What is the purpose of the state? Increasingly, it appears to be to secure something called ‘equality’. But we long ago moved past the point at which this was achieved through formal equality in the sense of everybody being equal before the law. What we now seem to expect is to experience equality in what I have previously called the ‘sibling’ sense: everybody loved equally by the benign parent, yet at the same time rivalrous with one another, seeking to be the one who is ever-so-slightly more loved than the rest.
The result of this is a grotesquely fake, cloying and sentimental governing style which apes a simpering maternalism while achieving something more like bad therapy. It coaxes, it reassures, it purports to nurture and support, in a manner that is transparently false and patronisingly obvious. And there is I think nowhere in the Western world where this style is more finessed or pronounced than Scotland, land of my fathers, where I spent the last two days speaking at an event.
Scotland is a small country which has always punched above its weight in every respect – and it should be no surprise, then, that it happens to be a world-leader in this pseudo-therapeutic governing style. The Scottish Government above all likes to portray itself as caring and compassionate. It wants what is best for everyone in Scotland. Like a good shepherd, it knows each and every member of the flock in intimate detail, and carefully micro-manages their interactions to ensure everybody is wrapped in precisely the amount of cotton wool that they happen to need at any given moment.
There is a genuinely dystopian gap between this vision and the reality, of course, which is that Scotland has in recent decades become the drug-death capital of Europe and the suicide capital of the UK – almost the precise opposite of what it purports to be. But that is by-the-by. It is the rhetoric that we are here most interested in, and what it says about the way in which political reason has developed – not just in Scotland, but across the developed world to varying degrees.
A curious illustration of this tendency, which encapsulates the issue in a very condensed form, is the foreword to the Scottish Government’s ‘Hate Crime Strategy for Scotland‘ (2023), provided by the Assistant Chief Constable of Police Scotland, Gary Ritchie.
When one thinks of the ‘police’, one still thinks I suppose of dedicated men and women fighting crime and arresting bad guys. But according to Mr Ritchie, the role of the police is actually something rather different – not so much the stern disciplinarian element of state authority enforcing public order, but rather the compassionate and nurturing arm of the mother hen executive.
Hence, the police do not do anything so prosaic as patrol the streets and deter crime. No: what they do is ensure that “everyone is able to thrive and flourish knowing they are valued for their true and authentic selves”. The police, you see, are there to combat “isolation” and the feeling that people might get that they are “unwelcome” or “rejected”. They “continually listen”, “help people identify and report hate crime” and “record and manage information to build deeper knowledge and understanding”. And they carry out “proactive information campaigns” to “challenge people to reflect on their own behaviours and attitudes” so as to nip hatred in the bud “before it happens”.
They in other words take on the role of benign busybodies, carefully monitoring what people are saying and thinking, and working to ensure that nobody is ever permitted to speak or behave in such a way as to interfere with anyone else’s “right to live safely and happily” as their (again) “true and authentic selves”.
This is laughable drivel, of course, although the smile on one’s face begins to fade when one considers that was written by the second most senior police officer in Scotland. Barely a moment’s thought has gone into it: Ritchie cannot possibly mean what he thinks he means, because anybody who reflected for even a moment would soon realise that being one’s “true and authentic self” is the last thing that should be encouraged in psychopaths, sexual predators, kleptomaniacs, exhibitionists, delinquents, misogynists, racists, paedophiles, arsonists, people who watch TikTok videos on public transport without headphones, or indeed even people who just aren’t very nice. (And this is leaving to one side the fact that roughly 85% of the population has by now become fed up to the back teeth with people being their “true and authentic selves” and would much rather turn the clock back to the days in which people largely suppressed their truth and authenticity in the name of good manners.)
No – what Ritchie really means is just that some people’s ‘truth and authenticity’ needs to be protected by the state, and not others. And we all of course know who are the ones whose “true and authentic selves” are to be celebrated and whose are not. But the fact that he would speak in this way is in any case revealing, because of course it brings to mind our old friend Alexandre Kojève and his account of the way in which modern political authority is constituted.
Kojève, in common with many other thinkers, describes modernity as characterised by the secular rejection of divine authority. God disappears, and the world becomes politically atheistic. This obviously has many consequences, but one of them is that law loses its mooring in divine right. Two people have a dispute, or a crime is alleged to have been committed. A rule is applied by the court. But where does the rule come from? What is it grounded in? Justice. But where does justice come from? Society’s sense of morality, perhaps, but that is never monolithic, and, in any case, is it simply the case that whatever is socially accepted as just, is? Was child sacrifice in ancient Mexico just, simply because the Aztecs thought it was? Was slavery in the southern US just, simply because most people living there believed it to be so?
