The Secret Knowledge

by David Mamet

  —Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1950

  Children on a playground are perfectly adept at designing a fair game. They collaborate on its design not only though, but so that, they may compete when the design is finished.

  It is the sine qua non of the design that the game’s rules be simple, and apply universally, for, without this, there may be triumph, but there will be no sport.

  The game is a special case (as per Homo Ludens), it is, in effect, a sacred observance, where peace means not stasis, but fairness.

  The rules of all sport evolve toward fairness, and the current hoopla about performance-enhancing drugs is due not to their immorality, but to the disruption of the spectators’ ability to root intelligently if drugs are involved.

  The job of the referee, like that of the courts, is to ensure that the rules have been obeyed. If he rules, in a close case, sentimentally, he defrauds not only one of the two teams, but, more importantly, the spectators. The spectators are funding the match. As much as they enthuse over their favorite team, their enthusiasm is limited to that team’s victory as per the mutually understood rules. (Who in Chicago exulted over the triumph of the 1919 Black Sox?)

  The product for which the spectators are paying is a fair contest, played out according to mutually understood and agreed-to rules. For though it seems they are paying to see success, they are actually paying for the ability to exercise permitted desire, and so are cheated, even should their team win, if the game is fixed. To fix the game for money is called corruption, to fix the game from sentiment is called Liberalism.

  Let us note that the referee, in a close call, may be wrong—but this is also a part of the game. No referee is other than human, and our catcalls are part of the pleasure of the thing. He may also be corrupted, which is a profound betrayal of both the laws and the unwritten precepts of sport; or he may (having, to his mind, miscalled a previous close decision), warp his judgment in a current case, in an attempt to rectify his previous error (Liberalism; see: Affirmative Action). In such a case, however, to whom is he being fair? He is merely abrogating to himself a supralegal ability to act in the name of an abstract concept: justice, and in contravention of the only possible device for its implementation, law.

  The good ref, then, would be aware not only of all the rules of the game, but of his own capacity for sentiment. He would consider his pay, in part, a reward not only for his scrupulousness over the rules, but over his own good intentions.82

  Both children agree: one gets to cut the cake, the other gets first choice. They have worked out the knotty problem, for they have foreseen that though the statue pictures Justice as blindfolded, her hands are filled, one with a scale and one with a sword, to prevent her from pulling the blindfold down.

  And what of the boy–or girlfriend?

  This institution, like baseball, is evolved from the unwritten law. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon and relationship, bearing, to the common understanding, more justice, rectitude, and force than the marriage contract.

  Marriage contains a built-in mechanism for dissolution. But how do a boyfriend and girlfriend become divorced? They have no recourse to lawyers, or legalisms. They must, simply, tell each other the truth, or suffer the remorse of betrayal and betrayer. Many, I have observed, get married, because they don’t know how, otherwise, to break up.

  In the boyfriend–girlfriend, or the institution of the best friend, we see most forcefully the operation of the unwritten law. It has been noted that one might say, “My husband hit me,” but one never hears, “My best friend hit me.” This is a covenantal relationship, like that of the boyfriend and girlfriend, and it is understood as such, and, so, as unmodifiable.

  Note, the marriage may be modified by a prenuptial agreement, by usage (an “open marriage”), by divorce or separation, or any number of mutually agreed upon or fought-out amendments. The relationship of the Best Friend is unmodifiable, because it’s based upon the unspoken understanding of complete loyalty.

  The boy–or girlfriend, similarly, is a sort of best friend with the added component of sexuality. Many might cheat on their spouse, but to cheat on your girlfriend raises the question, not only to the perpetrator, but to any with whom he might share his transgression, “Why?” The covenantal bond here is stronger than the legal.

  “This is my wife” conveys less information than “This is my girlfriend”; for the first may, but the second absolutely does inform the community of the speaker’s state of mind, intention, and expectations and demands for community performance. Here the two, having entered into a covenantal relationship, inform the community of their expectations of respect of the new member, such expectations being nonnegotiable.

  Marriage, though sanctified through millennia of usage, is a codification of this primordial, prelegal urge to monogamy; just as the rules of sport are all an elaboration of the school yard wisdom of the pie: the (momentarily) better team has scored the touchdown, it must then kick off to the (momentarily) lesser team, which now will have the benefit of possession.

  James Michener writes (in Kent State: What Happened and Why):The leadership of the movement [SDS] handed down the famous dictum, “Smash Monogamy”; this meant that husbands and wives or sweethearts who were getting too addicted to each other, had to split up. The idea was that if a man became too attached to a woman, it might impede his judgment if he were ordered to perform some dangerous task, or to involve him too deeply if he saw his girl being sent out on a mission from which she might not return. So the edict went out, “smash monogamy”; that’s when the phrase became popular, “I’m prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.” This meant that, as a husband, you were prepared to turn your wife over to the guy next door (p. 149).

  What did the SDS fear? The tendency of a person in a covenantal relationship to think rationally, thus, morally. They, like all radical groups, sought to subvert the conscience.

