Thanks for Nothing

Gratitude is a good thing, but it shouldn’t be bestowed indiscriminately and certainly not upon things that don’t, or likely don’t, exist—such as God or a beneficent government. By all means, be grateful to your parents if they did a good job, to friends who’ve helped you out, even to enemies who taught you a valuable lesson. An ingrate is a bad thing, but so is giving undue thanks.

At Thanksgiving, it even makes sense for me to feel some vague gratitude toward my immigrant ancestors—the ones who started showing up in New England around 1630 in the case of William Seavey, almost immediately building a church and doing it with government money. I’m not obliged to share their beliefs in order to recognize their actions causally led to me being here, just as you’re under no obligation to be thankful to, say, military forces that caused your parents to meet by bombing their village.

I suspect that much of what gets labeled “gratitude” when people talk about God or government should more properly be called “irrationally diminished anxiety”—that is, a slight cessation of the average slob’s unease at the thought that the universe is not carefully orchestrated by either a divine or earthly planner. You desperately want to hear that someone, somewhere, has things “under control” and so breathe a sigh of relief, which feels like properly directed gratitude, when your imagination (or more likely someone else’s) conjures up a controller-entity.

You can see the spiritual and the earthly impulse to conjure a central planner blend in an unsettling way with, for instance, the leader-worship that plainly exists in the minds of many Trump idolators—and I say this as someone who still thinks Trump’s slightly preferable to the Democrats, who are even more prone to pretensions of being farseeing central planners than Trump is. Of course, if Trump doesn’t want to keep getting called a fascist, maybe he shouldn’t act like a fascist.

Fascists are, among other things, prone to claim that they really just want a normal, peaceful civil order but must reluctantly declare a temporary “state of exception” or “state of emergency” during which certain liberties must be curtailed, some military deployments unleashed, just until things are fully under control, you understand. Naturally, Trump’s leading with that idea as he prepares to enter the Oval Office for a second time, warning the world he’ll deport millions and use the military to do it, immigration being the current ostensible emergency.

I won’t claim busting heads or rounding up prisoners can never be necessary—won’t even claim current immigration, subsidized as it is, should be viewed as entirely normal and acceptable—but how many times does a politician who’s purportedly a mixed bag of authoritarian and more humanely libertarian impulses get to lead with the authoritarian stuff before his followers, especially the nominally freedom-loving ones, admit that the authoritarian part is probably where his heart is and what we’re going to get?

Did any libertarians end up among Trump’s Cabinet nominees, despite his widely reported promises to the strangely self-abasing-yet-arrogant rightmost elements of the Libertarian Party? RFK is interesting and in some ways admirable, but his very recent nominal membership in the Party doesn’t really count for philosophical purposes, obviously.

I’m far from saying the problem of authoritarianism exists only on the right. Last week, I noticed a sign outside NYU advertising a panel discussion for law students on whether the philosopher Carl Schmitt is still relevant for the analysis of law, organized by professors named Kumm, Kaiser, and Weiler. I couldn’t help thinking it’s amazing, given how many harmless intellectuals—from economist James Buchanan to scientist Isaac Newton—have suffered some form of “cancelation” by the academic left, that Schmitt, who was a Nazi, is still viewed with respect, mainly because he viewed politics through the anti-individualistic lens of collective national purpose and fear of enemies.

The left and right can bicker all they like, but they both lap that stuff up while those of us dedicated to mundane, bourgeois things like secure property rights, balanced budgets, and free speech get called monsters. Maybe government and religion themselves are the closest things to real monsters that we face. Both engage in conjuring acts to keep us mesmerized and following orders. Unlike Schmitt, we should regard that as evil.

The physicist and YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder recently noted that one of the strongest secular arguments for either God or the multiverse (that being the hypothetical system of multiple universes that might make the odds-defyingly pleasant nature of our own seem more plausible by treating it as one rare positive outcome in an infinite sea of barren quark fogs whose own Big Bangs yielded nothing of interest) just got a lot weaker with the realization that the long-touted “fine-tuning” of the universe, seemingly making it perfectly suitable for life in a way that no tweaking of its physical parameters in any direction could improve, has been radically overstated.

If the basic condition for life being likely in a universe is abundant star formation, it appears that slight tweaking of our universe’s physical constants could’ve produced a universe 400 times more prone to star formation and thus, presumably, 400 times more prone to planet formation and life. If Dad leaves you a cookie, by all means thank him. If you find a four-hundredth of a cookie, maybe neither Dad nor anyone else was trying to help you out. Maybe you just found some crumbs and wanted to believe there was more.

—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey