Time Will Run Back

by Henry Hazlitt

  He turned on a radio by the wall. The smooth sonorous voice of an announcer was already in the middle of a sentence:

  “... that His Supremacy has promoted his son and Deputy, Peter Uldanov, from No. 13 to a newly created number, 1A. No. 1A will rank just below No. 1 and above any other number. It is to be so treated in all matters of precedence and authority. His Supremacy is especially happy to add that this move has the wholehearted endorsement of His Highness No. 2, Comrade Bolshekov; of His Highness No. 3, Comrade Adams; and, in fact, of the whole Politburo....”

  Peter turned off the radio and smiled sardonically at Bolshekov. “You wouldn’t want to go back on your publicly pledged word, would you?”

  “I’m told also,” remarked Bolshekov drily, “that Stalenin never made that broadcast appointing you as his deputy. It was simply a record.” There was a quietly smoldering green fire in his eyes.

  “Why can’t Stalenin make a record if he pleases?” Peter said at length. “Does he have to go personally to the broadcasting station in order to satisfy you?”

  “For a completely miseducated young man,” replied Bolshekov, “you seem to be learning fast.” He jerked his head sidewise in Adams’ direction without deigning to look at him. “This little broadcast was probably his plan... I confess that I have been a little slow to see something that is now obvious. Your father, in fear of becoming incapacitated—and in fear of me—groomed you as his successor. That was a major error. It would be an unparalleled disaster if an ignorant young amateur like yourself, still wet behind the ears, should become Dictator of Wonworld. Fortunately that can’t happen. A mistake that successful doting fathers used to make under capitalism was to assume that their beloved sons inherited their ability. It is particularly strange that Stalenin should have made this error. Every Marxist knows that ability is determined entirely by environment and education—and you were brought up ridiculously. You will never be Dictator, because you haven’t the ability to hold on to your seat. Even”—this time he looked disdainfully at Adams—“with No. 3’s advice.”

  “I must admire your candor and outspokenness,” said Peter. “I will be guided accordingly.... And now, if you are quite through, you may go.”

  “I should like to warn you,” said Bolshekov as a parting shot, “not to try to have me liquidated. You would find the enterprise much too risky.”

  “What did I tell you?” asked Adams, as soon as Bolshekov had left. “You should have had him liquidated immediately. Now it is probably too late. It was foolhardy to make him head of the Army and Navy. He wouldn’t talk as he does unless he were already sure of his power.”

  “He thinks I am going to play his game of intra-Party intrigue, and that he can beat me at it,” said Peter; “but I am going to do something so novel that it will throw him off balance.”

  “What?” Adams looked suspicious and faintly alarmed.

  “It will not be a struggle between Bolshekov and me for power, for the simple reason that I am going to put the ultimate power into the hands of the people.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am going to hold elections.”

  “But we already hold regular elections!”

  “We call them elections,” said Peter, “but they are absolutely meaningless. We put up only one candidate for an office. The individual voter has no choice. He must either vote for that candidate or against him. And he must vote in public. And he must vote. He knows that unless he votes for the candidate we choose he is as good as dead.”

  “You don’t mean to say,” said Adams, now really alarmed, “that you are going to let people vote secretly! They would vote to undermine you; they would vote against the government candidate—and you wouldn’t even be able to find who the guilty ones were.”

  “I intend to do precisely that. I intend to make the ballot secret and to protect that secrecy. For unless a man votes secretly, his vote cannot be free. Unless it is secret, it is an intimidated vote. He now votes for the government’s candidate because he knows that is the only healthy thing to do. Public opinion cannot be known—it cannot even be said to exist—unless it is free.”

  “I always said you had a will to political suicide,” replied Adams, with a sigh. “What date have you set for your death—and mine?”

  “This time I am going to be a little bit more cautious, Adams, than in my futile free criticism order. I’m going to try the experiment on a small scale. About a month from now, the regular elections are due in the French Soviet Republic. I’m going to try out the plan there.”

  He telephoned his orders to France. For each office no fewer than two candidates were to be nominated, and more if any more wanted to be candidates.

  A deluge of letters, telegrams and telephone calls poured into the Kremlin. They were all pleas, requests, almost demands for instructions. They were from the local district commissars appointed by Moscow or from the local district councils. All contained the same question. Which candidate or candidates did the Kremlin want them to name? Always in the past the Kremlin had picked the candidate, or had left the choice to the central government commissar on the spot or to the local council. But in the latter case the commissar or council had merely recommended the candidate and waited for the Kremlin’s approval before actually naming him. Now they did not know how to proceed. Naming more than one candidate was bewildering. All professed that they were loyal Communists, and passionately devoted to the Kremlin. But how could they carry out the Kremlin’s wishes unless they knew what its wishes were? How could they name the candidates that the Kremlin wanted named unless the Kremlin told them who they were?

