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Serve Your Country? No, Serve Your Fellow Man by Rob A
relative called me early on the Fourth of July to thank me for serving
my country. She was
referring to the four years I spent on active duty as an Army officer,
and the two years I spent in ROTC before that.
While I appreciated the gesture, especially since only a few
people have ever done so, I also thought it was pretty amusing. A
popular radio talk show host in Atlanta almost always responds with
“Thanks for serving your country” if a caller tells him that he is a
veteran or is in the military. That’s
the common perception: People who serve in the military serve their
country. If someone had
asked me during the late 1980s why I wanted to join the military, I
would have said, “Because I want to serve my country.”
At the time, I thought that every able-bodied male should serve
their country by serving in the military.
I thought I owed a debt to others (especially those who fought in
the Revolutionary War) and needed to “stand my watch.” Two of my favorite quotes at the time were “Freedom isn’t
free” (which the Army incorporated in a great TV commercial) and
“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for
your country.” I was very
idealistic and naïve. Towards
the end of my tour on active duty, I began to realize just what I was: a
pawn on a geopolitical chessboard, with Clinton calling the shots and
moving the pieces. A large
crowd (most of the civilized world) was at this chess match, watching
CNN’s Christianne Amanpour report from various hellholes on the
chessboard, and would demand that Clinton “do something” about them,
which invariably meant sending in troops (moving pawns like me to
another square). When my
division got the mission to prepare to deploy to Bosnia in the spring of
1993, I didn’t know of a single soldier who wanted to go.
But if we actually had deployed (we never did), I’m sure that
no one would have refused to go, because every soldier knows the deal:
They must obey every “lawful” (not moral) order issued by their
chain of command. As
Tennyson wrote in The
Charge of the Light Brigade: Theirs
not to make reply, At
the top of the chain of command is the President.
(To reinforce the point, pictures of the men in the chain of
command can be found in every Army headquarters at the battalion level
or higher.) Congress
appropriates the funding and exercises oversight, but the President is
the Commander-in-Chief. So
is serving the President by obeying his orders the same thing as serving
your country? Voter
turnout in the 1992 Presidential election was 55.19%. Clinton received 43.28% of the vote, so he was elected by
only 23.89% of the voting age population, or 17.73% of the total
population. How about
Congress? Voter turnout in
the 1992 Congressional elections was also 55% (which is actually the
highest it’s been since 1972). If
we assume that the average winner won with 55% of the vote, that means
those Congressmen were elected on average by only 30.25% of the voting
age population, or 22.48% of the total population.
Were the people who voted for winning candidates my countrymen?
Of course not. And
the actions of the President and Congress reflected the will of that
23.89% or 30.25% of the voting age population in only a crude sort of
way, since (1) most voters had only one or two options in the voting
booth, so the correlation of their views with those of the politician
they voted for may not have been high; (2) many voters didn’t know or
were misled about various politicians’ positions on the issues; and
(3) a politician might have changed his position on an issue (or even
his party) after he was elected. Additionally,
some of the people who voted (such as dual citizens living in a foreign
country) I would not consider my countrymen, while other people who
lived in America but couldn’t vote (say, because they had been
convicted of a victimless crime) I would.
So people who vote for victorious politicians are not my country,
and the actions of the politicians they elect don’t reflect the will
of my countrymen. What
is a country, then? This is
a question I’ve been pondering in recent months.
My dictionary provides several definitions, including: (1) a
large tract of land distinguishable by features of topography, biology
or culture; (2) a nation or state; the territory of a nation or state;
(3) the people of a nation or state; (4) the land of a person’s birth
or citizenship. We are
trained and conditioned to think of our country as everything within the
geographical area over which the federal government exercises its
monopoly on legal coercion. But
if the State is a social construct, a fiction, a figment of the imagination, then
so are its invisible, made-up boundaries.
I’ve been trying to get myself to ignore the State’s
boundaries and think of my country in terms of the first and last
definitions above. Yes,
it’s not as cut-and-dried, but that’s the way it would be in real
life if we didn’t have a government and nationalist sentiment. When
I think of my country, I think of people who live on the same landmass
as me, people who generally speak American English and look similar to
me, and people who believe in basic American values.
This might include some parts of Canada but exclude some parts of
the U.S. There is no reason
for a country to be defined by a specific geographical area unless a
government exists. In that
case, the government needs to stake out its turf (the same way a street
gang does) and determine where it needs to lay the minefields and build
the walls. Think about it:
Wouldn’t there be fewer wars if maps looked like this
one, with just the names of places and no political boundaries? Now
some of you might say that someone needs to serve in the military to
protect us from foreign invaders. I
agree that we need to protect ourselves from such people (although
Canada and Mexico don’t pose a threat, and the oceans on the east and
west coasts make a pretty good moat), but that doesn’t mean that the
government is the best or only candidate for the job.
See Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s The
Private Production of Defense (.pdf file, 26 pages) or the second
part of Bob Murphy’s short book Chaos
Theory. So
did I have a moral obligation to serve my country (here I mean the
non-political definition of country, not the political one)?
Well, my countrymen never did anything for me, and I never entered into a
contract with them. Although
we have some things in common and belong to the same affinity group, as
far as I’m concerned, they are simply other human beings, other
citizens of the world. The
fact that the U.S. government claims them as subjects makes no
difference to me. Their
status as Americans does not magically transform them into people whose
lives are worth more than those of non-Americans. If
you want to serve others and reduce nationalism and the incidence of
war, don’t serve your country, serve your fellow man, regardless of
his nationality. How?
Offer him a product or service he wants.
Cater to his wishes. Anticipate
his needs. Supply his
demand. Increase his satisfaction.
Make him glad he did business with you.
The beauty of the market is that even if you’re selfish and
care only about yourself, if you want to be able to buy food, clothing
and shelter, you have to spend about 40 hours per week putting the needs
of others ahead of your own. The
only way that you can get what you want is by serving your fellow man. Serving
and trading with others, regardless of nationality, makes war more
costly since trade is disrupted and profits and utility are lost.
That’s why, when politicians want to go to war with another
country, the first thing they do is try to stop people in their country
from trading with people in the other country by imposing tariffs,
sanctions, embargos and blockades. If trade between people in the two countries is no longer
possible, it reduces the costs of going to war. Once war is imminent, politicians will urge their subjects to
“serve your country,” by which they mean the State. War would not have been possible if people had simply ignored
the State and continued to serve their fellow man, regardless of
nationality. The difference between serving your country and serving your fellow man is the difference between war and peace, between devastation and prosperity. When you serve "your country," you are really taking orders from the State to kill, maim and destroy. But when you serve your fellow man by participating in the market, you take orders from consumers, which results in peace and prosperity.
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