“Shall we live in a Civil Society or a Statist Society?” Insufficient reflection is given to this question. When I was young and deciding whether I would prefer to face a life-long journey through civil society on the one hand or through statist society on the other, I decided to study the matter.
Members of a civil society and the groups and factions into which they divide themselves are free and at liberty to execute transactions among themselves. Each citizen may, at will, contract with any other citizen for personal commerce, engagement, and action. The government and its officials are not in any way involved in interactions between citizens. The interactions are direct, intimate, and personal. Civil society and its members conduct each of life’s transactions without government present as intermediary. Transactions are subject to a set of rules to which each member is bound. Honoring one’s transaction in accordance with the rules is a requisite for continued membership in civil society. Each party is duty-bound to live up to his side of each and every agreement. Government is an application running in the background to be called upon only if one party alleges another has broken the rules of transactional engagement. Then and only then does government become inserted into a transaction and even then it is bound, narrowed, and limited by the strict rule of law and constitutional limitation in its pursuit to settle the dispute and apply the rules.
Civil society’s fundamental reliance on direct personal transactions as the authoritative unit of social exchange requires private property rights, rule of law, and a well-developed system of free market enterprise in order to effectively function. The theory is that millions of free market transactions conducted within a few well-established rules will effectively and efficiently set prices and allocate resources. All personal transactions are agreement-constricted. The key to understanding the essence of a civil society is that government runs in the background leaving citizens alone until such time as one them invokes the government to resolve a dispute.
Statist Society
Members of the statist society, when they enter into individual transactions do so with the government immediately present in the transaction as a third party . Not only a third party, but a superior third party with sole authority to dictate the terms and language of the agreement. No citizen enters into a transaction, contract, or simple engagement unless some government intermediary is there to dictate, evaluate and approve the transaction in advance. The state’s elite experts act as the legal “parent” on behalf of the citizens. At all times, each transaction is subject to direct government oversight, intervention, and review.
A civil society can be differentiated from a statist society by the unencumbered freedom of its members to forge relationships, agreements, and transactions so long as the basic agreed upon rules are observed. Understanding the central political debate of twenty-first century America requires understanding this essence of civil society. Pure civil society sits at one end of a long spectrum staring to the other distant end where pure statist society sits. The essential difference between a civil society and a statist society is that in a civil society transactions are entered into exclusively by the private citizens who are members of the society whereas a statist society injects an external party, i.e., the state bureaucrat to oversee, direct, and give final approval or disapproval.
The choice between civil or statist society is not an all or nothing proposition. The continuum between a purely civil society and a purely statist society offers a mix. The question is where on the continuum should American society rest. While the promises and premises of these two societal designs are certainly subject to challenge, examination, and critique, an acute awareness that they exist and are vastly different societies is a prerequisite for reasonable evaluation of political design choices. Statist schemes range from bootjack Stalinist means-of-production communism to American progressive welfarism. Civil schemes range from city-state pure democracy to constitutional republicanism. Before raising our voice in the American political debate, we should first deeply contemplate the possibilities of each of these two very different ways of being and come to a personal choice as to which best serves the body politic.
The problem with the statist society is that the elites who run the state invariably become all-powerful, corrupt, and self-serving. Eventually, they become tyrannical and abuse or destroy any citizen that dares to speak out against anything the state does or says. Today the American Left Regime has fully implemented a statist society in the United Sates by infiltrating every institution and corrupting it. Ultimately the society collapses into a horror show of chaos, cruelty, and debauchery. This is where America is today.