  Peter replied to all requests that they were to be completely free in naming the candidates and, for that matter, anybody could run as a candidate on his own initiative, provided only that a nominating petition was turned in signed by at least 4 per cent of the adult inhabitants of the district. He didn’t care, he said, whether the candidates named agreed in their views with the Kremlin or not; in fact, one of the Kremlin’s purposes was to develop an intelligent opposition.

  The local authorities were even more bewildered. For years, for generations, the Kremlin had devoted itself to stamping out any vestige, shadow or possibility of opposition. Why did it wish suddenly to create an opposition?

  The local authorities arrived at the same conclusion. This was simply a new Kremlin trick to smoke out any opposition and annihilate it. None of them were going to be victims of that obvious dodge, though most of them were willing enough to co-operate with Moscow energetically in helping to perpetrate it on others.

  But they wanted instructions, and they moved guardedly.

  The pattern that evolved became pretty uniform. The local authorities would name a single government candidate, citing his record of loyalty, devotion and zeal, and would wait for approval of this candidacy by the Kremlin before taking any other step. Peter approved all candidates automatically. Then the local authorities would look for an opposition candidate. Their usual assumption was that this opposition candidate was to be chosen as a victim. When his name was sent into the Kremlin it was accompanied by a dossier giving reasons for suspecting his loyalty. Peter informed the local commissars that the Kremlin would not take sides and would not interfere: it would approve all candidates automatically.

  The opposition candidate, after being named, invariably declined the nomination. He was then ordered to accept it, and to make a campaign. His campaign invariably consisted of advocating the election of the government candidate, and of asserting his own complete devotion to the government.

  Even so the local authorities asked the Kremlin to tell them which candidate to support. They apparently wanted this as part of the record.

  When it came to the secrecy of the ballot, the local authorities invariably assumed, also, that what the Kremlin wanted was not real secrecy but only the appearance of secrecy, so that unwary disloyal voters might be trapped into voting for the opposition candidate under the impression that their
vote would go undetected.

  When the great election day arrived, the voters were not to be trapped. They voted 100 per cent for the government candidates. The local authorities sometimes reported this ioo per cent, and sometimes reported only 98 per cent and some fraction for the government candidate, in order to show that there was still a group of deviationists and wreckers to be stamped out—and meanwhile to act as scapegoats for governmental failures.

  After the French elections, the Kremlin was deluged with more letters, telegrams and telephone calls. What punishment, they asked, was to be meted out to the unsuccessful opposition candidates?

  Peter was completely disheartened.

  “You see, Adams,” he said, “what generations of suppression and terror have done to the people. I cannot even force them to make their own choice; I cannot even impose democracy upon the people!”

  “Frankly, chief,” said Adams, “I don’t understand what you are trying to do. We already have democracy. As all our textbooks have told us for generations, we have the only real kind of democracy, a people’s democracy, a socialist democracy, a communist democracy. I understand that under the old capitalist regime they had a pretense of democracy, a mock democracy, but everybody had to vote the way his capitalist boss wanted him to vote or he would lose his job. They used to have the pretense of an opposition such as you tried to set up in France; but as the capitalists owned both of the supposedly competing major parties, it didn’t make any difference which party was in power.”

  “The capitalists seem to have mismanaged the business fantastically from their own point of view, Adams, judging by the final results.”

  “Well, chief, I suppose the capitalists finally lost control, and that the bourgeois governments finally were marked by real dissension.... But surely you can’t set up political opposition and dissension as an ideal! The political ideal is harmony, loyalty, unanimity. This is what our socialism has achieved. And mankind having at last accomplished this after years of blood and sacrifice, you want to restore dissension all over again!”

  Peter lit a cigarette. He was not sure how to answer this.

  “I suppose we do want harmony and unanimity,” he said at length. “But we want harmony and unanimity based on free and uncoerced agreement, and not merely the appearance of unanimity based on force and threats and fear. Maybe free unanimity is the ideal, and maybe mankind can gradually approach it. But can it ever achieve it—in the absence of universal omniscience and universal self-renunciation?”

  “Chief, exactly what is your concept of democracy?”

  Peter tried to clarify his ideas as he smoked.

  “Democracy as I conceive it,” he said slowly, “exists when the government depends upon the uncoerced will of the people in such a way that it can be peaceably changed whenever the will of the people changes.”

  “Whereas now-?”

  “Whereas now, as you know perfectly well, Adams, the government can be changed only by death, assassination or violent revolution.”

  “And how could you secure this possibility of peaceable change, chief?”

  “By leaving decisions to an uncoerced majority.”

  “And do you believe that this majority will always act wisely, or will know what is good for it?”

  “Of course not. I would not base majority rule on any such nonsensical belief. I would base it merely on the assumption that this is the best way to preserve internal peace—that it is the best way to avoid violence and civil war.”

  “Then you mean, chief, that there should be an arbitrary agreement always to have things decided the way the majority wants them decided, regardless of how wrong or stupid or dangerous the majority’s wishes are?”

  “I agree with you, Adams, in supposing that the minority—or at least a minority—will sometimes be wiser or more nearly right than the majority. But who would decide between them, and how would the decision be enforced?”

