by Jerry Cayford
“If I Had My Way” is one of the great protest songs (aka “Samson and Delilah”). The biblical story of Samson expresses the theme that a primitive and chaotic force beneath protest can escape all restraint. Samson is a destroyer: “He lifted up that jawbone and he swung it over his head / And when he got to moving ten thousand was dead.” No specification of who exactly died is necessary, for it doesn’t much matter with Samson.
We might think the story is a warning, but what makes “If I Had My Way” so electrifying is the chorus celebrating Samson’s destructive spirit:
If I had my way
If I had my way in this wicked world
If I had my way I would tear this building down
The listener singing along revels vicariously in a rage so deep it has become nihilism: things are so bad I no longer care and just want to tear it all down. The revolutionary intent is clear in the anecdote about Samson in which he kills a lion with his bare hands: “And the bees made honey in the lion’s head.” The symbolism is obvious: lions always represent rulers; the bees are workers; and honey is the sweet life. Samson is the working class’s spirit of vengeance against a condescending and abusive ruling class. It is a spirit that has started to move again in our own wicked world.
I
Let us start with the song of an angry strongman. In the second section, we’ll consider how the nihilistic spirit of Samson has been awakened by a political betrayal of democratic promises. In the final section, we’ll look at philosophical ideas about what we imagine should keep that spirit from waking. First, though, the song.
Most people know “If I Had My Way” either from Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1962 version (from which I quote) or The Grateful Dead’s 1977 “Samson and Delilah.” But the song is a traditional African-American spiritual dating back at least to the early 20th century (three versions recorded in 1927), and maybe all the way to slavery. (The folk music magazine Sing Out! explores the song’s history in a four-part 2019 article: 1, 2, 3, 4.) Rev. Gary Davis brought it into the folk revival of the civil rights era in 1960, and then Peter, Paul and Mary brought it to mainstream audiences on their first album, which was so popular that royalties from it kept Rev. Davis (given copyright credit) financially secure for life (Sing Out!). I take Peter, Paul and Mary’s as the definitive version, in part because it is substantially rearranged to make the protest elements explicit.
In the biblical story—of which the song is a pretty faithful condensation—Samson is self-absorbed, thin-skinned, passionate, vindictive, remarkably unforgiving, and devoid of impulse control. He lurches from plan to plan as he does from woman to woman, responsive only to his own urges. He kills thirty random strangers to punish thirty wedding guests who he feels cheated him. Later, “a great slaughter” (I quote the New King James Version), then a thousand people, then three thousand die (including himself) when he tears the temple down. Along the way, he makes up a riddle about killing the lion, which he finds very clever. He sings a little song about killing a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey. He cannot be controlled, by himself or anyone else.
The force Samson represents—chaotic, violent, and nihilistic though it may be—is a force of change, of revolution. Not the revolution people want but the revolution they get (sometimes), not glorious revolution but bloody revolution, the force that takes over when Robespierre supplants Danton, when Stalin supplants Lenin or Kerensky (or whoever; it was complicated), when anger grows stronger than hope. “If I had my way, I would tear this building down.” Details in the Bible reinforce the song’s implication that Samson embodies the people’s rage, and his strength comes from us, from our own dark urge to lash out. His strength is not his own—neither he nor his parents seem aware of his strength before he kills the lion—and he is a destroyer only when “the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him.” His strength deserts him when he loses the visible, public symbol that marked him as the people’s champion: his uncut hair. (Just as uncut hair and beards identify Orthodox Jews today, it publicly marked Samson as a Nazirite, a special group who observed certain purity rules.) Samson is strong because the downtrodden see him as the vessel of their anger.
Neither the song nor the Bible makes any pretense that Samson is a good man. Rather, it is as if God is saying—and the song is saying—this nihilism, this unchecked destructiveness when people are pressed too far, this too is a part of creation; pay attention.
II
How did Samson’s destructiveness get to moving in our world today? In this section, I want to tease out a certain way of thinking that has lodged deep in our habits. I characterize it as a betrayal of democracy because it leads to the wrong decision at a vital decision point for democratic society. The body politic starts to decompose. Then the rage starts moving.
The decision point might be put this way: what do we do about those who disagree? What do the winners owe the losers in a democracy? We gave that question a bad answer in a key historical debate, and that bad answer has influenced every assessment of every important policy for decades. The question, though, is bigger than any one episode or controversy, and it is the thinking behind that bad answer that we’re after. This thinking creates not just the big reality of a polarized society but also our small, dogged continuation of every conflict long after we supposedly decided it: court challenges, stalled implementation, defunding enforcement, obstruction anywhere we can. Never surrender. So, this historical debate is just one instance—an important one and a revealing one, but still just one—of a pervasive pattern.
