorts of ways.
With Rome (under the Republic) it was the opposite.
There were some people who thought the Republic should control people’s lives – but the mainstream view was that people and their families were independent and that the State should only involve itself where there was a threat (either a domestic threat or the threat of invasion).
Such things as government education of children (a common thing in some Greek city states) filled Republican Romans with horror – for they know it would destroy the independence of Civil Society.
The distinction between Civil Society and the state is what the Roman Republic (in spite of all its flaws) was based on.
Some people say that the Republic died when “bread and games” became normal for the Roman mob.
However, only a small minority of Roman citizens lived in the city of Rome and could have access to such things (for most citizens Rome was not a Welfare State – and did not become so even under the Empire).
In politics the Roman mob were a terrible problem (selling their votes to those who offered them most benefits – Sulla was right that this perversion would undermine the Republic) buy they were not most Romans – the Republic still lived.
It really died when the private ownership and training with arms was banned – by the first Emperor.
The on-going attack on civil rights is not rooted in a culture of bureacracy, for the simple reason that it is occurring throughout the Western world. One must look elsewhere for its genesis.
A deeper and more radical approach is evident in this article, should anyone wish to comprehend. You may not find all the truths it contains to your liking:
http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the_horizontally_totalitarian_future_world/
Rather than whaffling about the philosophical differences between “subject” and “citizen”, why not examine the legal definitions? It don’t matter a hoot what YOU think subject and citizen mean, or which one you “prefer”. What matters is how those are defined BY THOSE IN POWER, and which one defines you when you are arrested or stand before a court judge.
If you bought your house and the land it stands on, and have paid off your mortgages, then why the hell do you still pay fixed asset taxes to the government? Answer that question, and you will find the answer to whether you are a subject or a citizen (regardless of which one you THINK you are) and what the terms really mean.
This is what it’s about, folks: the struggle between those who believe in voluntary cooperation and those who believe in compulsory cooperation. All the big issues discussed here and elsewhere come down to this. Should we base our currency on a gold standard or not? National dna database? National ID card? Labour or Conservative? Should we bailout the banks or other “too big to fail” companies, or not? Should we invade this or that country? TWOT? Euro? World currency? World government? National education?(Link)
Artist and journalist Jon Rappoport wrote in The Secret of Secret Societies(Link) that there are two big traditions in human history: the secret society, and the tradition of the imagination; the former is about control of people, the latter is about freedom, including freedom from others’ control and freedom from the need to control others. Nazism is a good example of the secret-society way of thinking.
(from Jon Rappoport’s website(Link))
(Spencer, “The Man Versus the State”,(Link) 1885, Chapter 1, page 1).
“But a citizen has to be involved in the ‘life of the state’ (at least according to some traditions of this form of thought) – whether they wish to be or not.”
Michelle Obama believes this: “Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”
Thanks, Michelle. I always liked the concept of a First Nanny better than a First Lady. Of course, to her, “uninvolved and uninformed” means “your opinions don’t match my opinions [but they will when I’m done with you].” I love you, Big Sister.
I believe one of your citizens said it best, “yer ass belongs to a dying nation, they don’t know that we own you.”
Government is outside the law.
The irony of a democratic society is that when civil and economic liberties are revoked it has the alleged impramatur of the citizen for its justification. Allegedly because they are often revoked by the conspiring of the media, legal, political and economic elite.
Monarchies have a dominant, ofttime oppressive elite and they acknowledge it. Democracies have such elites but deny it.
the man with a gun is a citizen; the man without a gun is a subject.
The man outgunned is a corpse.
“Monarchies have a dominant, ofttime oppressive elite and they acknowledge it. Democracies have such elites but deny it.”
We have always had such elites. The man who can think more quickly than the next, the woman who can reason more clearly than another, these people are just as elite as the man with one eye in the land of the blind. “All men are created equal” is taken as a polite fiction, but the truth is that the man who is born without sight, or hearing, or – God forbid – hands, will never be the equal of one born without these disabilities. And there is no technology that can make me a genius like Einstein, though there are technologies that could be used to cripple someone who is a genius, and make them as stupid as me.
