Dogs And Bones

“A dog who will bring a bone will carry a bone” is an old-time expression that usually is meant to say that someone who will steal for you will steal from you. More generally it means that an immoral person on your side will eventually let you down or go over on the other side. The underlying assumption is that even in an adversarial environment, there are rules. The person who violates those rules can never be trusted, even when their rule breaking favors you.

This “lack of a code” lies at the heart of the traitor in wartime. The person who makes a deal with the enemy is harshly punished, usually executed, not because of the practical aspects of their crime. It is not that they gave the enemy an advantage or useful information. It is that they violated the code that holds everyone together in the fight. They have excluded themselves from the company of men who can be trusted to uphold the code when no one is looking.

Similarly, the traitor that comes over from the other side is usually treated with suspicion. In the Cold War, defectors were rarely treated well by either side. Russians who betrayed their countrymen just so they could get an American passport were treated well enough to encourage others, but they were assumed to be disreputable people. The Russians took the same view. Famous spies like Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union, were never welcomed by Russia.

Again, the underlying reason for the way traitors have been treated by their own people as well as the enemies of their people is that someone who breaks trust for any reason cannot be trusted. Someone who deliberately breaks a sacred trust is especially suspicious. It is why American corporations used to discriminate against divorced men. If your wife cannot trust, why should your boss? Adultery used to be a serious social crime when we were a proper society.

It is a good thing to keep in mind as we head into what is looking like another interregnum. Suddenly, the people who were sure Donald Trump was Hitler are now strangely quiet. Much of it is simply the fact that their emotional tank is drained. A decade of hysteria has run it course. At the same time, many have just decided to change tactics, seeing that their Hitler lies failed to stop Trump. They will come up with new lies because it is what liars do. They lie.

The same should apply to those who look like converts. Someone who was an implacable opponent of even the slightest pushback but is now “coming around” on things like immigration should be treated with a great deal of suspicion. They could simply be opportunists. That is, after all, the spring that motivates every traitor. They see an opportunity for themselves in violating the trust of others. Often, they lure their victims into trusting them so they can betray the trust.

A great example is Ben Shapiro. Everyone with two brain cells knows his deal. He is an ultra-Zionist whose only interest is his people. He is willing to lie promiscuously for that cause. It speaks to the nature of Zionism that its most fervent practitioners are the least endowed with European morality. Even the most fervent Nazi understood that there is such a thing as truth. It was the Nazis, after all, who gave us the expression “The Big Lie.”

That aside, even when a Ben Shapiro is doing damage to the enemy, it is important to always qualify the praise so no one forgets that a dog that will bring a bone will carry a bone. If an arsonist burns down the house of that guy selling drugs near the high school, it is normal and healthy to be happy for his suffering or death, but it should never be an endorsement of arson. If the arsonist, however, is one of your guys, then that is another matter. “Who” is what matters, not how.

Those are easy cases, but a more challenging example is someone like James Lindsay, who started out in life as an anti-Christian bigot. He then moved on from that hustle to tricking academic journals with fake grievance studies papers. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian made up fake studies using the bizarre jargon of the grievance studies rackets. These papers were made deliberately ridiculous to expose the vacuity of the so-called social sciences.

This was hilarious and it confirmed that the people involved in these fields are mostly hucksters making a living off lunatics. The trouble though is Lindsay and Boghossian were deceiving people not on behalf of their cause or for their people. They were betraying people for personal advantage. In other words, they were bringing a bone to one group but would eventually carry a bone from that group. This is what we now see with their attacks on populists and Christians.

Whatever benefit came from these two subverting the grievance studies people came at the cost of having them attack the people who cheered for them, but from a position of greater authority. When James Linday was just a chubby massage therapist hating on Christians, no one cared. Now that he is a famous internet influencer; he can do real damage. It is a good reminder that giving power to immoral people is never a good idea.

None of this means that political actors must be purer than Caeser’s wife. As Mr. Dooley said, “Sure, politics ain’t bean-bag. ‘Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists’d do well to keep out iv it.” Or as Carl Schmitt would put it, politics is about friends and enemies. The thing to remember is that it is a commitment to the morality of the cause that distinguishes the friend from the enemy, so even though an enemy can be useful, they remain enemies.

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