The debate started in 1939, when the economics profession was in disgrace because of the Great Depression, when Nicholas Kaldor and John Hicks, two of the greatest economists of the 20th century, published papers that rescued their discipline. The issue was profound: why should the government listen to economists? How do we know if economists’ policy recommendations will make us better off or worse off? Following its massive policy failures, economics was foundering on an insoluble problem known as “the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons.” Kaldor and Hicks invented an ingenious workaround.
I published a lengthy treatment of the history and logic of this issue elsewhere. I’ll give only the core point here, then move to the implications for democracy. Every policy with large effects creates winners and losers. The money effects are relatively easy for economists to calculate: sound policies are productive enough to gain the winners more money than they cost the losers. The trouble is that the value of money—as well as of non-monetary effects—varies between people: each dollar matters more when you’re poor, due to a fundamental economic principle known as “diminishing marginal utility.” The insoluble problem, then, is that the value of any policy’s effects—their importance, their “utility”—is different for different people and cannot be compared between them. (This impossibility is universally agreed by philosophers and economists from the 19th century to today, a few would-be iconoclasts notwithstanding.) Consequently, the real worth of gains to winners and costs to losers cannot be aggregated into a net utility to show whether any policy is, on balance, good or bad.
Kaldor argued (and Hicks elaborated) that we can get around this problem by compensating the losers out of the winners’ gains. With productive policies, we can make everyone come out ahead “by compensating the [losers] for any loss of income and by providing the funds for such compensation by an extra tax on those whose incomes have been augmented.” Even though value is subjective and cannot be calculated, if we redistribute policy benefits so that everyone wins, we don’t need interpersonal comparisons to know which policies make society better off.
Kaldor and Hicks brilliantly solved an intractable problem for economic policymaking, and their solution contains an implicit answer to our political question: society needs to bring along those who disagree; winners need to reconcile losers with not getting their way. Compensation for those who were harmed is key to getting everyone to make peace with society’s choices. But that’s not how it went. The economic reasoning of Kaldor and Hicks was soon corrupted by a very different political idea, a different answer to our question: roughly, let the chips fall where they may; no one owes society’s losers anything.
In subsequent decades, economists argued that productivity gains large enough to potentially compensate losers imply that society is better off, regardless of who gets the money. Given the impossibility of comparing gains and losses between persons, this is an egregiously illogical argument that amounts to equating wealth with social utility; for it to be true would require that money has the same value to everyone (rich or poor), which would make hash out of all economics by denying diminishing marginal utility. Nevertheless, this argument pushed aside compensation and “distributional issues” as non-economic. In a cruel irony only possible for those who don’t actually read their own discipline’s history, economists named this freefalling-chips idea the “Kaldor-Hicks potential compensation criterion,” and on it they built a new economic tool called “cost-benefit analysis.”
I say their reasoning was corrupted because I want to focus on reason here, not morality. I want to avoid the distracting red herring that the two answers are just different moral intuitions: a soft-hearted liberal sympathy for the unfortunate versus a hard-headed conservative idea that they should take their lumps. The two answers are very different on the non-moral scale of reasoned argument. (A modest amelioration of cost-benefit’s harshness was adopted by the Office of Management and Budget in 2023, about which I wrote at the time, but it made little effort to transcend these competing moral visions.)
Now, economists are not stupid, and it is easy to find awareness in the literature that cost-benefit analysis (CBA) does not perform as advertised. The quasi-official excuse, found only in hints and jargon, is that CBA tells policymakers which policies have the potential to improve the world, if they want to compensate for unequal impacts. The politicians, however, don’t know this, and they take CBA at face value. The potential compensation criterion (as well as the CBA built on it) is an especially vivid example of separating the letter from the spirit (a vague but useful distinction). The whole spirit of Kaldor’s and Hicks’s argument is that compensation is a rational method to achieve a better society. But the letter of CBA erases that spirit entirely: inserting the word “potential” erases compensation, and devil take the hindmost.
