by Albert Jay Nock
1937
This little essay by our friend, the late Albert J. Nock, was first distributed by
FEE [Foundation for Economic Education] more than 30 years ago. But, apparently, its job
is never done. "Isaiah's Job" is the best antidote we've found for a touch of
the libertarian blues. It also offers excellent advice on how one may work most
effectively for freedom. When "down in the dumps" or overcome by an impulse to
"set the world straight," just give this another thoughtful reading.
One evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he
expounded a politico-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could
find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnestness: "I have a mission to the
masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of
my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the populace. What do you think?"
An embarrassing question in any case, and doubly so under the circumstances, because my
acquaintance is a very learned man, one of the three or four really first-class minds that
Europe produced in his generation; and naturally I, as one of the unlearned, was inclined
to regard his lightest word with reverence amounting to awe...
I referred him to the story of the prophet Isaiah.... I shall paraphrase the story in
our common speech since it has to be pieced out from various sources...
The prophet's career began at the end of King Uzziah's reign, say about 740 B.C. This
reign was uncommonly long, almost half a century, and apparently prosperous. It was one of
those prosperous reigns, however, like the reign of Marcus Aurelius at Rome, or the
administration of Eubulus at Athens, or of Mr. Coolidge at Washington, where at the end
the prosperity suddenly peters out and things go by the board with a resounding crash.
In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the
people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are," He said.
"Tell them what is wrong, and why, and what is going to happen unless they have a
change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are
positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on
giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it
won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at
you, and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until
they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out
with your life."
Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job; in fact, he had asked for it, but the
prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that
were so, if the enterprise was to be a failure from the start, was there any sense in
starting it?
"Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there
that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing
along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has
gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new
society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your
job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it"....
What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant?
As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and
underprivileged people, laboring people, proletarians. But it means nothing like that; it
means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to
apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of
character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and
because such people make up the great, the overwhelming majority of mankind, they are
called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the
Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance.The Remnant are those who by
force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are
able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do
either.
The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In
his view, the mass-man -- be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor,prince or pauper -- gets
off very badly. He appears as not only weak-minded and weak-willed, but as by consequence
knavish, arrogant, grasping,dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous...
As things now stand, Isaiah's job seems rather to go begging. Everyone with a message
nowadays is, like my venerable European friend, eager to take it to the masses. His first,
last, and only thought is of mass-acceptance and mass-approval. His great care is to put
his doctrine in such shape as will capture the masses' attention and interest....
The main trouble with this [mass-man approach] is its reaction upon the mission itself.
It necessitates an opportunist sophistication of one's doctrine, which profoundly alters
its character and reduces it to a mere placebo. If, say, you are a preacher, you wish to
attract as large a congregation as you can, which means an appeal to the masses; and this,
in turn, means adapting the terms of your message to the order of intellect and character
that the masses exhibit. If you are an educator, say with a college on your hands, you
wish to get as many students as possible, and you whittle down your requirements
accordingly. If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many
purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician,
many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several
desires the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every
instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile,
the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their
backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.
Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses
only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who
liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen.
The Remnant want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they
are satisfied; you have nothing more to worry about....
In a sense, nevertheless, as I have said, it is not a rewarding job.... A prophet of
the Remnant will not grow purse-proud on the financial returns from his work, nor is it
likely that he will get any great renown out of it. Isaiah's case was exceptional to this
second rule, and there are others--but not many.
It may be thought, then, that while taking care of the Remnant is no doubt a good job,
it is not an especially interesting job because it is as a rule so poorly paid. I have my
doubts about this. There are other compensations to be got out of a job besides money and
notoriety, and some of them seem substantial enough to be attractive. Many jobs which do
not pay well are yet profoundly interesting, as, for instance, the job of the research
student in the sciences is said to be; and the job of looking after the Remnant seems to
me, as I have surveyed it for many years from my seat in the grandstand, to be as
interesting as any that can be found in the world.
What chiefly makes it so, I think, is that in any given society the Remnant are always
so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things
about them. You can be sure of those -- dead sure, as our phrase is -- but you will never
be able to make even a respectable guess at anything else. You do not know, and will never
know, who the Remnant are, nor where they are, nor how many of them there are, nor what
they are doing or will do. Two things you know, and no more: first, that they exist;
second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant
means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition
calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted
with the imagination, insight, and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful
pursuit of his trade.
The fascination as well as the despair of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah's
Jewry, upon Plato's Athens, or upon Rome of the Antonines, is the hope of discovering and
laying bare the "substratum of right-thinking and well-doing" which he knows
must have existed somewhere in those societies because no kind of collective life can
possibly go on without it. He finds tantalizing intimations of it here and there in
many places, as in the Greek Anthology, in the scrapbook of Aulus Gellius, in the poems of
Ausonius, and in the brief and touching tribute, Bene merenti, bestowed upon the unknown
occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they lead him nowhere in
his search for some kind of measure of this substratum, but merely testify to what he
already knew a priori --that the substratum did somewhere exist. Where it was, how
substantial it was, what its power of self-assertion and resistance was of all this they
tell him nothing.
