Why I Compare Thee to a Summer Rose

The Pencil Metaphor Across Right Wing Circles

Why I Compare Thee to a Summer Rose: Efficacy of Metaphor

Metaphoric Reasoning and the more critical stories they sometimes contain are efficacious means to influence. Logic rarely moves people, but emotion and colorful metaphors will. Yes, metaphors are never complete. If someone confidently states that metaphors are limiting, you should cut ties with that person. That might be one of the most mid-witty answers you will ever encounter and dear reader, you deserve more from people in your life.  

Metaphors aren't meant to explain fully but provide an insight into a singular phenomenon. The speaker/writer often uses a metaphor to talk to his audience empathetically. They understand that the issue argued in the professional forums for the problem is so replete with a "thieves cant" of academic gobbly-gook inaccessible to most people. The metaphor shows the speaker trying to converse, not dictate. Most importantly, metaphors also force the speaker/writer to think reflectively about the issue and rearrange its elements in a unique, plausible environment, thereby strengthening their position. Instead of reciting, they are creating.

Today, the pencil (yes, just a dull number #2) will focus on understanding the power of metaphor. The pencil has been used significantly in right-wing circles to communicate and argue for the free market and a centralized monarchy.         

The Pencil: A Metaphor for Freedom and Control

"I Pencil" is one of the most influential libertarian tracts ever written. The full title is "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read" for those in the know, including you. "I Pencil" is the shortened title used to reference it in the rest of this post. Leonard Reed authored the article in the 1958 December issue of The Freeman[1]. It soon became an influential article that helped argue for market forces as necessary for wealth and security in contrast to the administrative state that had accelerated during the Roosevelt Administration.    

           Reflecting on the article a few years later, Read articulated the Tom Wolfe "aha moment" that animated and coordinated the principles on the tip of his tongue into the influential article: 

"As I sat contemplating the miraculous make-up of an ordinary lead pencil, the 

thought flashed in my mind: I'll bet there isn't a person on earth who knows how to 

make even so simple a thing as a pencil.

If this could be demonstrated, it would dramatically portray the miracle of the 

market. It would help to make clear that all manufactured things are but manifestations of creative-energy exchanges and that these are, in fact, spiritual phenomena. The lessons in political economy this could teach!"

In "I Pencil," an ordinary pencil provides its autobiography. Narrating its existence, the pencil details its roots in Northern California and Oregon forests to eventually being in your hand. The story briefly accounts for the complexity of the graphite, wood, and labeling coming together to form the mundane yet magical pencil. The video version on YouTube perfectly conveys the message and is a fair substitute for those who would rather watch.

  At the end of both is the didactic message questioning those with ambitions to be a societal "mastermind":  

"Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in 

harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles 

the best it can. Permit this creative know-how to flow freely. Have faith 

that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will 

be confirmed."

           The rookie freedom enthusiast could ask for no better initial argument against centralized planning than "I Pencil." No matter how intelligent we assume ourselves to be, there is an impossible amount of data, imperatives, impulses, preferences, and goals that could never coordinate something as simple as creating pencils.    

Inverting the Pencil: Only the Monarch Can Wield the #2

Curtis Yarvin uses the pencil radically differently for his metaphor to explain order. He inverts it and uses the pencil as evidence against free formation, naturally leading to societal equilibrium. Yarvin's critique is especially poignant because his roots are deeply libertarian. He extolls the virtues and wisdom of Ludwig von Mises (he says don't read Hayek) and Murray Rothbard and trades in many libertarian circles. However, when his intellectual journey brought him to Rothbard's student Hans Herman Hoppe and his work Democracy: The God that Failed, Yarvin stayed on the right but changed his orientation. In the book, Hoppe's "thesis contrasted monarchy and democracy, their respective time preference and manifestation in the two systems, the forces constraining monarchs, and the terrible incentives created for democratic rulers." It rocked Yarvin's world and led to his voluminous output, arguing that order can only be imposed by a sovereign and not created through spontaneity.

In an interview with Thaddeus Russell, he shows that the metaphor of a pencil (created through unconscious cooperation) is inadequate to provide for basic needs or move anything in a positive direction. Yarvin contends much of political philosophy, including all threads of libertarianism (e.g., Anarcho-capitalism, Night Watchman State, Minarchism, Georgism), are limited by their Newtonian nature. They work well under specific regimes and circumstances (read optimal) but fail like Newtonian physics when traveling 150,000 miles per hour, making the results questionable. Passive action and order (see "I Pencil") are inadequate to guarantee a safe life. True libertarianism must be an absolute monarchy.

           Yarvin further conveys his argument by asking the listener to imagine a pencil on its point, with merely one finger holding it in one place. The result is an unstable equilibrium. One finger can keep this pencil stable. However, the farther the pencil moves from the top dead center in any direction (analogous to difficult periods in any regime), the less control the finger (or the passive order) has on it. Once the pencil falls, it requires a coordinated hand to return to equilibrium. Like an anarchist state, the pencil can not give rise to itself or maintain itself. A libertarian state is possible only when everything is perfect. Even when technology and innovation serve to undergird and support passive action and order, it is inadequate. It cannot solve perennial problems. To Yarvin, a successful political arrangement thus requires a monarch to spin order out of chaos.

I can't believe that the choice of a pencil is a mere coincidence. 

I would be surprised if someone who consumes and recalls information and Yarvin would have missed "I Pencil" during his libertarian period. If it is intentional, I understand why. 

Many libertarians use this as a ready heuristic for those skeptical of their positions. Yarvin is a thinker who seems to be addressing and resonating with many libertarians. Deliberately breaking this symbol through this deconstruction and explanation would only be appropriate.    

NRX v. Mises

           I was one of those who questioned my most profound help libertarian sympathies when I first heard this a year and a half ago. Yarvin's argumentation during a Thaddeus Russell podcast and this metaphor strained my beliefs[2]. The powerful illustration made me contemplate who could be trusted in American society to serve as sovereign of Kingdom America and not dismiss it as a prehistoric anachronism.  

           This control vs. spontaneous order argument is far more over in right-wing circles. Luckily, the right has radical thinkers who can freshen these up compared to a staid, conservative Inc. The Neo-reactionary/neo-cameral movement and Mises-inspired libertarian movement (e.g., Mises caucus in the Libertarian Party) are the freshest and most compelling movements on the right. This tension point of the pencil is a perfect demarcation point for those who want a new order based on right-wing preferences (e.g., tradition, freedom, order) but are at extreme odds with what the new order will be.       

[1] The Freeman was an American libertarian magazine formerly published by the Foundation for Economic Education. 

[2] I no longer have hope for a passive order.