The letter of cost-benefit analysis is wealth maximization, hidden behind phrasing that pretends to implement the spirit of overall societal betterment. At democracy’s vital decision point, then, we chose to let society’s losers tough it out, a choice justified—in part—by cost-benefit analysis’s letter-over-spirit focus on wealth. Starting around 1980, the government began relying on cost-benefit analysis more and more. Not coincidentally, the benefits of public policy started going overwhelmingly to the rich, inequality soared, working class incomes stagnated for forty years, and now Samson’s spirit is moving.
The trouble here is that once you stop attending to democracy’s spirit (the public welfare) and rely solely on its letter (democracy’s rules and procedures), those rules will be corrupted. Another crucial historical episode illustrates this dynamic: the failure to prosecute anyone for the 2008 housing market meltdown. The 2008 crisis was much bigger than the Savings & Loan crisis of the late 1980s, and of comparable criminality; yet the S&L crisis saw well over a thousand people convicted of felonies, whereas not a single person was even indicted for 2008’s financial meltdown. What changed? I think the revealing claim (some would call it “brazen”) is that there were no indictments because there were no crimes. This claim would seem obviously mendacious. But what is really behind this claim is the same idea that corrupted cost benefit analysis: the letter trumps the spirit. In this case, financial predators among the ruling class believed they had, in the intervening 20 years, embedded enough ambiguity and loopholes into the law so that none of 2008’s apparently criminal behavior was technically illegal. Now, the consensus is that this argument fails; there was lots of lawbreaking, letter and spirit. And yet, mendacious or not, this argument successfully kept out of jail thousands of bankers who stole trillions of dollars (trillions, not billions) of homeowner equity. Shenanigans in the housing rental market today are the on-going consequence of that unpunished crime.
What is striking in this episode is how far apart the law’s letter and spirit were pushed, and how successfully. If corrupt financiers did not technically win the intellectual argument over the law’s letter, they did win in practice because they escaped prosecution. And the law’s spirit was certainly trounced. (I addressed the bold push for the law’s letter to dominate its spirit in an earlier 3QD piece about the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Chevron v. NRDC precedent last year.) We’re outraged, of course, but the damage goes deeper. The pattern we are tracking is a privileging of letter over spirit, which enables corruption of the letter. Society’s rules are now widely viewed not just as violated sometimes, or even often, but as rigged. I think the 2008 meltdown marked a tipping point in a movement from outrage to nihilism. When the rules across the board are losing their hold on people, something fundamental to our lives is under assault. Why? What is supposed to keep us together, keep us a coherent society? The answers can only be pragmatic, not moral, which is what makes the amorality of the Samson story so interesting.
III
The question of why people would go along with society’s rules and norms—or stop doing so—takes us to “social contract theory.” The concept of this theory is that we all make a tacit deal to cooperate with society in exchange for certain benefits. You will not be surprised to hear that it is a weedy mess of a field, but the lens of social contract theory can help us to see some essential points clearly.
The basic problem can be phrased various ways: why do governments exist; why would people submit to the state’s rules; or, with a different emphasis, why does morality have any authority? We imagine a contract that it would be rational for people to enter into out of self-interest; then we take them to be obligated to follow that contract. Already things are messy. Obviously, they did not agree to the contract. Equally obviously, it would not matter if they had agreed because what makes agreements binding is as much in question as all other norms. Already, I am in a certain camp in this messy field, roughly that of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Hobbes is the inventor of modern social contract theory. He wrote his masterpiece, Leviathan, during the bloody English Civil Wars (1642 to 1651 and overlapping the Thirty Years’ War of 1618 to 1648 on the European continent, where Hobbes also lived for many years). So, he lived among and wrote about people in extremity, those who would tear this building down.
Hobbes asked how we get from a pre-moral, pre-civilized state of nature to a functioning civil society. His answer is that it is in our rational self-interest to choose society over the state of nature, and so we treat each other as bound by—i.e. enforce on one another—a contractual obligation to obey the rules of the state. Notice that this is an argument that conjures something out of nothing: intrinsically, morality and authority don’t exist, so nobody has any obligations of any kind; but if enough of us treat each other as bound by a given norm, then for all practical purposes we are bound, because a mere instinct for self-preservation will induce us to conform. (Thereafter, norms are institutionalized, children are socialized into these norms, and so on.) Not all of us will conform, of course, but this is a question of numbers, and a critical mass of conformers is what it requires. The theory is pragmatic to its core.