The elites have always existed, and will always exist. The difference between cultures is how accurately their superior skills are recognized, how much freedom they are given to use them, and (this is the part that atheists and libertarians tend to choke on) how well they are harnessed for the good of the society. Monarchies are extremely poor at recognizing superior skill, substituting the superstition that the children of a proven elite inevitably have the same skills; not a farfetched proposition, and certainly one that would be borne out by the understanding of biogenetics in dark age Europe, but the chaotic natue of genetics eventually results in flaws that no amount of inbreeding can repair. Pure democracies (think the “mob rule” of the French Revolution) are just as poor at harnessing the power of the elite, instead leaving it completely free to pursue its own goals… which, considering how power magnifies human vices while diminishing virtues, eventually leads to the bloody wars between competing elites that France saw.
Excellent post, excellent comments. Thanks everyone.
I do not fear death…
You know what I fear?
‘A cage…
…To stay behind bars until use and old age accept them and all chance of valor has gone beyond beyond recall or desire.’
I must have freedom… be it this life or the next.
If we have to fight, so be it. If we must die, so be it.
Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils.
Time we borrowed a line from Gen. John Stark.
I’m sorry, but this is an imbecile conversation. There’s no such thing as a British citizen. You are either British, and a subject of the Queen (or King, if we’re talking about the past or hypothetical future), or you are a visiting subject of some other monarchy, or a visiting citizen of some foreign republic. If you can’t stand the notion of being a subject, find a republic which will take you.
These are legally defined terms, which have an objective reality outside of libertarian wish-fulfillment fantasy. Once you stop believing in citizenship and the monarchy, they still exist: the very phildickian definition of reality. If this greatly offends your sense of philosophical amour propre, the obvious course is to agitate for the destruction of the monarchy & replacement of it with some people’s republic or Galtian oligarchy. But in the meantime, you are still a subject of the Queen.
You, Sir, are a dickhead. I offer the following into evidence as proof of your manifest state of dickheadedness… turn to the picture page of your very own British passport. There you will see two important things:
1. In capital letters the words BRITISH CITIZEN
2. The image of a dickhead looking back at you
Laird,
I note with some amusement that on the page you linked (with the spanner in the works sticker), there’s this priceless “Made In America” patch.
Of all the guns to choose, they HAD to pick the Browning High Power: a gun made in Belgium and assembled in either Canada or Portugal.
The rest of the stickers are equally hilarious, and incorrect.
Kim, I don’t know enough about handguns to recognize that particular model, but I accept your identification and appreciate the irony. And you’re right: the rest of the stickers are pretty much uniformly left-wing (I especially liked “Labor Creates All Wealth”). But, I still enjoy my “Wrench* in the Machine” sticker. We need to use the tools of the left against them! I just got a copy of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”.
* “Wrench”, not “spanner”!
Very interesting observation. http://www.the11thamendment.com assosiates this as “dogma” from dark ages, when rational thinking included burning people who objected to abuse of power as witches, inter alia.
So Copernicus feared for his life and halted the publishing of his exposing this dogma. Enter the foolish child scientist Galileo, and he was imprisoned for life, for showing that dogma had flaws! Ooooh God made a big mistake in communicating to the “sovereigns.” This started the paradigm shift, but it was quickly misconstrued as a so called scientific breakthrough, when in actuality, it was an opertunity for society to toss out these abusive sovereigns.
Instead we settled for a moot Magna Charta.
USA had rekindled this move to ending dogma whereby officials, called royal court, could escape liability for abuses of power, through what the declaration called “mock trials” and judicial tyranny.” The said the major premise that created abuse was from “a right enistimable for them and formidable for tyrants only.
So, we few, have identified the source of the worlds problems, which is “sovereign immunity.” IN USA it was “state immunity” untill 1999 when it was declared in Alden v Maine as “sovereignty for all officials born in the original constitution, regardless of the 11th amendment.”
This is good new. If we can get “citizens” or “subjects” to grasp the reality that exists, constitutional laws that perpetuate corruption, can be repealed.
Instead the fallacies are robbing democracy in “two party systems” that have never mentioned this issues of “subject v citizen.” Sovereign absolute power is in the USA through the 11th amendment and Alden v Maine, and the citizens here have no clue it exists or affects them.
I am very perplexed about this.
I like this discription, because it follows a rule of law…not discretion….
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldhansrd/vo040504/text/40504w05.htm