Kojeve’s answer to the problem of where justice comes from is ‘recognition’, which is for our purposes really just another way of saying the individual’s realisation of his or her “true and authentic self”. Ultimately, since political authority cannot be constituted on the basis of divine right, and because it cannot rest on social mores alone or some other source, ultimately it can only rest on the irreducible core of the individual human experience, which is the desire to be recognised as one’s self for one’s (as it were) intrinsic value. We all yearn, in other words, for what a liberal would call ‘equal concern and respect’. And that is in the end, then, what political modernity will end up trying to achieve. It is inevitable, because it is the only thing which will ultimately provide the authority of the state with a proper grounding.
The problem with this – or, perhaps, the virtue of it, depending on whether one is a Stalinist – is that it presupposes the most perfect union of state and society that could ever be imagined, because it would cast the state as the constant guarantor of ‘truth and authenticity’ for every single individual at all times and everywhere. The state could not simply declare everybody to now have the right to be their true and authentic selves and leave it at that; people’s notions about their expressions of their true and authentic selves clash. (One thinks, for instance, of the transwoman and the lesbian, or the racist and the subject of that racism.) So the state emerges rather as a continuous modulator and intervener, constantly interfering in human social interactions to manage these conflicts, with the population made eternally reliant on it for the ‘recognition’ they crave.
Gary Ritchie could not really have expressed this better if he had tried. Once it is posited that the state’s job is to realise the truth of the authenticity of the individual, then this becomes the law’s role, and hence of course that of the police. And it follows that the nature of policing should itself transmogrify from the prevention and punishment of crime to something more along the lines of ensuring, to use his arresting phrase, that “everyone is able to thrive and flourish”.
It will also follow that the nature of policing should itself shift to the monitoring and management of everyday social interactions in order to better realise the overarching objective. Note the emphasis that Ritchie places on “record[ing] and manag[ing] information” in order to build “deeper knowledge and understanding of trends in hate crime”; note his desire to facilitate “help[ing] people identify and report” hate crime; note his description of a future in which people are “proactively…challenged” to “reflect on their own behaviours and attitudes”. This calls to mind precisely the kind of totalising relationship between state and society which Kojeve’s vision portends, in which public authority takes on the role of ensuring that true and authentic selfhood permeates the population and that all of social life is mobilised to that end. And it obviously also calls to mind the idea that the state should always be present in the background, looming over each and every dispute between each and every individual in order to ensure that a position of equality is eternally secured.
That this is a pipe dream and that it can only result in a general deterioration in social relations, with the population ever more minutely divided into identitarian interest groups, is obvious: when the state’s raison d’être is to protect everyone’s right to live safely and happily as their true and authentic selves, the result can be nothing but a war over whose truth is truer and whose authenticity is the more authentic. That explains a great deal about what we see in society around us, of course – it explains everything from ‘LGBTQI+’ to pro-Hamas student activism to the otherwise impossible-to-understand incapacity of the state to deal sensibly and rationally with the issue of illegal immigration – and it also explains why it is that secularism seems so strongly characterised by social division rather than unity.
Scotland will, however, continue to demonstrate a pioneering attitude in this regard. A glance through the Scottish Government’s ‘Programme for Government 2025-2026‘ reveals that it intends to introduce a raft of new measures broadly along the lines of actualising everybody’s true and authentic selves: funding safe spaces for the “LGBTQI+ community”; the creation of a Non-Binary Equality Action Plan; the prioritisation of the needs of “marginalised women and girls”; “improving disability competence across government”; the development of an Equality Strategy for Women and Girls; the creation of an “Anti-Racism Observatory for Scotland” to tackle systemic racism; the launch of a new “Integration Support Service” to ensure that “refugees, people seeking asylum and other forced migrants” can “access the support they need”; and so on and so forth.
And it is entirely no accident that, as a result, the Scottish Government’s purview over the lives of ordinary Scots will continue to grow and grow. The modern state grows – that is what it does – and it is in Scotland that it appears set to reach something of an apogee, if not economically then certainly culturally and spiritually. This is something for Scottish people to look forward to and for the rest of the world to study closely – because it is also suggestive that it is in Scotland where things will begin to unravel quickest.
Dr David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.