Zen & the Art of Federal Employment

Dear Federal Employees,

Greetings. I hope this message finds you well in these confusing times. Our honorable President* Joseph Biden recently referred to current attempts to expose election fraud as, “the greatest crisis to hit our country since the Civil War.” According to my sources, several weeks ago, in offices around the federal government, language began to be used such as has never been used in history. Language such as, “When we come back from Labor Day we are going to start going after Conservative groups” (not “extremists” or “White Nationalists”, but “Conservative groups”). Word also reaches me of discontent and “near civil war conditions” in some nooks and crannies of your esteemed offices. I write with the hope of pouring oil on troubled water.

My political leanings are known. Like Milton Friedman, I define myself as a small “l” libertarian small “r” republican (and have no love for the Republicans). Given this, it might be assumed by some that I am antagonistic towards federal employees. Yes there are individuals at certain commissions with whom I have had friction, but my mentor General Jack Vessey once told me, “Federal employees don’t go in every day wanting to do a bad job. It’s their leadership.” You folks would be shocked to know how over the years I have generally spoken of you so highly as a class, telling people how pleased and surprised I had been with the quality of people who have become federal employees whom I have met (even across deposition tables).  I sometimes sense an insecurity in lifelong federal employees, as though they wonder how they would fare in the private market. Be assured (and the public should know) that the popular conception is misguided, and that in federal employment one generally encounters a higher octane of individual than one comes across in corporate America. “About 1 in 20 are duds,” is how I have often described it, “versus 1 in 5 one meets in corporate America.”

So my following words do not come from a place of antagonism.  Given that 55% (and perhaps over 60%) of citizens will now tell a pollster that they believe fraud was significant or very significant in President* Biden’s victory, there must be a similar share of members of your group who harbor similar doubts. If so, then they must be having some sleepless nights, should they be in the least bit reflective about their duties.

I would like to share (in fact, overquote) a story from a classic of my early adolescence, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. In the context of a father-son motorcycle trip this book wove together numerous lectures on topics diverse. Describing the efforts of a professor he calls “Phaedrus” (actually his name for himself, before the onset of a crippling mental illness), he refers to a situation where a university had been threatened with loss of accreditation, and a student had asked if the police could not be posted to prevent it. Phaedrus gives the class a lecture on what he calls, “The Church of Reason”.

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The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind. It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through the centuries and which does not exist at any specific location. It’s a state of mind which is regenerated throughout the centuries by a body of people who traditionally carry the title of professor, but even that title is not part of the real University. The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.

In addition to this state of mind, “reason,” there’s a legal entity which is unfortunately called by the same name but which is quite another thing. This is a nonprofit corporation, a branch of the state with a specific address. It owns property, is capable of paying salaries, of receiving money and of responding to legislative pressures in the process.

But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.

Confusion continually occurs in people who fail to see this difference, he said, and think that control of the church buildings implies control of the church. They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations.

They see the second university, but fail to see the first.

After these explanations he returned to the analogy of the religious church. The citizens who build such a church and pay for it probably have in mind that they’re doing this for the community. A good sermon can put the parishioners in a right frame of mind for the coming week. Sunday school will help the children grow up right. The minister who delivers the sermon and directs the Sunday school understands these goals and normally goes along with them, but he also knows that his primary goals are not to serve the community. His primary goal is always to serve God. Normally there’s no conflict but occasionally one creeps in when trustees oppose the minister’s sermons and threaten reduction of funds. That happens.

A true minister, in such situations, must act as though he’d never heard the threats. His primary goal isn’t to serve the members of the community, but always god.

The primary goal of the Church of Reason, Phaedrus said, is always Socrates’ old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it’s revealed by the process of rationality. Everything else is subordinate to that. Normally this goal is in no conflict with the location goal of improving citizenry, but on occasion some conflict arises, as in the case of Socrates himself. It arises when trustees and legislators who’ve contributed large amounts of time and money to the location take points of view in opposition to the professors’ lectures of public statements. They can then lean on the administration by threatening to cut off funds if the professors don’t say what they want to hear. That happens too.

True churchmen in such situations must act as though they had never heard these threats. Their primary goal never is to serve the community ahead of everything else. Their primary goal is to serve, through reason, the goal of truth.

– Pirsig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1999, p. 150-151

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To federal employees who read this, I respectfully ask, What god do you serve?

