“You Belong,” But To What or To Whom?

Katherine Tai, the US Commerce Consultant within the Biden administration, is among the many attorneys tasked with understanding and working the financial system. Final Could, 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 isn’t a manner for a person to belong however by selecting which group to not 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 all the things, belonging usually, is unimaginable in a free society.

In an unfree society, it’s completely different. I can consider three types of “belonging.” In a tribe, one does certainly belong usually, as a result of there may be little alternative 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 implies to its authorities, which can or will not be a majoritarian democracy. In Aldous Huxley’s Courageous New World, Lenina expresses this in her easy manner: “Everybody belongs to everybody else.” The “Pricey Chief watches you and can take excellent care of you” that one can see in Ms. Tai’s lyrism may be very in line with that manner of belonging. The third technique to belong is slavery, the last word type of belonging; should you actually need to belong, that’s the way in which to go.

One objection is that “belong” can be utilized not in its property-right sense however in a derived symbolic sense corresponding to “to be connected 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 net Merriam-Webster.) However word that “slave” additionally has figurative meanings, which don’t completely defang its literal sense. Ms. Tai ought to have stated 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 state of affairs” (as Merriam-Webster writes). However this might additionally recommend that one should keep in his place, or he shall be put in his place by the ability that be. In a free society, the person largely chooses not solely what he “belongs to,” but additionally which concept he espouses, what’s “appropriate, applicable, or advantageous” for him to consider and to do.

One other manner, maybe extra sensible, to take a look at the issue is to contemplate a latest assertion 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 just isn’t a giant Starbucks. It contains even those that don’t like Starbucks or don’t need to be watched and brought care of by some Pricey Chief. In such a common context of liberty, Starbucks itself, in fact, needs to be free to do what its house owners resolve. Absent a common context of liberty, Starbucks wouldn’t have the ability 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, in my opinion, 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 Pricey Chief is an phantasm, for he’s solely expensive to a part of the inhabitants.