5.3 Mudsill America part 3

Understanding Mudsill Theory is a threshold step toward deconstructing the American Myth. Absolutely, being a slave and being an exploited factory worker are different. However, both the slave and eight-year-old cotton mill worker are mudsills. Calls to enslave all low-class people confirm that. In eighteenth century England there were so many unemployed workers that the maiming or deaths of children in cotton mills carried the moral significance of having to replace a gear because of a chipped tooth. That is the same moral significance as raping a slave or wife.

Mudsill Theory was The Great Chain of Being in new language. God assigned each person a station in life, and it defied God to try to rise above that station. There is no meaningful difference between imposing slavery because blacks are “mentally feeble” and imposing economic slavery when people are poor.

We need to reset by reviewing the basics. Thomas Hobbes’ social contract described the cooperation necessary for societies to develop beyond a perpetual war of all against all. Enlightenment built on the social contract, its central beliefs are that through effort individuals can rise above the station of their birth. That through our combined effort we can create a better society. John Locke saw every individual as God’s creation, none holding authority over another. Locke addressed the importance of ensuring the well being of the community that made individual success possible. “…when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he as much as he can to preserve the rest of mankind, and not…take away or impair the life, or what tends to preservation of life, liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.”¹

Like The Great Chain of Being, Mudsill Theory argued that God assigned some people to rule and most to serve by obeying. The two approaches have conflicting explanations of cultural and societal advancement. The Enlightenment vision is that advancements come from developing and drawing on the ability of every person in the community. The Mudsill vision is that advancement is only possible by exploiting the mudsill’s labor to provide the leisure time for an elite to be creative, innovative.

These views create different approaches for addressing emerging problems. When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to study prisons, he stayed to study the nation, eventually writing Democracy In America (vol I 1835, vol II 1840). Amazed by the young nation’s economic vibrancy, he contrasted it to the French, aristocratic primogeniture system. Regardless of the child’s ability, the first born son inherited the family estate. Primogeniture created many ineffectual lineage heads and many more dilettantes.

Thomas Paine’s rejected the institutionalization of incompetence that Burke and de Maistre enshrined in their protection of aristocrats’ privileges of tradition. A contemporary analogy better explains the conservative liberal difference. Bear Bryant was faced with losing bowl games to Northern football teams that recruited the best black athletes from Alabama. The losses posed a dilemma to the fans. Did they want to lose by putting the best all white team on the field (conservative), or did they want to win by putting the best team on the field that Alabama could recruit? (liberal)

De Maistre shouted the silent part aloud. The Great Chain of Being, Mudsill, slavery: by whatever name conservative social order was maintained by violence. De Maistre praised the executioner, calling for his frequent use. Violence was necessary to force compliance and used out of fear of what the rabble might do should they gain power. They remembered the French rabble sent aristocrats to the guillotine 

The community, Hobbes’ social contract, recognizes the virtues of honesty and fairness. It is inherent in “all men are created equal” drawn from Locke. Mudsill laws and enforcement violate that social contract. The Great Chain of Being justifies abusing others. It establishes the non-personhood and moral irrelevance of most people in a society.

Future posts will trace the doctrines developed by wealthy white men to strip women and indigenous people of their moral relevance. There is a clear record of men justifying brutalities that should have raised moral concerns. That record deserves more than a passing mention. For now, a brief psychological introduction.

A growing body of research has found that as wealth increases, empathy and compassion decrease.² The wealthiest people are protected from emergency loses and expenses and too easily assume that is true for everyone of merit. For the top 1%, the protections strong communities provide their members become irrelevant. Helping non-persons is an unwanted expense. At the extreme of wealth, Hobbes’ war of all against all among non-persons is desirable. Mudsill are their tools of production, until AI replaces them, and product market.

That is not an unhinged statement. The Koch brothers³ made large contributions to business and law schools, with the condition that the students be required to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The Koch brothers financed the work of conservative economist James Buchanan whose ideas of unregulated capitalism were so extreme that the Kochs and Buchanan believed students would reject them unless Ayn Rand’s fictional hero, John Gault, radicalized their business morality.⁴

Hammond’s mudsill began with slavery and his rape of women. It contaminated the conservative river, justifying treating humans as non-persons and affirming the Patriots’ patriarchal misogyny. The liberal river believes women exist as persons endowed by God with the same rights and autonomy as men. Tracing those rivers is a continuing topic, not a comment in a post. But the conservative belief needs a marker now. The glorification of the “traditional wife” is a conservative diversion. It is a mythology of the years between the end of WW II and the mid 1960s. During its most glorified years, married women were harmed by substance abuse, physical abuse, rape, murder. Historically, the American family existed in separate spheres for men and women. For all of the white nationalist Christian hyperbola, conservative men who demand worship from tradwives dislike the reality of their tradwives. Tradwives are quickly reduced to conservative husbands’ non-person property^.5

 1 Locke, John Two Treatises on Government Chapter II §6 (Published 1689)

2 https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/wealth-empathy

3  Particularly Charles Koch and the BB&T Corporation

4 In Fairness, Ayn Rand hated Libertarians’ and Kochs’ Neo-liberal philosophy that misinterpreted her work with a passion matching her hatred of communism.

5 Robnett, Rachael D. and Matthew D. Hammond “Ambivalent Sexism Theory as a Framework for Understanding Men’s Attitudes About the #Tradwife Movement” Psychology of Women Quarterly March 25, 2026