  How to turn the nice middle-class boys and girls of my generation into the Killers of the Weathermen? They begin by exhorting each other to betray the one covenantal relationship they knew and respected—to sell out their sweethearts.

  After that, everything is moot, for the betrayer has chosen his new community and they all must now abide by the same laws or suffer the shame of a degraded conscience.83

  The first rule of tinkering is, of course, “save all the parts.”

  But in dismantling the social fabric, the parts cannot all be saved, for one of them is time. Time, we were told, is a river flowing endlessly through the universe and one cannot step into the same river twice. Not only can we not undo actions taken in haste and in fear (the Japanese Internment), but those taken from the best of reasons, but that have proved destructive (affirmative action); the essential mechanism of societal preservation is not inspiration, but restraint.

  The two children with the pie will work it out, their only alternative is calling in an adjudicator, a parent. But the adult can only call in Government, control of whose own desires merely moves the problem to a less manageable level. For this new entity has to be provided for in some way, and it, or its assigns, either through good intentions, through corruption, or through the world’s favorite process of elaboration, will eventually get all the pie.

  31

  BREATHARIAN

  Countries, like any organism, come into being, and mature, decay, and die. Any successful life form attracts: adherents, exploiters, imitators, sycophants, and parasites, as life can only live on life.

  Bernard Cavanaugh was a mountebank in 1841. He claimed the ability to exist on no nourishment other than pure air. At his request he was imprisoned in a cell, and survived there, ostensibly without food, for a period of several months, after which he emerged healthy and having actually gained weight.

  The effect, contemporary magicians tell us, is not difficult. Food may be secreted in or around the body, in clothing or actually woven into the cloth from which the clothing is made. It may be formed into the bricks, paint, plaster o
r bars of the cell, or passed by a confederate.

  The only difficulty in the effect’s performance is the secretion and disposal of excrement.

  The Socialist vision, similarly, is a trick. Man cannot live on air. He must live on food, and the other goods and necessities of life produced through the physical effort and thought of him and his contemporaries.

  As civilization progresses and population grows, new and more productive methods must be developed to deal with both foreseeable scarcities and unforeseeable disasters and progressions.

  Each of these new methods is, originally, the inspiration of one or a small group of individuals who think differently from their fellows.

  Not all of these inspired visions are effective or effectible, so the various visions must compete—no government organization is wise enough to determine in advance which of a number of equally strange visions will succeed.

  In order to compete, these visions need private funding.84 As many of these inspirations originally seem impossible to accomplish, or, indeed, insane (the airplane, the radio, television, the automobile, the computer), the funding must come from those with sufficient disposable wealth to engage in what is, in effect, gambling. The competition between these competing visions eventually benefits all—if unfettered it will eventually discover new foods and methods of cultivation, of travel, new fuels—as it has throughout the history of free enterprise. For the potential reward of success is enormous—this incentive is the engine of progress, and its absence or stifling leads to stagnation and decay.

  The Government can neither invent the automobile, nor, indeed, actually oversee its effective and economic production. It has bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, and this subvention will be seen to be not only an abrogation of the rule of law (the cancellation of obligations), but a vast waste of funds; for just as the camel is a horse put together by a committee, actual “government cars”,—should we devolve to that—cars put together under the supervision of a board of majority government appointees, will be neither fish nor fowl, nor sufficiently safe, efficient, attractive, affordable, durable, or fun. How could they be? They won’t be made by automakers—that is, by those in love with either cars, gain, or a combination of the two, but by apparatchiks. Who would buy such cars?85

  The Government can make work, in the main, only by appropriating those jobs already created by private enterprise, and doling them out less efficiently. A perfect example is the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal, which, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, was merely giving twenty thousand shovels out to do the work which could be accomplished by fifty bulldozers. Why not then, as he suggested, enlarge the paradigm, and replace the shovels with three million teaspoons? Government intervention in private enterprise is the death of private enterprise (cf. East versus West Germany; Havana versus Miami; Palestine versus Israel). Has the case not already been settled?

  Government intervention is, in fact, a form of savage or precivi-lized thinking, as if a primitive tribe looked at the man who invented the wheel and reasoned that he was depriving an entire contingent of the tribe, the Bearers, of work, and so killed him and burnt his supposed improvement.

  Let us note also that the ever-hungry politician, Socialist though he may be, when possessed by the urge for higher office, applies first and always to some combination of the Interests he will, with a wink toward them, eventually denounce. He must—for where is the money he runs on going to come from save from those who made it?

  The stifling of free enterprise by Government, whether wholesale, in Communist Cuba, China, East Germany, Russia, et cetera, or piecemeal, under the New Deal, led at best to shortages.86 Under totalitarian regimes, it eventually led to famine and slavery, as governments insisted upon the continuation of the destructive and absurd failed systems, and instituted speech and thought control to stifle consideration, and to ban utterance of the most obvious conclusions.

