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Going through great piles of aging printed detritus in my study the other day, I came across an unopened copy of The Spectator dated 13 December 2008. It is sometimes instructive to look back into the distant recent, or recent distant, past (distant or recent according to one’s perspective), for we are apt to suppose both that there is nothing new under the sun and that we live in times without precedent, veering crazily from one extreme belief to the other.

Opening the magazine at random, my eyes fell immediately on this headline:

Brown’s Britain is broke and creeping towards the ignominy of an IMF bail-out.

This is precisely the situation today, except that the governmental incompetent in charge has changed, possibly for the even worse. The debt has only grown, and thanks to the moral, intellectual, and no doubt in some cases financial corruption of those responsible for contracting it, there is nothing of any value to show for it.

Is this a ground for optimism or pessimism for a resident of the country such as I? On the one hand, it is depressing to live in a country in which the economic news is always bad (as it has been ever since I was born, though I do not assign any causative relationship between my birth and the constant bad news). On the other, I have in the intervening years managed to live a satisfactory, enjoyable, and not uninteresting life—not uninteresting to me, that is. I have suffered no hunger, no cold, no oppression, and no restriction of my liberty. I have not been prevented from traveling, I have not been censored in what I say or write. I have not been persecuted.

In other words, notwithstanding the disastrously low caliber of our governors (it seems that only such people go in for governing these days, better people having better things to do than pursue office), life has gone on. No doubt we are living on the intellectual, moral, political, and institutional capital of the past, which is not inexhaustible, but it has so far seen me through. The fact that it has done so despite institutionalized incompetence or moral and intellectual corruption gives me hope that the capital to which I have referred will last the rest of my life. If there is to be le déluge, as seems likely, I hope it will be après moi. I am aware, however, that induction—the belief that everything will go on as it did in the past—is not a reliable method of reasoning. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in The Problems of Philosophy, the chicken that has always been fed by the farmer is one day surprised to have its neck wrung by him.

I have been thinking recently of the vast debt that we have accumulated. Most people, if they think of it at all, believe it to be a disaster, or at best the brink of a precipice toward which we are all running. We are as lemmings, self-destructing en masse.

From the point of view of governments or governing classes, however, such indebtedness is a blessing, for there is nothing like debt for keeping a population in thrall, at least where bayonets cannot be used on it too liberally. Debt must be managed, and where there is something to be managed, there must be managers. The more there is to manage, therefore, the more managers there must be. As the Indians were once said to be the wealth of the Indies, debt is the wealth of governments, indeed their very lifeblood.

But how and why do governments run up such vast debts? I do not think that they do so as a deliberate plot or conscious policy to enslave, or at least to indenture, their populations, though having run them up, they find that they are useful in keeping themselves powerful and populations in their place, toiling away to pay for their own enslavement or indenture.

Politicians seeking election are engaged upon an auction of promises, and since political competition is for the short-term, the long-term consequences of their promises are unimportant. Those long-term consequences are easily comprehensible to people who think about them, but, electorally speaking, they are in a small minority and therefore of little account. Most people are easily persuaded to believe six impossible things before breakfast, and in any case, it is more blessed for them to receive a benefit from the government than to forgo it once it becomes economically necessary for them to do so. A benefit becomes a right; and a right enters a metaphysical sphere from which no return is possible.

From the point of view of popularity, therefore, better a benefit retained in the present than a debt crisis avoided in the future. The former is visible, the latter invisible. Moreover, when that crisis occurs, and those benefits must be reduced, the blame can be attached to the heartless outsiders who impose conditions for the relief of the crisis. The blame for it rarely falls on those who created it in the first place.

It will be objected, of course, that my theory does not account for two things: First that there have been, and are, democracies that have avoided the kind of debt that I have described, and second that it is not such democracies alone that have run up enormous debts. Dictatorships have done so as well.

Everyone who has a theory that appears to be contradicted by the evidence tries to preserve it by means of further ad hoc hypotheses, and so I will now do precisely this—which will horrify strict Popperians, of course.

With regard to democracies that have not run up vast debts, at least not so far, I should say that they are (1) relatively small and (2) relatively homogeneous and egalitarian. It is far easier in those circumstances for politicians to be morally and intellectually honest than in countries with huge, diverse, and divided populations whose citizens’ interests are not even similar, let alone identical.

With regard to dictatorships or non-democracies that run up huge debts, I would argue that even they require some popular support, or at least an absence of too-deep discontent. They therefore make promises to their populations of a cognate kind. Real tyrannies, such as that of North Korea, do not have to make such promises because they claim to have achieved perfect happiness already and can shoot anyone who denies it. In any case, no one will lend them any money. But there is nothing so tempting as a loan.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).