Now, remember that value is subjective and incomparable between people. The value of what any given person gets or expects from society or other people cannot be calculated. Nor is it unchanging. Yet these value judgments, in the aggregate, create the social contract. On this reading of social contract theory (there are others), morality, government, law, etc. are always a little fragile. They only exist after a social contract is in place, and that contract is contingent on the subjective value judgments of countless people. The social contract, then, does not derive from some ideal rationality but is as rational as people are. It is an empirical question what people will put up with.
A particularly wonderful monkey experiment illustrated the point. Monkeys were rewarded with food for a simple task. They were happy enough with low-value cucumber rewards until the neighboring monkey got high-value grapes for the same task. Then they refused to accept cucumbers. That is, the monkeys would rather take a loss than accept unfairness. As the researcher in the linked video argues, the monkeys are right: for species dependent on cooperative behaviors, it does, over time, make sense to demand fairness, even at a cost. In social contract theory terms, then, whether it’s rational to accept or reject a government’s legitimacy depends on intuitive judgments about what one can reasonably expect from the government in a given context. And for two generations, the working class has been getting cucumbers while watching the professional class get grapes (and the ruling class get vineyards).
We are watching the consequences unfold. The pragmatic reality—and this reality is an urgent topic of discussion these days—is that it is much easier to destroy things than to build them. If the products and accomplishments of society are easily destroyed by those who disagree with society’s decisions, then obviously the social contract requires a substantial consensus for the body politic to remain healthy. That consensus has slipped from us today. Still, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that injustice will entail societal collapse. From Hobbes on, we have theorized that state power keeps order. Coercion, in theory, should work. In theory also, the more powerful the beneficiaries of society’s choices get, the more able they should be to control the downtrodden (and their wealth and power have grown dramatically for fifty years). So, why isn’t it working?
Social contract theory is famous for the idea that government legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed, but the deeper idea is that rulers, laws, and all social institutions derive their power as well as their legitimacy from the people’s recognition that it is rational to offer their consent. The emphasis here is on “recognition” more than “rational,” because whatever deal people recognize as good enough is what we will consider to be rational. Here is where the tacit nature of the social contract shows itself to be a strength, for there can be no divergence of letter and spirit in a contract that has no letter. Laws, morals, norms, and all the explicit structure of our relations to society are vulnerable to losing touch with the underlying contract they are meant to implement.
When we presume that the letter of democracy’s rules will reliably protect democracy’s spirit, we risk the gradual corruption of those rules. Money in politics, gerrymandering, backroom collusion, distorting electoral processes, all these things can be reconciled with the letter of democracy while abandoning its spirit. When we leave society’s losers on their own and let the chips fall where they may, we risk losing their consent to be governed. Winning by society’s explicit rules does not mean we can take for granted that whatever policy won can command acceptance; a majority is not a critical mass. When the number of people who perceive society’s norms as serving their interests falls below that critical mass, that’s when Samson’s nihilistic spirit starts moving.
Different people respond differently to oppression. In the Bible story of Samson, some of his countrymen are appalled at his violence, which they fear will bring upon them the anger of the rulers. Foreshadowing the story of Delilah, they bind him with new ropes and turn him in, but he cannot be restrained. Delilah’s role is more ambiguous than the popular picture of her as seducer and betrayer. Yes, she is bribed by the “lords of the Philistines” (and probably threatened), but she never deceives Samson. She tells him honestly she wants the secret of his strength so as to bind him so the authorities can control him. He lies repeatedly, but eventually he tells her. It’s as if even Samson is ambivalent about the destruction he brings. So, the lords arrest him, they behave as arrogantly and malignantly as we would expect of unrepentant rulers, and it all ends badly. If Samson is the spirit of revolution, then, perhaps Delilah symbolizes the spirit of restraint or the spirit of reform, compromised by dealing with corrupt rulers. She does not avert what all can see coming, and the message of both story and song is that things have gone too far once we have roused the nihilist spirit of Samson. If this truly is a parable for our times, we may be shocked at how much we lose, and how easily.
Samson is the last of the “judges” of Israel in the Book of Judges. All the judges before him are normal leaders, but Samson is a destroyer. It’s as if the last story in the book is telling us that life can come to a last resort, and sometimes will. The lesson we find in “If I Had My Way,” and in cost-benefit’s betrayal of democracy’s spirit, and in the vulnerability of our social contract, is that care must be taken that people perceive society as working. Despair and rage must not pass a certain threshold. When they do, when too many of us see only how wicked is this world, when too many think too often—and we do!—“If I had my way, I would tear this building down,” well, then the spirit of Samson gets to moving, and won’t be stopped.