Okay, I’m going to give you what I believe to be an Iron Law of Human Nature. This is probably the most important thing I’ll say all year, which is why I’ll say it several times. One should take full advantage of these things when they come around.

Human Nature

Actually, before I give you my Iron Law, I’ll note that formulating laws of human nature is a very risky business. History and anthropology teach us that whatever views you and I have about human nature are pretty much just always wrong.

Think humans were born to be free from social compulsion? People in Confucian societies, very conformist societies, seem to be doing just fine. They’re happy. Think humans need structure to achieve anything to flourish, to avoid societal conflict? Burning man or certain Islanders or Indians, Native American tribes, were pretty anarchist, and they were completely fine that way.

If you’re vegan or vegetarian, the Inuit ate basically only meat. If you love meat, there are warrior societies that are mostly vegetarian. If you love patriarchy, there are a couple of matriarchal societies still kickin’ it. If you think patriarchy is the source of all modern ills, there are a few societies that have mostly avoided the ills of patriarchy.

Whatever we think about human nature is wrong because humans are malleable and adaptable, capable of thriving almost everywhere.

With all that said, this fool will rush in where angels fear to treat.

The Iron Law

My iron law is: whenever and wherever a group of humans get enough power to prevent others from looking too closely at what they’re doing, and enough credibility to tell others they ought not to question them too closely, that group will tend towards corruption and incompetence.

A Touchstone

I like to use this iron law as a touchstone.

Suppose I see a news story about how some cops shot someone in their own house and then covered it up or planted a gun, but were exposed on the stand in their coordinated lies by a video camera or something. Or a news story about how cops routinely rob, under color of law, Americans traveling across country.

I always want to shout, “What did you expect to happen? Of course they did. They have legal immunity that removes redress in the courts, political heft via police unions that removes redress in the legislature, and of course dominance on the street that removes practical resistance. And they always talk about their honor and their brave men and women protecting us all, so how dare you impugn them.”

I like this touchstone because it’s pretty neutral. I’m not hating on cops here. Any group of humans will do the same in similar positions, Republican or Democrat, Communist or Barry Goldwater.

What’s that? The Catholic church shuffled priests around to evade victims’ accusations, repeatedly returning them over the years to fresh flocks of victims, and when finally exposed then shuffled money around to avoid victims’ legal claims? The nuns in Ireland enslaved women who got pregnant, and then destroyed the records of the adopted children?

No shit.

They literally tell their flock it’s a sin to challenge them (“you must forgive, my child”), and they have loyal cadres of acolytes to protect them. Of course they acted poorly. It’s not because they’re religious, it’s because they’re human.

What’s that? The Secret Service responded to a political critic by leaking classified information about that critic, to his detriment? The Secret Service acted like sophomores on spring break in Colombia? The IRS targeted conservative groups under a liberal president? The FBI urged Martin Luther King, Jr., to commit suicide, harasses Laura Poitras for making documentaries? Well, we didn’t expect people with little to no oversight to act competently or use its power fairly.

For the CIA, we turn to Lewis Lapham.

“The CIA’s failures as an intelligence-gathering operation during the second half of the century billed as America’s own have borne out Doolittle’s early warning of “dead wood at virtually all levels.” The agency evidently didn’t foresee the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Vietcong Tet Offensive in 1968, the Arab-Israeli war in 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atomic bomb by India in 1998, the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.”

Where would we be without the CIA to gather intelligence for us? Now watch Lapham take on the agency’s actual operations:

“The agency played with sending an émigré army to capture the lost kingdom of Albania, but once parachuted into the Balkan darkness the advance scouts were never seen or heard from again because the CIA’s head of secret ops was unwittingly coordinating the event with a Soviet double agent providing the KGB with the map coordinates of the intended drop zones. To discredit Sukarno as president of Indonesia in the mid-1950s, the CIA planned to incite popular envy and resentment of his sexual prowess, shooting a propaganda film entitled Happy Days showing Sukarno (played by a Mexican actor wearing a mask) in bed with a Soviet agent (played by a California actress wearing a wig). To assassinate Fidel Castro the agency drew up plans to present him with an exploding cigar and poisoned scuba gear. The bungled invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961 assumed a crowd of joyful Cuban peasants rising from the sugar cane and marching gloriously to Havana.The cadre of Cuban exiles was landed at the wrong tide on the wrong boats, soon to be confronted by Castro at the head of a column of tanks. In what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair (running guns to the mullahs in Iran in return for money to fund a thuggish junta in Nicaragua) the “enterprise” deposited $10 million in the wrong Swiss bank account, hired drunken aircraft mechanics in El Salvador, and dropped munitions into the wrong jungles in Nicaragua.”

Again, this isn’t partisan. The Secret Service protects Democrat and Republican presidents equally, the IRS works decade in and decade out, the FBI does its thing regardless of the political weather, the CIA overthrows governments and prosecutes secret wars whether the president’s party bleeds red or blue.

Nor am I advocating all these organizations be carted away for scrap metal. That’s not feasible, and (while I’d love to see them reined in) not wholly desirable.

Simply, this is my iron law of human nature: never be surprised at misuse of power or at incompetence in a powerful group with the propaganda (holiness, honor, service) to insulate itself from criticism.

We can generalize this observation to celebrities like Bill Cosby who have cultural cachet and political correctness to protect themselves, but then I fear the law becomes too general to be useful.