  “That is simple, chief. We would. As we already do. We do the deciding and we do the enforcing—and we are certainly more competent, and immensely better informed, than the majority.”

  “For all practical purposes, Adams, I myself have only been included in this ‘we’ for a few months, and then not by ability but only by the accident of birth or—shall we say?—of filial affection.”

  “But you are an exception.”

  “Thank you,” said Peter. “But if I’m not mistaken, this is the way kings and the ruling nobility were selected in the pre-capitalist era, and I’m not sure that it isn’t an inevitable long-run accompaniment of rule of minority. A minority, it seems to me, can hold on to power only in one of two ways. The first is to get control of all the guns and to be more expert at force and violence than its opponents; in which case it can stay in power—like our own Party—only by constant suppression of the majority, by arrests, purges, concentration camps and a continuous reign of terror.”

  “And the second way?”

  “The second way, Adams, is for the ruling minority to get at least the passive support of the majority. It can do this by convincing the majority either that the minority is inherently superior or that, at all events, allowing it to continue to rule is the best way to keep the peace. The institution of inherited royalty seems to have met both these requirements at once/ When everybody agreed that the next ruler should always be the eldest son of the reigning king, regardless of the ability or even of the normality of that eldest son, it at least prevented a civil war for the succession every time the reigning king died—not to speak of civil wars during his reign. But in addition to this, the ruling dynasty and nobility accomplished a trick that looks at first glance impossible. They convinced everybody else, including even the most brilliant men, that they, the existing rulers, were inherently superior, by the sheer accident of birth, to everybody else.”

  “If the trick of minority rule is so easy,” said Adams, “why are you so eager to have majority rule?”

  “Because minority rule seems to me to rest either on continuous force or continuous fraud,” replied Peter. “The kings were actually, on the average, very commonplace men. Many of them were outright idiots. Their alleged superiority did not exist. They often led their countries to disaster. They started wars easily and often because they could get somebody else to fight them. Their policies were based purely on their own narrow interests.”

  “But you still haven’t explained the advantages of majority rule.”

  “The majority may not be brilliant,” said Peter, “but at least it knows its own wishes better than anybody else. And when a policy is adopted that meets the wishes of the greatest number of people it is likely, at least in the short run, to produce the greatest amount of happiness—or the least amount of dissatisfaction.”

  “The majority may know what it wants, chief, but not how to get it. It is not hard for a man to know what he wants, but it takes intelligence to know what are the proper ways and means for him to get what he wants.”

  “True; but it certainly helps if the majority is permitted to try to get what it desires rather than what the minority desires.”

  “But you haven’t yet told me, chief, how majority rule promotes internal peace. Isn’t a minority likely to start a fight if the majority tries to force something upon it that it doesn’t want?”

  “Maybe it would, if it were a minority of 49 per cent—in which case the majority would be well advised to proceed cautiously. In fact, it would always be a good rule for the majority not to try to impose on a large minority any policy to which the latter would too strongly object. Moreover, a member of the majority on one issue never knows when he will be a member of the minority on another. For that reason, majority rule, as I see it, would tend to be less tyrannical than any other kind of rule. And finally—to answer your question, Adams—majority rule is the best way of keeping the peace. Because in the event of an insurrection or a civil war, the majority usually wins, and the larger the majority the more probable is its victory. Therefore,
if we decide issues by counting heads or noses, the minority will recognize in advance the futility of resorting to violence in order to get its way. The less vital the issue is, the less disposed the minority will be to start trouble. And once majority decision becomes accepted as the proper way of preventing or settling disputes, it should tend to become the most peaceable and stable of all systems.”

  “Very well,” said Adams. “Suppose I agree with everything you have said. I still maintain that majority rule is impossible under socialism—and vice versa.”

  “Why?”

  “We have just seen why. You say your experiment in democracy failed in the French Soviet Republic because the people have been terrorized for generations by communism and must be educated out of their terror. But you have also pointed out that they will never be educated out of their fear because their fear is inherent in the socialist system. And you have finally convinced me that this is true. Under socialism the State controls all the jobs. Under socialism everybody’s career, everybody’s means of livelihood, depends upon the minority, the hierarchy, already in power. That hierarchy holds economic life-and-death powers over everyone. Therefore nobody’s opinion is free. Nobody has the impartial information to form an intelligent opinion, even if he had the courage to form or express one. Because the State, the ruling hierarchy, prints and controls all the newspapers, all the books and magazines, all the sources of information. It owns all the meeting halls. And nobody has the courage or even the means to express his opinion in public. Under such conditions, not only is public opinion not free, which is the only way in which it could be meaningful, but it cannot be said even to exist.”

  Adams is now stating my own arguments better than I stated them, thought Peter. He said aloud: “But can’t we allow private individuals to start their own newspapers, publish their own books and pamphlets, and so on?”

  “You mean, chief, to become employers; to hire and exploit printers, reporters, writers and other people for profit; to own printing presses and plants, to own the means of production? All that would be the very negation of socialism.”