On liberty—Happy Fourth of July!
[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited version of a previous post.]
The Fourth isn’t just about barbecue, although I defer to no one in my regard for barbecue.
It’s about liberty. As the years go by, I appreciate that fact more and more, and sense that our liberty is more and more threatened from within as well as without—and by “within” I mean not just those among us who would destroy it for others, but something in the human heart and mind that means not everyone cares very much about it until they have lost it.
In fact, there’s something in many human hearts and minds that leads some people not to care about liberty even after they’ve lost it, unless they’re the ones in the Gulag.
For whatever reason, I’ve always been very sensitive to liberty, very touchy about it. For example, even when I was quite young, I would pay extra for a health insurance policy that gave me total freedom to choose my doctor. This may seem like a small thing, and at the time I didn’t connect it with any abstract principle such as “liberty.” But I had a horror of being boxed in by a government or a business or an agency telling what I could or could not do and where I could and could not go.
That’s not to say that I was some trailblazing, independent, courageous spirit, cutting an adventurous swath through the world. I lived a pretty ordinary life, I thought. I had a husband and a child. And even later, when I went through my political change, I had no idea where it would lead, either socially (estrangement from quite a few people, mostly mild but sometimes severe) or in terms of what I do with a great deal of my time (reading about politics/history, and writing this blog).
One doesn’t always have any idea where it will lead when you take a step, and then another step, and then another, and pretty soon you’re somewhere you never, never ever, thought you’d be.
When I was young I used to assume that a lot of people, the majority of people, felt the same way I did. Not just about liberty, but about a lot of things. For example, I thought just about everyone loved poetry—what’s not to like? I was in my thirties before I became aware that love of poetry was a relatively rare thing. Another thing I assumed, when managed care started taking over the health insurance world, was that more people would hate it and complain bitterly about it—and, if they could do it, would pay extra to get away from it. But I was surprised when so many people I knew didn’t seem all that offended by it, and even those who could have paid more in order to have choice often decided against it. They couldn’t be bothered, and were happy to save the money.
Then, when I was going through my slow political change between the fall of 2001 (post-9/11) and 2003, I was living a rather isolated life in a place when I hardly knew anyone, newly separated from a husband I’d been with for 30 years. I was also recovering from a very painful arm injury and surgery. So the change experience was a solitary one, and I didn’t start mentioning it to people until after it was pretty much complete some time in 2003.
I had somehow assumed that other people had been going through something similar to my political journey, although perhaps milder. This now seems to me a rather humorous thought, not to mention profoundly naive (you might even call it stupid), but that’s the way it was for me. I was truly shocked to be on the receiving end of a significant amount of hostility from a lot of people when I mentioned my positions on various issues of the day, and this sometimes involved friends and acquaintances I’d known for decades and with whom I’d never even discussed politics before or had a single disagreement of any substance.
Talk about an eye-opener.
Now I have a different way of looking at all of this.
I have come to believe that, although there are many elements that go into the reasons people differ on these issues, the most essential difference is the comparative importance people give to liberty.
Since this is the Fourth of July, a holiday on which we celebrate the birth of our nation that was (as Lincoln said) “conceived in liberty,” I though I’d re-publish a slightly-edited version of an essay on liberty that I first wrote in January of 2014:
Commenter “DNW” has a question:
How in the world could these [liberal and leftist] others not value liberty and voluntary association as the very premises that made human life worth living? But they obviously don’t…
We now have a situation wherein the classic justifying predicate of this polity and our civil association ”“ the preservation and enhancement of personal liberty ”“ has been officially abandoned by one major party and a large portion of the electorate, in favor of a fascist scheme of state enforced social solidarity and life-energy redistribution.
I can’t speak for all liberals, “progressives,” or leftists. Nor do they even speak for each other, because there’s a great deal of variety among them in how far they want to go to stifle liberty, and how much they value liberty.
In my own family of origin, for example, there was quite a variety of points of view on that score, especially if you included distant relatives. My own father and mother were garden-variety liberals (“liberals” as defined back then, which was nowhere near as leftist as now). But the very-extended family included leftists various and sundry, including those who were Soviet-philes and even a few later on who were Maoists.
Talk about fun! Family gatherings involving this larger group (which occurred quite infrequently) usually featured—after a few hours of conviviality—a degeneration into shouting matches over politics. I wish now I had paid more attention to the details of the content. But even as a child I heard enough to be both vaguely entertained by these arguments and repelled by them. The latter emotion won out, in part because of the arguments’ repetitive nature (nobody ever convinced anyone of anything) and in part because what the leftist branch was saying seemed so dogmatic, unreasonable, and manifestly wrong to me.