  These totalitarian states kept—and keep—their citizens enslaved, imprisoning those who oppose and shooting those who try to escape their Socialist utopias. These totalitarian states must eventually embark on war as the only way remaining to feed their starving masses—through the accession of the land and goods of the more productive. These states, in preparation for war, habitually indict the more productive as “enemies of the People,” “colonialists,” or “oppressors of the Weak.” See the UN’s continual denunciation of Israel, the Arab bloc’s insistence that Israel is an aggressor state; and the reiteration of peaceful Nazi Germany’s simple pleas for “Lebensraum.”

  But, unfettered, we human beings are capable of fulfilling each other’s needs and of prospering thereby. Our prosperity will be in direct proportion to our ability to fulfill the needs of others. The Scare Words of the Left—Greed, Exploitation, Colonialism—are identical with those employed by totalitarian states to indict the more prosperous whose goods they covet and whose successes they must indict to divert attention from their own monstrous behavior.

  How can one live on air?

  One cannot. And the recurrent Liberal call for Government control, for Welfare, Government bailouts, reparations, and confiscatory taxes, is nothing other than this transparent, silly claim. All life needs to consume. And to consume we must produce. The Government cannot produce, it can merely confiscate, intrude, and allocate according to some plan pleasant to the capacity or cupidity of the current officeholders.

  Just as in any totalitarian state, the Government can and will explain its depredations, and the inattentive may endorse these blunt and transparent efforts as “humanitarian,” until the appearance of actual shortages is sufficient to discommode even those sufficiently privileged to have thought themselves immune from the Good Works.

  But for anyone to consider himself immune requires a studied ignorance of both history and human nature.

  One may smuggle in the food, the problem is to explain the accumulation of the effluvia: shortages, unemployment, and inflation.

  What is the one institution which will not suffer through confiscation and the abrogation of the rule of law? Government.

  Bill Clinton out of office will wax fat upon the various charity schemes bearing his name, and President Obama, on retirement, will proceed to his own particular dukedom.

  Marie Antoinette suggested that the starving populace Eat Cake. She was reviled. But at least she understood that they had to eat something.

  With thanks to Ricky Jay.

  32

  THE STREET SWEEPER AND THE SURGEON, OR MARXISM EXAMINED

  What are the interests of the people? Not the interests of those who would betray them. Who is to judge of those interests? Not those who would suborn others to betray them. The government is instituted for the benefit of the governed, there can be little doubt; but the interest of the government (once it becomes absolute and independent of the people) must be at variance with those of the governed. The interests of the one are common and equal rights: of the other, exclusive and invidious privileges.

  —William Hazlitt, “What Is the People?,” 1817

  A privileged adolescent may see the street sweeper and wonder why he is paid less for his job than is the doctor. As the sweeper’s job is both essential and disagreeable, perhaps, this young philosopher might muse, he should be paid as much, or perhaps even more.

  This is Marx’s vision: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,87 taken through one permutation, and substituting merit for needs. For today we may view the notion of a Government determining “needs,” as naïve—who would not exaggerate his needs if simply to do so would gain him more governmental largess? Further, we may, in our enlightenment, see that everyone has different needs—one may wish more leisure, another more pay, et cetera. But “merit” is an equally subjective concept, and, like need, its acceptance as a tool for the determination of desert merely empowers the judge.

  “But what about,” this adolescent wonders, trying out his new toy: “merit. Does not the street
sweeper, as he also works and sweats, merit as much as the physician? Does not the performer of an unpleasant task merit as much as or more than one who works in comfort and with status? Must government not recognize the worth of this contribution, and do away with the inequality in the treatment of the lowly applicant?”

  But the problem unrecognized by the privileged adolescent, the problem is not the term, but the equation; for the true horror of the equation is the tacit presumption of a mechanism to distribute services and goods. And what would that mechanism be, but the totalitarian state?

  Acceptance of the notion that there exists an equation under which the State may fairly and honestly control human exchange leads the adolescent down the road of folly—increasing taxes to increase programs to increase happiness to allow equality—which ends in dictatorship.

  For in the adolescent vision the street sweeper ceases to be a citizen and becomes an applicant, presenting himself to Government and demanding compensation based upon his “merit,” or “goodness,” as a member of society who contributes as much as the physician, but is treated, on payday, as less than equal.

  The adolescent, in his imagination, stands at the side of the street sweeper, reminding him of his “equality,” and urging on him the courage to press his claim.

  Justice is corrupted by consideration, not of whether or not the accused committed the crime, but of supposedly mitigating factors of his childhood, race, or environment. If weight is given, in extenuation, to his supposed goodness to animals or to his mother, he is then liable to leniency based not upon the needs of the citizenry (protection), but upon the criminal’s ability to dramatize his plight. If he may entertain, and play upon the emotions of the judge and jury, if he and his defenders may flatter the ability to “be compassionate,” and call it courage, society is weakened. Laws, then, decided upon in tranquility, without reference to the individual, and based upon behaviors, are cast aside or vitiated by reference to merit, fairness, or compassion, all of which are inchoate, subjective, and nonquantifiable.