I humble and respectfully suggest that I know you have all kinds of private beliefs, as all citizens are entitled to have. We all have paradigms within which we live and seek to find meaning in life. Some of us are Catholics some Jews, some are economists some bowlers, some are athletes some are gamers, some are environmental activists some are social justice advocates, but no matter one’s personal commitment to such centers of meaning in life, there is one and only one god a federal employee qua federal employee may serve.

Meet god:

That is to say, the US Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Why is that? Because the citizens of this country (or our ancestors) made a deal with you (or your forerunners), and there is nothing in life worse than a welcher, right? The deal is the deal. And the nature of that deal is spelled out with great clarity near the beginning of the first of those documents:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,…”

So we agreed that we the people start with rights and do so “self-evidently” (which is to say, we don’t have to prove that point to anyone, including you). Some of us may buy the story that a Creator made us and invested us with such rights. Some may locate them in imagining what people in a “state of nature” engaging in Lockean reasoning about what non-interference must be respected in order to grow civil society. The question may be debated in one’s private conscience, but one’s individual answer is irrelevant at this moment. Because whatever your theory as to the origin of those rights, the deal was that we the people (and the states we created) traded in some of those rights (no matter their origin) so as to empower a federal government to do certain things we could not do as individuals or as states.

In these confusing times, it may help to review what those things are. A good list of them can be found in Article I Section 8. And a list of things the federal government can never do is found in the Bill of Rights.

So in sum: that’s the paradigm within which our discourse occurs. It is within that paradigm, for example, that we the people surrendered the most fundamental right of all, the right of self-defense (known to philosophers as “self-help justice”). As John Locke noted, the right to defend oneself is something even an animal has. So much more then, a rational being such as a person. Yet we surrender that right in all but the most urgent, dire cases, and agree to live under a rule of law wherein all such matters will be adjudicated. That concession made by We the People is the most basic one we make: we have taken that most fundamental right of all animals and surrendered it to you, the government, in return for your commitment to abide by a paradigm established by a Declaration that says we have rights and that to protect them we traded in some rights so as to empower you in government; a Constitution defining those powers of government and the processes by which it generates and enforces well-formed rules; and a Bill of Rights listing the things that the federal government can never do.

That’s it. That’s the deal. That’s our deal. That is the deal you took when we hired you and you swore us an oath. It is on the basis that you swore such an oath that we trusted you with the powers of government, including trusting you enough to surrender our right to self-help justice.

There are other paradigms some may have, I know. Among them are paradigms that a proper life is spent abiding by the teachers of this or that religious figure, promote art or literature, or pursuing a goals as the environment, or maximizing some special form of justice to pursue (e.g., “social justice”). Those may be worthy goals and I wish you the greatest of success in choosing your own ends and maximizing them with your lives. But I wish respectfully to also remind you: a deal is a deal, nothing is worse than a welcher, and the deal that we the people made with you the government is spelled out in those three documents. It is on your acceptance of those terms that we surrendered our rights and created your powers. You are free to pursue all your other ends in life as well in your own time, but in your position as a member of the federal government, that is the deal you made us.

To the military class I send my special greetings. I have no doubts that the enlisted members of the services will always remember their constitutional duties, but about officers I have my doubts. Yet they have been trained in situational ethics, presumably for a moment such as we are reaching. Evidence is bubbling (and beginning to gush) to the surface about the criminal activities that accompanied this election. The recent news from Arizona is just scratching the surface. You are going to be tested, because no one can take over this country through civil forces alone such as police and sheriffs (they aren’t willing and the 2^nd Amendment would stop them even if they were). A dictator may rule this country only if that dictator is able to get the military to do things which the military is forbidden to do and which no modern military wants to do. You are not Noriega’s goons, you are not the People Liberation Army driving tanks over dissidents in Tiananmen: you are the United States military, and you don’t fire on your own population.

Those who are preparing to give orders to involve you in political matters (e.g., having you “go after Conservative groups”), whether they wish to do so with bullets or other tools of national security, are violating our deal. I am no expert on the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but I’m pretty sure that the rule is if someone gives you such an unconstitutional order or even uses language like that, you are supposed to string them up them from the nearest lamppost. But consult your own attorneys and conscience on that one.

In closing, to our great and many esteemed federal colleagues, I respectfully recommend that in moments of confusion, please think about the story above. Remember the minster, who has to remember for whom he really works (not “to whom he reports” but for whom he works). Remember the story of the Church of Reason and the role of a professor therein. Then ask yourself, what god do you serve?

No matter your private sensibilities, you answered that question the day you took the job.

This story was first published on Deep Capture. Deep Capture features original investigative reporting on the all-too-cozy relationship Wall Street has with regulators, media, government and the intellectual establishment.