Those of you who lump together leftists and liberals may be surprised to hear that the arguments between the two wings of my family were so bitter (there were one or two conservatives, too, who had married in). But the liberals and the leftists were at loggerheads, the liberals believing in liberty, capitalism, and that the USSR was a totalitarian slagheap of a police state up to no good in the world, and the leftists believing that the true liberty (or goodness, anyway) lay in defeating capitalism, and that the Soviets were the greatest thing since sliced bread.
That was in the 50s and 60s, of course, and a little bit in the 70s as well. The mainstream of the Democratic Party, which my parents then represented, has moved to the left over the ensuing years. Some of the liberals I know have moved to the left with it, but some have not. And in the last couple of years, as the assaults on liberty have cascaded, I have noticed that the liberals I know seem to divide naturally into two camps: those who love liberty and to whom it is important, and those who do not and to whom it is not.
I don’t know the relative size of the two groups, because I don’t seek out political discussions with my friends and family; I don’t want get-togethers to degenerate into the useless, repetitive, unproductive arguments I witnessed in my youth—which they easily could, with me now as the sole conservative. But I know that those two groups exist, and I think that what differentiates them are (a) the person’s need to control others and/or society; and (b) the degree to which the person thinks he/she can do so effectively and get the desired results.
Among most of my friends their motives are “good”—that is, they want people to be happier, healthier, and in general just better. Some leftists I know have the same motivations (I would add that most of the people who think they are doing good are also motivated by the need to feel that they are good people for wanting that). But many leftists—we’re talking about quite a few of the leaders of the movement, and certainly people such as Stalin—have a different motivation: they are motivated almost purely by the desire for power and control.
There is an unholy alliance between the two groups. The first is the much-larger pack of would-be do-gooders who believe that liberalism is the way to go about it, whose minds are formed by a combination of their families growing up, present-day peers, the MSM, eduction, politicians, literature, the entertainment business, and in some cases their “progressive” churches and synagogues. The second is the smaller (although not small) and extremely influential group of leftist activists, some proudly out as unrepentant “progressives,” and some just quietly going about their business, some motivated by the desire for power/control plus the idea that they’re doing “good,” and the rest just wanting the power/control part.
Back when Mayor Bloomberg of New York was heavily engaged in banning Big Gulps, I had some discussions with a couple of liberal friends about it. Some were offended by what Bloomberg had done, although others were in favor. That was one of the strongest demonstrations I’ve seen of what I have come to consider a very important and somewhat invisible dividing line between those liberals who love and value liberty and those who do not. You might call them the non-statists (or perhaps the less-statists) and the statists. Don’t forget, too, that there are statists on the right, too, although in my experience there are far far fewer.
But it was the Sarah Conly book that really crystallized things for me. Remember Conly, author of Against Autonomy? I can think of no better demonstration of the statist impulse plus the supposedly do-goody one combining to create a vile synergy. And who better to explain it all but Ms. Conly herself:
I argue that autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated””that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are. We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others””and in particular, of government regulation””to keep us from going wrong.
If you want to know how a person can justify such tyranny to themselves, that’s how. How they can be so stupid as to believe it a good idea (assuming that Conly does believe it rather than merely mouthing it in order to get a lot of publicity and maybe even power one day) is another, more mysterious question. It’s a question I have yet to answer to my satisfaction, actually, but let’s just say that I’m beginning to think the desire for liberty versus the desire to control others might just be something innate.
The sad thing is that even those liberals who love liberty are for the most part voting for people dedicated to ending it.
neo,
I consider this at least one of the finest, if not the finest post you have ever written. The breadth and depth of insight is a pleasure to read. Though I might phrase things a bit differently, I can find nothing with which I might disagree.
Having quoted them enough, I know you to be familiar with Jefferson’s and Heinlein’s views on mankind’s desire to control and be free from control.
What they don’t address is that a substantial portion of humanity want to be controlled or perhaps more accurately, to be babied. It is they who enable the nanny state.
In reading this post I was reminded of an insight into humanity that a scene in an old John Wayne movie, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” provided. Wayne played a Captain in charge of troops, he’s the leader. He’s assisted by his officers (managers) troops (followers) and one other small contingent, Wayne’s scouts.
It is the scouts who most value liberty and self-reliance. Most of the time, they are far from the troops and solely dependent upon their own skills. They inherently reject going along to get along.
