The Right to Die for the Telephone Company
A critique of Liberalism, Classical and crass
A follow-up to my latest Newsmax column, ‘The Right to Burn Books.’
“A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
Robert Frost
At birth, they measure us, weigh us, and draw our first blood. We’re recorded in the bureaucracy’s ledger before our mother’s first embrace. Conscripts for the modern liberal state’s reserve army.
To Glaswegian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the modern liberal state cannot inspire the type of loyalty that drives citizens to make sacrifices for the polity. He compares it to “dying for the telephone company.”
I agree, but with a caveat: it’s not just that the modern liberal state cannot drum up loyalty; it should not. Yet, increasingly, it does.
In his critique of liberalism, MacIntyre argues that, up until the Renaissance, ethics were teleological — assuming life had a purpose beyond being a chain of causes and effects. With Aristotle relegated to the sidelines, ethics was left as, essentially, a list of vocabulary with few definitions and no context. Enlightenment philosophers, then, were empowered to start with a clean slate.
MacIntyre cites the Hawaiian islanders as an example. Their taboos, once full of meaning, lost their didactic purpose over time, becoming an arbitrary set of prohibitions. When King Kamehameha II abolished them seemingly overnight, there was no resistance. MacIntyre sees this as a mirror to post-Enlightenment moral confusion.
This confusion took us from utopia to ultracrepidarianism, driving the rise of totalitarian belief systems around the world. From Mussolini making the trains run on time, to Kim Jong Il making the sun rise in the East, to the West’s manic drive for diversity and equity. The Enlightenment lit up every candle in Nuremberg's Cathedral of Light, a beacon for totalitarianism that shines into every facet of life today: from schools, to universities, the government, arts, and the corporate world.
Over time, such an assault on reason became entrenched as the concept of liberal citizenship. Once the shared values underpinning civic republican life faded away, what remained was a Faustian bargain: either we all enrich ourselves under the auspices of the telephone company, or morality shall be restored. Tertium non datur. Until the rise of the Third Way, or social democracy’s halfway house.
Underpinning this combination of neoliberal economics and passé socialist policies is a synthesis of Cultural Marxism and brooding Randian thinking: the belief that the individual, as the ultimate minority, is always oppressed by the collective. It appears the solution was to dismantle every sub-collective division in society, in favour of creating a monolith of the rainbow, a wall composed of atomised individuals.
Modern Janissaries
“What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Since the end of the Cold War, society has been running endlessly on a hedonistic hamster wheel, trapped in the perpetual Groundhog Day after the End of History. Loyal only to the next dollar.
Dying for bureaucrats and corporations is harder to sell than dying for king and country. It doesn’t get the blood pumping. Yet, there’s the third way. In the 14th century, Sultan Murad I, the third ruler of the Ottoman Empire, faced a similar dilemma in then recently conquered lands in the Balkans.
His solution was as brutal as it was effective, a plan almost straight out of the mind of modern educators: he took the children of his Christian subjects to indoctrinate them into loyal soldiers and bureaucrats.
These children, separated from their families at a young age, circumcised, and converted to Islam, became fiercely loyal to the Sultan. This system birthed the Janissaries, one of the most formidable military forces in history. Over time, the Janissaries rose to the top of Ottoman society.
Modern Janissaries are similarly conscripted from families, indoctrinated from youth, and climb society’s ranks as they go. And now, with China and Russia looming, they are prime candidates for enlistment by foreign powers. TikTokers and neocons alike, defying social democracy’s earlier predictions, are increasingly ready to die for the telephone company.
A Virgin That Lays Golden Eggs
“You misinterpret everything, even the silence.”
Franz Kafka, The Castle
The multiplication of iPhones, a vulgar miracle of crony capitalism, has convinced our modern Janissaries that turning tricks is the only way to ensure the survival of our living standards.
They are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The traditions they strive to preserve are those that emerged only in the last five minutes, such as eating Big Macs and drinking Coca-Cola. They’ve made corporations into people, endowing them with the right to life they deny to humans.
They claim to think long-term, scoffing at Keynes’ remark, ‘in the long term we’re all dead.’ But their notion of the long term stretches only a decade or two further. They’ve fallen into the Marxist trap of believing late-stage capitalism is more than just an optimisation tool, mistaking the thing for the idea of the thing, a classic case of reification. It’s as if they don’t realise it’s simply a matter of garbage in, garbage out.
Taking Janissarian thinking beyond economics is a disaster. The extreme belief in the individual as society’s core — and oppressed by the collective — has, unsurprisingly, torn apart our social fabric.
The modern Janissary believes impartiality means arguing against yourself. And if by some miracle they bat for their team, they make damn sure not to hit anything. The only way to ‘win’, they think, is to assure your opponent you won’t get what you want.
We must let families suffer because expanding maternal leave means higher costs for customers or taxpayers. Universities, they say, should primarily prepare youth to join the workforce, ignoring the toxic alliance with left-wing ideologues that supports this scam.
Modern Janissaries pride themselves on exercising critical thinking, as per the dilettantes’ diktat. Unknowingly embracing Marxist historical materialism, seeing themselves as the victors in the primitive accumulation of capital, defending so-called free markets that are 90% crony capitalism and 10% monopolistic competition.
Soon enough, they will champion decolonisation, blind to the fact they’re the ones being colonised. To them, we all live in the 21st century, even as 19th-century barbarians lurk at the gates.
Their real fear? The rise of gritty, blue-collar populism challenging unchecked globalisation, open borders, and identity politics. A threat to the virgin of the golden eggs, forever pregnant with the future.
The Day After the End of History
“Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.
(This is the place where death delights in helping life.)”
This motto, usually found in morgues, now perfectly applies to our modern Janissaries. Because, above all, they are democrats. And if, to save democracy, they need to jump into the abyss, they will jump.
Free of taboos, those now arbitrary prohibitions in civilian life, the whisper in their desperate ears, “You know you can jump, right?” holds higher moral ground than any hand yanking them back from the brink, against their will.
In the spirit of the season, they clutch in their left hand a letter to the void. “Dear forces of the free market, I was a good boy this year…” followed by a long wish list of parchment guarantees.
As they leap, their iPhones ring. It’s a sound that hits like a Pavlovian jolt of hope in the midst of freefall. They answer, clinging to a desperate optimism that maybe, just maybe this time... but an automated message crackles through the air:
“Thank you for your leap. Your sacrifice is very important to us. We hope it is not in vain. Your call to action will be answered in the order it was received. Please stay committed in your descent, and one of our customer service representatives will be with your remains shortly. We appreciate your devotion.”
Note: I can’t (and likely don’t) thank the readers enough. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to sound insincere by being concise, or test your patience by being sincere. Thank you all for your support and, above all, your companionship! Wishing you all the best in the New Year!
