Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, published in 1943, is now available on-line (.pdf). Nock, born in the early 1870's, received a classical education and his memoir is filled with foreign language phrasing. A writer and editor in the 20th Century's earlier decades, Nock was an intensely private man and his autobiography touches little on personal details and relationships, emphasizing instead the experiences and ideas that shaped his world-view.

Nock never received a government-school education, and never learned to worship the Flag. Indeed, though steeped in the classics, his formal education scarcely touched upon post-AD 1500 history. But once he grew an interest in public matters, he did study American history, and every event reminded him of some previous event in antiquity. This impressed on Nock that human being don't really change - that the desires and hope of people thousands of years ago remain ours today.

Nock's insights are not always original or profound, but taken together they form, more or less, a system of thought on which to build. The first that comes to mind is Nock's emphasis on the court of taste and manners, at least as important as the courts of law, religion, and morality. What I gather from Nock, and his commentary of the Beecher-Tilton adultery scandal, is that the publicity and righteous indignation surrounding it were just as bad as the alleged adultery itself. In other words, adultery is wrong at least in part because it is in bad taste - it leads to ugly public gossip and judgment.

Matters of taste and manners, however, extend further. Unlike the absolutes implied in systems of law, taste and manners are subjective - I would suggest they rely on the Golden Rule: if you wouldn't want others to bring it up, don't bring it up yourself. And it is good taste that Nock saw absent in America and decreasing in Europe. This was due to what Nock calls "economism" - a word he invented to be more precise than "materialism." Economism emphasizes work and material well-being rather than leisure and cultural pursuits that make society lovely. Economism created more "labor-saving" devices, but not more amenities. Happiness can decline as prosperity grows. Nock was more at home in Europe than in America primarily because of their small businesses and leisurely pace. But as years went by Europe itself was being swept up by economism. Economism led to war, and "respect for life is at the vanishing point, and respect for the dignity of death has disappeared." One evidence of this was the popularity of murder mysteries in the 1930's; in contrast, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories of the 1890's rarely dealt with murder.

Nock was, by today's standards, an oddity. He was an individualist, a libertarian. But he did not equate market freedom as market worship. Instead, he agreed in principle with the teachings of Henry George, that land-rent should be the source of public revenue, would check Big Business and economism, and would maximize freedom. But Georgism as a system would require the same "good people" that any system would require to run successfully; otherwise, it would fail. Individuals are not perfectible or infinitely improvable, but they would improve most under conditions of freedom. Nock was an elitist, a snob. His observations on the decline of excellence, on the decline of civilization, lie mainly in his belief that most members of the species homo sapiens were not capable of becoming "human beings" in the moral and psychological sense of the term. Yet, he had no intention of violating the rights of fellow members of the species.

But what I perceive to be Nock's best contribution is five points I jotted down while reading his book. Taken together, they provide the best means of understanding the social sciences that I have ever seen. Every policy "mistake" and every sign of civilizational "decline" are probably neither, they are just reflections of the human condition.

The first is, that individuals, to borrow a cliche, "are what they are." Most are "uneducable": there's no convincing them, they can't be taught what they don't already know. They understand how letters become words, but they don't understand what they read. There is no "natural equality," individuals are equal in their rights but not in their abilities. And most fall far short of the standards we'd expect of individuals in a "good" society - and are incapable of meeting those standards even if they tried.

The second is, as Voltaire says, "In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other." Whether we want government to protect our rights is beside the point; the fact is that the government takes from some to give to some others. The question then becomes whether this is something to applaud, and if not, what to do about it, or how to make the best of this bad situation.

The third is what Nock calls Epstean's Law: "Man tends always to satisfy his needs and desires with the least possible exertion" – "by exploitation whenever exploitation is practicable." If the people's loves and values are noble and exalted, including the value not to exploit people, that's one thing. But most people are not that noble.

The fourth is Gresham's Law: "Good money drives out bad," or more broadly, when people are compelled by law to treat two items of unequal quality as of equal value, they will dispense with the least valuable and horde the most valuable. If the law says that coins that are 40% silver and coins that are 90% silver are both worth 25 cents, people will let the 40% coins circulate and keep the 90% for themselves. Likewise, when mere literacy is equated with good reading comprehension, with being "educated," poor literature will outsell good literature. The market will be dominated by the lower quality thing.

The fifth is the law of diminishing returns: the more you spend, the less you get back. For instance, the difference between a $5 bottle of wine and a $50 bottle of wine is much greater than the difference between a $50 bottle and a $500 bottle. Nock points out that democracy also suffers from the law of diminishing returns: the larger the community, the less well-informed the people can be about public affairs.

Nock's views are not dark or pessimistic. If anything, he provides a sense of peace - the "serenity to accept the things I cannot change" - namely, other people. The more Nock was persuaded that humans can not be perfected, the more he looked upon them with a "Christian spirit." Their drives, tastes, and prejudices didn't bother him any more.

It's good advice to those who believe that if only the masses can "be told the truth," they will see the light, change their ways, and reform the system. The best anyone can hope is to reach those with an open mind, who are open to persuasion. We shouldn't expect either the masses or the system to produce freedom or justice - only individuals can choose to be free, and only individuals can be just.