Similarly, when the historian of two thousand years hence, or two hundred years, looks
over the available testimony to the quality of our civilization and tries to get any kind
of clear, competent evidence concerning the substratum of right-thinking and well-doing
which he knows must have been here, he will have a devil of a time finding it. When he has
assembled all he can get and has made even a minimum allowance for speciousness,
vagueness, and confusion of motive, he will sadly acknowledgethat his net result is simply
nothing. A Remnant were here, building a substratum like coral insects; so much he knows,
but he will find nothing to put him on the track of who and where and how many they were
and what their work was like.
Concerning all this, too, the prophet of the present knows precisely as much and as
little as the historian of the future; and that, I repeat, is what makes his job seem to
me so profoundly interesting. One of the most suggestive episodes recounted in the Bible
is that of a prophet's attempt-- the only attempt of the kind on record, I believe -- to
count up the Remnant. Elijah had fled from persecution into the desert, where the Lord
presently overhauled him and asked what he was doing so far away from his job. He said
that he was running away, not because be was a coward, but because all the Remnant had
been killed off except himself. He had got away only by the skin of his teeth, and, he
being now all the Remnant there was, if he were killed the True Faith would go flat. The
Lord replied that he need not worry about that, for even without him the True Faith could
probably manage to squeeze along somehow if it had to; "and as for your figures on
the Remnant," He said, "I don't mind telling you that there are seven thousand
of them back there in Israel whom it seems you have not heard of, but you may take My word
for it that there they are."
At that time, probably the population of Israel could not have run to much more than a
million or so; and a Remnant of seven thousand out a million is a highly encouraging
percentage for any prophet. With seven thousand of the boys on his side, there was no
great reason for Elijah to feel lonesome; and incidentally, that would be something for
the modern prophet of the Remnant to think of when he has a touch of the blues. But the
main point is that if Elijah the Prophet could not make a closer guess on the number of
the Remnant than he made when he missed it by seven thousand, anyone else who tackled the
problem would only waste his time.
The other certainty which the prophet of the Remnant may always have is that the
Remnant will find him. He may rely on that with absolute assurance. They will find him
without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do anything about it, he is
pretty sure to put them off. He does not need to advertise for them nor resort to any
schemes of publicity to get their attention. If he is a preacher or a public
speaker, for example, he may be quite indifferent to going on show at receptions, getting
his picture printed in the newspapers, or furnishing autobiographical material for
publication on the side of "human interest." If a writer, he need not make
a point of attending any pink teas, autographing books at wholesale, nor entering into any
specious freemasonry with reviewers.
All this and much more of the same order lies in the regular and necessary routine laid
down for the prophet of the masses. It is, and must be, part of the great general
technique of getting the mass-man's ear -- or as our vigorous and excellent publicist, Mr.
H. L. Mencken, puts it, the techniqueof boob-bumping. The prophet of the Remnant is
not bound to this technique. He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their
own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if they find him
employing such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will smell a rat in them and
will sheer off.
The certainty that the Remnant will find him, however, leaves the prophet as much in
the dark as ever, as helpless as ever in the matter of putting any estimate of any kind
upon the Remnant; for, as appears in the case of Elijah, he remains ignorant of who they
are that have found him or where they are or how many. They do not write in and tell
him about it, after the manner of those who admire the vedettes of Hollywood, nor yet do
they seek him out and attach themselves to his person. They are not that kind. They take
his message much as drivers take the directions on a roadside signboard--that is, with
very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to
be there, but with very serious thought about the directions.
This impersonal attitude of the Remnant wonderfully enhances the interest of the
imaginative prophet's job. Once in a while, just about often enoughto keep his
intellectual curiosity in good working order, he will quite accidentally come upon some
distinct reflection of his own message in an unsuspected quarter. This enables him to
entertain himself in his leisure moments with agreeable speculations about the course his
message may have taken in reaching that particular quarter, and about what came of it
after it got there. Most interesting of all are those instances, if one could only run
them down (but one may always speculate about them) where the recipient himself no longer
knows where nor when, nor from whom he got the message or even where, as sometimes
happens, he has forgotten that he got it anywhere and imagines that it is all a
self-starting idea of his own.
Such instances as these are probably not infrequent, for, without presuming to enroll
ourselves among the Remnant, we can all no doubt remember having found ourselves suddenly
under the influence of an idea, the source of which we cannot possibly identify.
"It came to us afterward," as we say; that is, we are aware of it only after it
has shot up full-grown in our minds, leaving us quite ignorant of how and when and by what
agency it was planted there and left to germinate. It seems highly probable that the
prophet's message often takes some such course with the Remnant.
If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea
which lodges in the Unbewusstsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there.
For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades
the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite
forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has
invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you
never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.
Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945) was Editor of The Freeman (1920-1924)
and author of Jefferson, Our Enemy The State, and many
other books and articles on the philosophy of government and human freedom. "Isaiah's
Job" is extracted from Chapter 13 of his book, Free Speech and Plain Language,
copyright 1937 by Albert Jay Nock.
Reprinted July, 1962, by the Foundation For Economic Education,
Irvington-on-Hudson, New York and June, 1995, by AAPS.
Reprints available from: Association of American Physicians and Surgeons,1601 N.
Tucson Blvd. Suite 9, Tucson, AZ 85716 (800) 635-1196 Pamphlet No.1040, June, 1995