Very few among mankind are true leaders. A not insignificant portion of humanity are managers. The great bulk of humanity are followers and thus easily swayed for good or ill. Next to leaders, the smallest in number are those who rely upon themselves and who welcome liberty’s risks.
America’s founding occurred in a time when self-reliance was a necessity among those who sought opportunity. Expansion required self-reliance.
Today, those conditions no longer apply and a society whose conditions place no need for self-reliance will find few among the followers who gravitate toward the inherent risk of liberty.
I had somehow assumed that other people had been going through something similar to my political journey, although perhaps milder. This now seems to me a rather humorous thought, not to mention profoundly naive (you might even call it stupid), but that’s the way it was for me. I was truly shocked to be on the receiving end of a significant amount of hostility from a lot of people when I mentioned my positions on various issues of the day, and this sometimes involved friends and acquaintances I’d known for decades and with whom I’d never even discussed politics before or had a single disagreement of any substance.
Similar to the experience of the prophets of the Christian God, when they were commanded to spread the Gospel on how to improve and save humanity.
Your baka ka, so to speak, came from innocence or the lack of knowledge of evil.
Evil doesn’t care what people are motivated by. It makes their conversion process easier.
Neo, I agree with Geoffrey Britain; You have such a gift for writing…but more than just writing…you have a gift for getting to the essence of things. I thank you. Are you familiar with Evan Sayat’s How Modern Liberals Think?
I recently ran across a link to a classic PJ O’Rourke essay on his experiences with old-style leftists on a Peace Cruise through Russia in 1982. It’s hilarious and well-worth the long read:
http://www.likereading.net/Republican_Party_Reptile/6.html
God bless America! Happy Fourth everyone.
G.B.: “What they don’t address is that a substantial portion of humanity want to be controlled or perhaps more accurately, to be babied. It is they who enable the nanny state.”
I have always referred to this group of people as those wanting “a womb with a view.”
I live in a neighborhood with a homeowner’s association. It is very interesting to watch the various types of people in action. Most of those who get actively involved do so in order insure that everyone is living up to their standards – much as the typical progressive does. They “know best.” And they do believe their actions and ideas are good for the community – their intentions are good. Their favorite thing is to keep suggesting new covenants and regulations, which will make the community “nicer.” Most of their regulations can only be enforced by group pressure as all owners here own their land and buildings. It is private property and their regulations would not stand if challenged in a court of law. Needless to say I’m not on good terms with some of my neighbors because I don’t accept all the regs as being beneficial or “for my own good.” I follow what I accept and don’t follow the picayune ones that make no sense except to satisfy certain people’s tastes. In HOA meetings I always argue against new regulations based on the principles of private property. It has not made me popular.
Most of the owners here are like sheep. They don’t want to ruffle the waters so they go along to get along. Which is what the vast majority of people do, Few have sat down and thought about what they believe, what this country’s founding principles are, or why they enjoy the freedoms they do. It’s all taken for granted that we will always be free.
This all gets serious when the do-gooders have armies or police at their command to enforce their ideas – such as we see at the mayoral, governor, and Federal levels. Freedom is fragile and never very far from being extinguished by those who “know better.”
Communism looks good on paper. Who wouldn’t like to see a world where there was no poverty, no great economic inequalities, a government that really did know best, and where central planning was superior to the free market. Why some people favor it is a mystery when it is clear that it goes against human nature and always results in misery not liberty.
Happy Fourth of July to all. Keep on believing in the Founders principles.
“Eduction”: What you get if you don’t get an “A” in your classes.
Would that in my writings, I made as few errors as she.
If “to err is human”, then so too is the impulse to point it out.
But the essence of kindness is to let error pass silently, when correction serves no useful purpose.
J.J.,
Your comment brought this CS Lewis observation to mind, ““Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end… for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Happy Independence Day!
I am also celebrating that today is #199 on the countdown calendar. Observe the glorious number one. Down to double digits in less than a hundred days. And at least one national nightmare will be over.
I had some of the same naive expectation, while going through my own change, that others – my friends, family and peers – would likewise be going through inner revolutions of their own, or at least would sympathize a little. Not so, not hardly. Thank goodness for this blog. For me, the liberty that matters most lies in not being told what to think, in owning my own perceptions and conclusions – an impulse I can trace in memory back to early childhood, and one I thought was universal until very recently, when I had to slowly acknowledge that many people prefer to surrender authority over their own minds to the comfort of the crowd.
