“You Belong,” However To What or To Whom?

Katherine Tai, the US Commerce Consultant within the Biden administration, is without doubt one of the many legal professionals tasked with understanding and operating the economic system. Final Might, she gave a speech to have a good time the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and PacificIslander Heritage Month. She advised her viewers:

You aren’t invisible. I see you and I hear you. The President sees you and hears you. And we’re preventing like hell for you.

Since you belong.

What does that imply? What does “you belong” imply?

In a liberal-individualist society, that’s, in a free society, there is no such thing as a method for a person to belong however by selecting which group not to belong to, for he (or she) is a member or potential member of a virtually limitless variety of teams with completely different levels of abstractness and compatibility. “Belonging” to every thing, belonging usually, is unattainable in a free society.

In an unfree society, it’s completely different. I can consider three kinds of “belonging.” In a tribe, one does certainly belong usually, as a result of there’s little selection however to undertake the belonging uniformity imposed by customs and the worry of being banned. In a extra structured society, we meet the second sort of belonging: to belong to “society,” which suggests to its authorities, which can or might not be a majoritarian democracy. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Lenina expresses this in her easy method: “Everybody belongs to everybody else.” The “Expensive Chief watches you and can take excellent care of you” that one can see in Ms. Tai’s lyrism may be very according to that method of belonging. The third method to belong is slavery, the final word type of belonging; in the event you actually need to belong, that’s the best way to go.

One objection is that “belong” can be utilized not in its property-right sense however in a derived symbolic sense akin to “to be hooked up or sure by beginning, allegiance, or dependency … they belong to their homeland;” or “to be a member of a membership, group, or set … she belongs to a rustic membership.” (See the online Merriam-Webster.) However notice that “slave” additionally has figurative meanings, which don’t completely defang its literal sense. Ms. Tai ought to have mentioned extra exactly how her viewers belongs.

Ms. Tai would possibly emphasize her use of the intransitive type of the verb, which conveys the extra fuzzy that means of “to be appropriate, applicable, or advantageous … to be in a correct scenario” (as Merriam-Webster writes). However this might additionally counsel that one should keep in his place, or he shall be put in his place by the facility that be. In a free society, the person largely chooses not solely what he “belongs to,” but additionally which thought he espouses, what’s “appropriate, applicable, or advantageous” for him to consider and to do.

One other method, maybe extra sensible, to have a look at the issue is to think about a recent statement by a Starbucks spokesman:

We stay dedicated to making a tradition of heat and belonging, the place everyone seems to be welcome.

A free society shouldn’t be an enormous Starbucks. It contains even those that don’t like Starbucks or don’t need to be watched and brought care of by some Expensive Chief. In such a normal context of liberty, Starbucks itself, in fact, needs to be free to do what its house owners resolve. Absent a normal context of liberty, Starbucks wouldn’t be capable to outline for itself what’s “a tradition of heat and belonging.”

I doubt that the present USTR, who’s philosophically a Seventeenth-century mercantilist (simply as her predecessor within the Trump administration, Robert Lighthizer, was), meant that a person is free to “belong” or not as he decides. (Say you don’t need to belong to the minimum-wage “beneficiaries” or to belong to a union.) All this leaves open the query of the minimal guidelines, authorized or ethical, on which a free society would possibly rely. Political slogans and incantations about belonging can not reply this query. It’s, for my part, tough to consider it with out studying Nobel economists James Buchanan and Friedrich Hayek—and for that matter Anthony de Jasay, who confirmed that the Expensive Chief is an phantasm, for he’s solely expensive to a part of the inhabitants.