I was at the University of London yesterday, to meet a client when I stumbled upon Jeremy Bentham's preserved remains.  While looking at his unblinking eye, it suddenly dawned on me how much Bentham has in common with many of our academics today — that is, haughty; illogical; intemperate; and, if given enough power, probably dangerous.

Indeed, Bentham was the epitome of an arrogant radical.  Not only did he envision a Utopian collectivist society wherein morality could be determined through felicific calculus, but he also, in a delusional state of paradisaical pomposity, requested mummification so he could "inspire future generations."

In the golden age of the academy, intellectual explorers descended into cerebral black holes to pursue truth.  If those geniuses were fortunate, they would escape that gravity victoriously — like Andrew Wiles or Roger Scruton — although often weary.  If they were not so fortunate, parts of themselves were lost inside that fissure forever, like John Nash, Kurt Godel, Vashishtha Narayan Singh, Nikola Tesla, and the countless other brave souls who never fully returned.

Today, instead of courageously chasing scholastic gold, our academics are more concerned with platitudes for the purpose of virtue-signaling their moral superiority over "Joe the Plumber."  The groupthink is so awful that one can no longer express any view contrary to the establishment without being called a racist, xenophobe, or some other epithet.  It seems to me that only an appalling lack of humility could turn formerly inquisitive students into overbearing, supercilious, maniacal autocrats.

Neo-Marxists, not unlike the classical Marxists, still fail to grasp the difference between justice and fairness.  A heavyweight boxer pummeling a middleweight boxer might be unfair, but it's not unjust; an heiress born into an obscene amount of wealth is unfair, but it's certainly not unjust.

Arbitrary conceptions of fairness, or in Bentham's case "collective happiness," are not the same as justice.  The whole of justice requires an agreed-upon requisite, with a subset that exists outside the purview of legislation, and a subset that lies within.  Moral law must always exist as a derivative of some axiom, either tied to the bonds of deduction or traced back to the transcendent.  An heiress constantly followed by the paparazzi may think she's being treated unfairly, while a non-heiress may think she has no reason to complain.  But what truly matters, and what determines justice, is not the subjective feelings of fairness unique to each individual, but rather the contract that exists between persons and government, and the rational force of natural law.

Socialist academics often express outrage over inalienable rights, because they believe that individual rights — such as the right to private property — permit unfairness to exist.  Others claim that corporations are too big, that they have become too powerful, that capitalism has failed us, that the hierarchy of rules oppresses us, and that only bigger government — and presumably its genius — can solve these negative externalities.

But none of these claims is true.

First, while monopolies and oligopolies have the capacity to be just as tyrannical as any politburo, prescribing the centralization of government to counter the centralization of industry is doubly worse.  Indeed, it is a tactical blunder — a mistake Marx made — a mistake that was not unknown to the anarcho-syndicalists who concurrently opposed his ideas, to the hundreds of thousands who survived the torturous gulags, and to the millions now buried in unmarked graves.  Those seeking the "dictatorship of the proletariat" should heed Lord Acton's warning: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely!"

Second, extreme inequality is obviously worthy of consideration, but so is the problem of extreme equality. As Baron de Montesquieu wrote, "democracy has two excesses to avoid: the spirit of inequality, which leads to aristocracy ... and the spirit of extreme equality which conducts it to despotism[.]"  The source of inequality in the West is mostly created by government — that is to say, it's a result of entry barriers, subsidies, tax breaks, and generous patent laws that permit companies to operate as monopolies.  In short, most government regulation is anti-capitalist.  And it should come as no surprise to anyone that such regulation favors big business, and their big special interests, at the expense of mom-and-pop stores.

Third, the proposed solution has to be better than the problem. To dogmatically pursue perfect equality, one would need to create an equalizer with a power that exceeds all others, for strength is the only way one can take from the so-called privileged and powerful and redistribute to the so-called unprivileged and weak.  Such an equalizer simply creates a tangible, corporeal version of Orwell's Animal Farm, where equality is an illusion grounded in a new and more dangerous form of inequality.  In pursuit of this extreme equality, Bentham's utilitarian henchman would have unlimited power to coerce through force and, more ominously, disregard anything deemed inalienable.  This is precisely what Montesquieu is referring to when he says extreme equality can lead to despotism.

Finally, pursuing notional policy is a historically dangerous proposition — not just because pursuing the abstract to the extent of fully realizing the idea is an impossibility, but also because the pursuit of such extremes invariably tears at the fabric of social and cultural institutions until there is nothing left but destruction, anarchy, and misery.  In fact, the French Revolution is a microcosm of how the pursuit of abstraction can lead to chaos.  In this bleak world, one will no longer have self-determination, individuality, self-expression, control over subsistence, or the right to be evaluated upon his merits or demerits.  The famous author of the "Federalist Papers" was clearly aware of this imprudence: "The power over a man's subsistence is a power over his will."

In summary, philosophical fundamentalists pursuing perfect equality are not very different from the various other fundamentalists who threaten our way of life.

As Edmund Burke so elegantly said, "intemperate minds cannot be free."

Johannes Karl Otto Danneskiold-Samsoe is an attorney, libertarian, and American citizen residing in London.

Image via Pexels.