We often say that socialist societies are epistemologically deficient, and thus their economies stagnate because they cannot create growth. This is not a false point, but it obscures the equally plausible observation that socialist societies and their governments cannot manage growth, or co-exist with growth, and thus react by attempting to constrain it.

They cannot manage growth because it disturbs the status arrangements that are the principal desideratum of socialist policy. But growth is not uncommon in socialist societies, in spite of poor policies, largely because people neither do what they are told, nor what they say they want. While people support and even applaud stable status arrangements, they behave otherwise, engaging in contractual relationships to increase their own wellbeing. When this occurs, the socialist administration reacts to the threat of disruptions to the status order by actively discouraging further growth, by dissipating the energy of growth in malivestment. It must do this because other than maintenance of the status order it has no other functions.

Put another way, we think of socialist failings too frequently in terms of the inability to deliver wealth, but there is also a definite and necessary hostility.

Politics is inherently unstable in the short term, and as seen from within and nearby, because it is the outcome of a compromise between those interests of an individual which are in conflict with the interests of others, a fairly well understood and very large set, and those interests which coincide or overlap in some part with the interests of others, a set of uncertain size and membership. Individuals necessarily approach both classes of interests in a probabilistic fashion, since they can do no better, but all their behaviour is encompassed by this description, and it is unobservant to claim otherwise. Politics is the attempt to optimise results in both categories.

The instability arises because:

1. Interest, both purely individual, and that overlapping with the interests of others, is uncertain and dynamic. The boundaries between common and selfish interest shift continually in fact, depending on circumstances, and also in our estimation as information alters in quantity or weight. Thus, the compromise fixed in our political systems and in our laws is always obsolete, and only approximate at best. Discontent is inevitable.

2. In order to serve the common interest it is necessary to devolve and depute some power to a subset of the population, the police, the government in general, loosely the civil and military services of the state, or The Crown. But these people are self-interested people like any other, and will inevitably and even if only fractionally and subtly abuse their power, overstating the degree of the sacrifice that the general population must make to secure the common interest. Equally, the rest of the population will, individuall, underestimate the sacrifice and seek to benefit without contribution.

This tension is inevitable, but note that the civil and military services are co-ordinated and well-armed, by virtue of the legitimate tasks that they must perform, and have indeed a common-interest in exploiting the mass of individuals, whose those individuals themselves are poorly armed or co-ordinated, except at time of rebellion, and have only a weak common interest, partly because of the cost of co-ordination, which the civil and military powers have as a free gift of their work, and partly individuals in rebellion are very unevenly exposed to hazard in revealing and prosecuting resistance.

From these points flows the ebb and flow of political history, with individuals ever dissatisfied with the extent and character of their government, whether in the person of kings, civil servants, soldiers, politicians, and clergy. It really is that simple.

There has been and still is a strong tendency to see monotheism as a superior, refined, certainly a developed form of religion. This is unlikely to be true. The projection of a single individual as a causal force seems almost certainly the most unreflective explanation for the world, the least sensitive to the great variety of causal forces in the observed universe, where a plurality of material substances have a multiplicity of properties and even properties emergent on their further combination.

The projection of multiple persons into the deosphere, perhaps even an infinitude of such persons, as found in pantheism, is doubtless foolish – there is no need at all to personalize an of these facts – but at lest it is responsive to the evident plurality of the facts. Monotheism, bu contrast, is absurdly selfish, denying all evidence except the single fact of solipsistic consciousness, and seeing it reflected it in the universe is a grotesque act of self-worship, capped by the further delight that other adherents in a monotheistic religion seem to worship this reflection as devoutly as you do yourself. Everybody is deluded, but delightfully so. No wonder then that the co-religionists of monotheistic cults are bound so tightly together; their kind of faith gratifies the self as no other religion does.

Kings long ago lost their mystery; now even the tribunes of the people are willingly conniving in the trivialisation of their own persons, and even the process by which they were chosen. In such a climate the self-respect of the electorate cannot last for long.

Heads of state issue comments and official statements via the internet’s social meda channels, going round and about their own Parliaments. All elected representatives must follow, for that channel is their Chamber now. – If they do not tweet they will not have a voice at all, for utterances in parliament are obscure. Indeed, it used to be said that the best way to keep a secret was to disclose it in a speech in the House of Lords; perhaps that is now also true of the Commons. Is anybody listening? Is there anybody there?

Some will think this an interesting, even an important stage in the evolution of our democracy. I am not so optimistic. An erosion of the dignity of State involves the slender range of common interests to which it gives body; and it leaves employees of the state in a much stronger position. Indeed, as social cohesion loses its gravitational power, never strong, the personnel of functional government will necessarily use the state’s monopoly of violence or force in small ways and large to prevent disintegration. And it will be a strange man that does welcome this, for it will be obviously necessary, but he will be a fool that does not fear its longer consequences.

