Henhouse or Animal Farm

I. Two Yards

When a meeting talks over itself, nobody listens and in the end nothing is decided, Germans say: it is like a henhouse. Every hen cackles in her corner, every hen pecks at her neighbour, and when the fox comes they all scatter in a panic. The henhouse is the image of a community that cannot agree on anything and therefore produces nothing.

The other yard is in a book. In 1945 George Orwell published “Animal Farm”. The animals of a farm chase away the farmer in the name of equality. They give themselves seven commandments, the last of which reads: “All animals are equal.” In the end the pigs sit in the farmer’s house, walk on two legs, drink his whisky, and on the barn wall only one commandment remains: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Politics has played out between these two yards for thousands of years. In one nothing comes about; in the other something comes about, but not for everyone. Which leads to the question many no longer dare to ask aloud: must people be forced into happiness?

II. Animal Farm

Orwell’s fable is not a tale against revolution but against its betrayal. The animals had every reason to drive out the drunken farmer. But the cleverest among them, the pigs, take over the leadership because the others cannot read. They secure the milk and the apples because brainwork takes strength. Their spokesman Squealer explains every new inequality as necessary for the good of all. The commandments on the barn wall are secretly rewritten at night.

The most tragic figure is the cart-horse Boxer. To every crisis he answers with the same sentence: “I will work harder.” When he collapses, the pigs sell him to the knacker and buy whisky with the money. Boxer did not want to rule. He only wanted things to get better for everyone, and he trusted those who promised to see to it.

What Orwell describes, the sociologist Robert Michels had already formulated in 1911 as the “iron law of oligarchy”: every organisation, even the most democratic, produces a leadership that pursues its own interests. Animal Farm is no accident. It is what happens when one wants to abolish the pecking order without changing the rules by which pecking is done.

III. From Cackling to the Pig

The two yards are not opposites. One is the breeding ground of the other. Whoever lives long enough amid the cackling longs for the pig who will finally take charge.

The Greek historian Polybius described this in the second century BC as a cycle: democracy turns into the rule of the mob in which nobody can agree any more, and that turns back into one-man rule. In “How a Pseudodemocracy Became a Fully Developed Ochlocracy” we applied this cycle to the United States. Thomas Hobbes built his entire “Leviathan” of 1651 on the fear of the henhouse: better an unlimited ruler than the war of all against all.

The German lesson is Weimar. In fourteen years there were around twenty governments, parties that preferred working against each other to working together, and in the end emergency decrees instead of laws. When someone came in 1933 who promised to clean up, many people’s relief was greater than their fear. Today we see one coalition quarrel after another and a European Union in which a single country can block any joint decision. In “The Perpetual Diet” we compared it with the Diet of Regensburg, which sat from 1663 until the Empire no longer existed. And the longer the cackling goes on, the louder the call for the strongman, which we described in “Whom Do You Want — Cincinnatus or Caesar?”.

IV. Forced into Happiness

The temptation is old. Plato wanted philosophers to rule because only they knew what was good; we described it in “The Helmsman Nobody Elects”. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in “The Social Contract” in 1762 that whoever resists the general will shall be “forced to be free”. Enlightened absolutism had the formula “Everything for the people, nothing by the people”. Lenin built a party of professional revolutionaries to lead the proletariat, because it would not reach the right consciousness by itself. And the Jesuits in Paraguay were the fathers of the Guaraní, well-meaning, well-organised, and when they were expelled everything collapsed. That is the subject of our fool’s speech “Watt soll dä janze Käu?”.

Today the coercion is gentler. It is called “nudging”: the state arranges the canteen so that the salad is at the front, and the pension scheme so that one has to opt out actively. That is more harmless than a gulag, but the logic is the same: someone knows better than you what is good for you and arranges your world accordingly.

Immanuel Kant said what was needed on this in 1793. A government that treats the people as a father treats his children, who cannot tell what is useful to them and must therefore expect their happiness solely from the ruler’s kindness, is “the greatest despotism thinkable”. Not because the ruler is wicked, but because he keeps people immature. The pig in Orwell’s fable never said it wanted to rule. It always said it was looking after the others.

V. What the Hens Teach

The henhouse is considered an image of an order that is so by nature. An experiment shows that this is not true. In the 1990s the animal breeder William Muir at Purdue University in Indiana wanted to breed hens that lay more eggs. He kept them in cages of nine and ran two trials.

In the first he chose from each cage only the hen that had laid the most and bred from her. After several generations six of the nine hens in each cage were dead, and the rest had plucked out each other’s feathers. The most productive hen, it turned out, was usually the one that suppressed the others most. In the second trial he chose whole cages whose hens together had laid the most. There all nine survived, kept their plumage, and egg production rose by 160 per cent within a few generations.

That is the lesson: whether hens peck each other to pieces or cooperate is not a matter of their nature but of what is rewarded. Whoever rewards the strongest at the top gets peckers. Whoever rewards the group gets cooperation. That applies to companies that pay their executives bonuses for their own success just as much as to parties in which only those who bite others away rise.

VI. What Holds a Yard Together

If coercion leads to the pig and freedom alone to cackling, a third possibility remains: to build the rules of the yard so that cooperation pays more than pecking. There is evidence for this, not utopias.

The Basque curate José María Arizmendiarrieta forced nobody in Mondragón. He trained people and drafted rules under which they could agree: every member has one vote, regardless of capital. The gap between the highest and the lowest wage was limited, at first to one to three. Profits largely stay in the cooperative. Out of this grew the largest group of cooperatives in the world, as we described in “From Experiment to Model”.

A henhouse has no goal, which is why it cackles. In “A Condition Without a Deadline” we showed that a goal consists of three parts: a quantity, a value and a deadline. Without the deadline the goal becomes a pious wish, and pious wishes can be argued about endlessly. Procedures can also create agreement without forcing people: citizens’ assemblies of citizens chosen by lot, who do not want to be re-elected and therefore need not manoeuvre, as we described in “The Other Entrances”. And the pigs on Orwell’s farm could rule only because they rewrote the commandments at night without anyone seeing. Against rewriting at night only light helps, the idea behind our Transparency Council.

One of the two authors experienced both yards at once in Antioquia, Colombia. Groups of women who wanted to produce food together broke apart again and again because the means were lacking: the henhouse. And the women who led the groups received the funding while the others went empty-handed: the first little pigs. Only individuals made it. What was missing was not good intentions but rules and means under which cooperation would have paid.

VII. Putting Ourselves to the Test

One must be merciless with oneself too. Our own proposals as well, from Akratia to the Transparency Council, could be coercion into happiness, only better meant. Anyone who designs a better order is tempted to impose it on others.

There are four touchstones by which a proposal must be measured. It must be voluntary: nobody may be forced to take part. It must be reversible: what does not prove itself must be possible to abolish again. It must be visible: everyone must be able to see who decides and why. And it must be removable: whoever holds power must be able to lose it again without bloodshed. The last is Karl Popper’s criterion for democracy. A proposal that fails one of these touchstones is a pig in sheep’s clothing, however well it is meant.

VIII. Neither Cackle nor Obey

Must people be forced into happiness? No. Whoever forces becomes the pig himself; Orwell, Michels and the fathers of Paraguay teach that. But one must not leave people to the cackling either, and watch the call for the strongman grow out of exhaustion.

The third yard is no paradise. There too people quarrel; there too there is ambition, envy and error. But the rules are built so that common success pays more than victory over the neighbour, that every decision has a goal and a deadline, and that nobody can rewrite the commandments at night.

People need not be forced into happiness. We only have to stop rewarding those who peck the others hardest.