As for Conly, how can it not be as screamingly obvious to her as it is to me that if each of us is too irrational to be trusted to make good choices, there’s nothing about assigning the imprimatur of Government to some of us that will suddenly confer superior rationality on the chosen few?
Bravo, Neo!! I’m in enthusiastic agreement with Geoffrey Britain. Liberty is uniquely American and bears little relation to European style Social Democracy. And, obviously, Obama and his idiotcracy want and are actively working for shrinkage of Liberty & Exceptionalism. On several fronts.
Was it a founder(Franklin..?)or just my simple wishful thinking that beautifully defined Equality & Liberty thusly: “Equality is two wolves and a sheep sitting down for supper. Liberty is the sheep coming fully armed and ready to contest the meal.”
The Left and His Infantile Majesty in the Oval (occassionally)
long for the former. They’ve made significant strides. Not what the Founders gave us. Loathsome.
Mrs Whatsit Says:
July 4th, 2016 at 9:31 pm
…
As for Conly, how can it not be as screamingly obvious to her as it is to me that if each of us is too irrational to be trusted to make good choices, there’s nothing about assigning the imprimatur of Government to some of us that will suddenly confer superior rationality on the chosen few?
* * *
Hayek makes the same point in his works on socialism.
Conly obviously has never observed the maxim that the IQ of any group is equal to the IQ of the smartest person divided by the number in the group.
For many people, the desire for Liberty is trumped by the desire for Belonging. Just the other day, I was watching an interview with a German man about his experiences during Hitler’s rise to power. A strong anti-Nazi, he said that while listening to Hitler in full-rant mode, he knew well that what he was listening to was evil and insane….but he could not help thinking about how warm and comforting it would be if he could join in with the crowd.
Great essay neo, and astute comments above. We are free in our hearts and minds. Never surrender, lend your energy and resources to the cause of liberty., the pendulum is never still, be of good cheer. All they can do is kill you.
Sebastian Hafner, who grew up in Germany between the wars, wrote of a brief period, during the Stresemann chancellorship, when the political, social, and economic climate achieved some sort of stability:
“The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries…There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food and a little political boredom. everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness.”
But…and I think this is a particuarly important point…a return to private life was not to everyone’s taste:
“A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk.
To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. they began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.”
People who have become accustomed to ***having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis by the public sphere*** are unlikely to place a high value on liberty. And it strikes me that in America today, the obsession with popular culture combines with the politicization of almost everything to create something sort of similar to what Huffier discussed.
Neo: Agreed that this is one of your best posts. Too bad that things have only gotten worse (in the liberty department) since your 2014 original. And as a mundane vignette illustrating your topic: there are people on my street complaining this evening about the neighborhood kids setting off their fireworks. On the 4th of July.)
“the IQ of any group is equal to the IQ of the smartest person divided by the number in the group”
There are certain situations in which this is not correct and the group is actually smarter than any of its individual members. No one at Boeing is smart enough to design and build a 787, but the company collectively does just that.
I suspect that what many ‘progressives’ are doing is fallaciously generalizing this type of organizational intelligence into situations where it does not apply.
G.B., yes, that quote by C.S. Lewis is spot on for the average HOA. And of course, our omnipotent moral busybodies in Congress and the White House.
When or if one ceases to believe in ‘them’ one becomes free. “What will you do without freedom?”
Comey to make statement at 11am today. A lot of comments I’m reading are calling for a second revolution if he says no indictment, which of course we all believe is going to be the case. 11am today could be the death knell of the country or the start of of a regain of freedom, or something in between.
‘…In such cases, we need the help of others–and in particular, of government regulation–to keep us from going wrong.’
Well, a third grader could see the logical problem with this argument. If people are incapable of choosing their ends wisely, how in the world could government, which is formed from people, be any more capable of it?
Though I grew up in a liberal environment (with a few exceptions), I cannot remember a time when I held liberal views. Leftism (in any of its variants) does not fit human nature. One does not need to know history to figure this out. I knew that as a child and a few minutes of honest reflection should be enough for any intelligent person to figure it out.
“Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
Rodham is free.
As Bill Ayers said “guilty as hell, free as a bird, what a great country”
Just imagine the incredible stuff Rodham will do in the presidency.
Neo writes,
Inclusion, affirmation, shared pain, “this is how we care for each other now”
As disappointing as it is in some ways, it is just as clarifying in others, to consider that Professor Jon Haidt’s moral taste theories may have something in them that is literally true; that deeply rooted psychological and thus biological foundations lie beneath the moral preference expressions of the people we encounter in our associative lives.