The faceless organ of state power must become stronger as elected politicians and the electorate itself lose dignity, and without a dignified politics and a self-respecting electorate, the organ of state can no longer be held in check. Since it is made up of men and women, the state can only be self-serving, for we know no other condition, institutional or personal. But when in balance with politicians and people, a compromise is forced upon the personnel of government. But without this limiting pressure the organ of state must expand, for it has no other option, and since it will often be exapnding in response to disintegration in the public sphere it will have much justification.

Unless the people and their representatives can regain self-respect and dignity, unless they can rescue themselves from triviality, the end of this trajectory is an authoritarian state. – The consequences of being game for a laugh, or showing a sense of humour, are grave in the extreme. Worst of all, perhaps, the recovery of dignity may also pass through this unappealing authoritarian stage. Louis Napoléon is not a pretty thought.

Those who dislike Mandeville, while at the same time feeling the force of his arguments, suggest that he is more libertine than libertarian, a farceur, not l'homme serieux, as his near predecessor Hobbes so obviously is. As it happens, since the seventeenth century the sense of "libertine" seems to have shifted somewhat towards a condemnation of sensual indulgence, and away from the broader sense which included implications that if not quite political in the strict sense are certainly conscious of an ethical resonance broader than the simple and unbridled satisfaction of the appetites.

In any case, squabbling over these terms is somewhat to miss the point of Mandeville's argument to the effect that there is no clear stopping point at which a line can be drawn in the scale of human wishes, on one side of which we can declare all to be vice, with virtue on the other side. – Virtue is the complete denial of human wishes or it is nothing, or nothing but a shifty compromise that hardly deserves the name. Similarly we cannot separate liberty of a type that we do not wholly dislike from that we detest. Liberty is complete liberty or, again, it is nothing.

But in both cases we find it practically necessary to draw lines, however indefensible in principle, for practical ends (in order to satisfy another wish). – M.'s point, or so it seems to me, is that is not in our own interests to pretend that there is anything very solid about these lines. The theologian, the moralist, insisting on Virtue as an absolute must be a rigorist in theory compromising theory in order to deliver wealth. The lover of freedom must be a Libertine in theory, compromising his theory in order to preserve stability in the societal system.

An article in The Times today reports that information from the National Audit Office (NAO) of the United Kingdom to the effect that “Family sizes shrink to their lowest level”, with the fertility rate dropping to 1.9 children per woman. Around 20% of women do not have any children, a proportion that is, it seems, historically anomalous.

An ONS statistician is quoted with a precise summary:

"Women born in 1971 who completed their bearing in 2016 had an average 1.9 children per woman, fewer than their mothers' generation, born 1944, who had 2.21 children, and the lowest level on record."

Some will doubtless interpret this as showing that rich people have other interests than fulfilling biological drives, but there are other possible explanations. – In a complex, competitive society the cost of maintaining a satisfactory position from which an individual can securely reproduce leaves less over for investment in the offspring, a pressure that encourages lower fertility to maintain high levels of resource concentration per child. On this view, in spite of appearances, and careless chatter about the demographic transition, people are still maximising their reproduction, but the conditions are such that this means smaller family sizes. Another way of approaching this is to say that as general societal complexity moves further from thermodynamic equilibrium, the human species is becoming further K-shifted in its reproductive strategies.

Politics is produced by the tension between self-interest and that compromise with the interests of others needed in order to secure an individual's self-interest.

Bayle's Miscellaneous Reflections, Occasion'd by the Comet which appear'd in December 1680, first published in an English translation in 1708, is ostensibly an attack on popular superstitions, but the cumulative effect of the argument inevitably erodes the religion that the author claims to uphold. He must have known this. If a man can see the reasons that make the attribution of supernatural owers to the visible comet a superstition, then the attribution of such power to an invisible deity is all the more absurd.

The late 17th Century in England presents the reader of that country's literature with the first minds definitely of the modern model, perceiving and convinced of the sole sufficiency of the material world to explain all phenomena. Indeed, they are less prone to residual illusions of transcendence than many in the present. Others before them had perceived the superiority of materialist explanations, but were not fully convinced, or staved off conviction with very reasonable scepticism.

The new conviction struck men in different ways, for all philosophies come in various flavours, sour, salt, and sweet. Hobbes describes his conclusions without a tremor; Butler weeps, and Mandeville shrugs his shoulders and laughs. Hobbes saw it plain, and took it for what it was worth; Butler regretted the lies of the past and the opportunities foregone; Mandeville embraced the freedom and consequent riches of the present, come what may.

Every man, woman, and child has been the youngest person on earth, and some more than once. But you could live a very long life and never be the oldest. Inexperience is cheap; wisdom, rare and consequently dear.