Parasitocracy

Tyranny, being as endemic to the human condition as other similar privations of the human good such as ignorance, vice, or sickness, is as old as mankind. What may be new, however, is the uniquely intractable form of tyranny that is currently metastasizing throughout the world, namely the rule of an authoritarian plurality of societal parasites. Our next thousand years of darkness, if such be our fate, will begin under the governance of a “parasitocracy.”

The modern West has defied ancient wisdom on so many fronts, introducing new modes of existence and coexistence, spreading prosperity and promise in hitherto inconceivable measures, and overcoming the practical limits of time and distance in ways that would be as fantastical to our ancient ancestors’ imaginations as teleportation and hyperspace seem to ours. Yet it appears that Nature’s scales of justice must exact an equal measure of evil invention to balance our extreme bounty. So it is that late modern man has unearthed a new political arrangement, one that might have been impossible among the ancients, as it could have been born only of a civilization as broadly prosperous, liberal, and tolerant as ours.

I am not speaking of mere parasitism, the weakness of individual men who demand or cajole sustenance from others while contributing nothing in return. Rather, I am speaking of a systematic elevation of parasitism to the status of a ruling philosophy.

First, let us define our terms. By a “parasite” I do not mean merely an “unproductive” member of society. The two categories often overlap, but they are not identical. An unproductive person — i.e., someone whose activities contribute little of measurable value — is not necessarily parasitical. A friend recently reminded me of a lovely observation from Milan Kundera: “To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.” Sitting with a dog, literally or figuratively, is essentially unproductive, but it harms no one, and perhaps even benefits others indirectly as a reminder of the spiritual life, and particularly of the fact that the value of an action cannot always be measured by its usefulness to other people — a lesson individualists would do well to keep in mind. (Propaganda against the “unproductive” is precisely the means to the death panels of socialized medicine, as collectivism assumes that a productive man’s value is exhausted when his contribution to “society” ceases.)