Whether this observation merely represents a moment’s pause and reflection on an otherwise uninterrupted academic journey to collectivist hell, or whether it turns out to have intellectual staying power and remains a lasting conviction for the “discoverer”, Haidt’s relatively belated inclusion of “liberty” as a foundational interest in his academic moral formation scheme, portends, possibly, the further revelation of an intrinsic disposition toward liberty in at least some people.
That, the desire to be at liberty, may not even be a unitary phenomenon, not driven by one “gene” or one psychological trait.
Some of it may be due to reactance, simply having a personality that bridles at any presumption; in other cases it may be due to a more positive resentment at being socially channeled and deprived of personal agency. In still others, it may be a kind of quasi-philosophical recognition that in order for any “moral” action to have full value, it must in some significant measure be voluntary and intentional.
However, this last point of course, assumes a kind of individualist anthropology, and presumes a world of intrinsic values, that the collectivist rejects as intellectually indefensible and illusory.
It is not important on the collectivist view that individual agency be respected, because there is nothing really there to respect, as the believers, in “spirit goo” or “souls”, or selves, believe.
There exist, we exist as ultimately, just meaningless appetites – local expressions or manifestations of a larger worlding if pointless subsystem; one floating about in still greater field of some sort. The elements of which spend their period of existence appropriating, expelling, and deriving satisfying internal feedback from successfully doing so.
As they, the collectivists or progressives see it, that is all there really is to existence. They “want” what they want. Conflict and eating the other is built into it. “You”, are part of the environment in which they manifest and operate and receive feedback; the environment in which they seek satisfactions and strive to avoid “unnecessary” pain.
Thus, some managerial scheme of life-energy redistribution or redirection which will maximize their satisfactions, and persuade numerous others to yield liberty and autonomy for the promise it do the same for them, is what is called for.
And, so, what does your liberty from the demands of their desire, have to do with the achieving of any of that?
Because when a lot of stupid or venal people with ulterior and self-serving motives put their heads together collectively, the result will be an intelligent program impartially and neutrally administered for the common (taken in a logically distributive sense) good.
Or so I have been assured by those in favor of such a system.
We don’t have to imagine. We already saw it in the State Department.
Countdown to the commentariat exploding with observations that it is in the best interest of our political system that she not be judicially prosecuted for misdemeanors, as it would set a bad precedent and bring the purity and free operation of our election system, and the neutrality of our government departments into question.
Best to fall on our sword like good little losers. It feels so virtuous.
As you say. they presume that,
And that therefore, as Neo quotes, the managerial collectivist argues,
In reaction to which, one is almost compelled to reply:
“Are you personally competent to direct your own life?
If not, what makes you fit to direct that of any one else, or even to have any say in theirs?
And if you are personally life-competent, do you imagine that you are the only one?”
To which they invariably respond:
Well. what about them, EXACTLY ?
J.J.(7:32pm,Monday): Communism brought the most horrendous mass murder of all human history. Round figure is 100-million, but that’s only the Soviets and Chinese. Tooss in the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, Sandinistas, etc.and their “High minded” progressivism pushes to 105-million. So, lemme see…Each morning Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Pol Pot, Fidel, Che, etc, etc, etc.awoke with equality, fairness, goodness and the like on their plates and, then, off to Kolyma, Vorkuta, the Lao Gai, the death pits, the slave shops to the Arctic Death Camps, etc endlessly… Such high-motivesby the tens of millions. All in one century.
Freedom means … the freedom to be wrong, to do wrong.
“We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others–and in particular, of government regulation–to keep us from going wrong.”
The “do-good tyrants” do NOT want (other) people to be wrong or do wrong. So they support gov’t regs and laws requiring folk to be good; and think this is good.
They don’t believe in God, but they really believe God giving others Free Will was a mistake.
“… that autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated–that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are. We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others–and in particular, of government regulation–to keep us from going wrong. “
They underrate free will and free agency.
It is precisely because only about 3% of humans are capable of using their will correctly in all circumstances, that they are rare and valuable.
If everyone could do it, it would be worth about as much as a penny.
Because people make mistakes and fall to vice and destroy virtue, is why it makes the hard work of saints and heroes, look all that much better.
If everyone could do it right from being born, what would be the point of praising the virtue of saints?
They don’t believe in God, but they really believe God giving others Free Will was a mistake.
That’s because Lucifer and his generals are their master. They do believe in evil, after all.