Hello Ernie:
I am for a radical deconstruction of central planning, programs, practices,
and regulations not because I am a Libertarin Utopian but because what we
have now is so bloated that it has sucked the life and love out of
communities. I might even venture to say that I am using libertarianism
because it is the philosophy that needs to be applied today to unwind the
inevitible build-up that occurs over time in human systems. Having worked
for 20 years in human services, perhaps the most repressive and intransigent
of all, I think something serious needs to happen to get back to efficiency
and neighborliness.
But I do believe in the theory of spontaneous order. So in that sense I
take issue with some of the ideas in the article. When people are freed
from psychological tyranny they naturally form cooperative enclaves because
they have to.
This is Chapter Seven from my book, Discovering Possibility.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Freedom
The Webster dictionary defines freedom as “being free” and free, as "not
under the control or power of another.” As history proves repeatedly,
freedom reflects the highest of all human aspirations.
Our Founders believed freedom was a natural right, meaning that it was
guaranteed by God and was the basic condition under which all men should be
allowed to live. The most basic belief, shared by most if not all of the
founding fathers, was that men are entitled to be free and in the absence of
legal safeguards, oppressive governments would enslave them. Thus, the birth
of the United States was inextricably tied to the Founders’ belief in man’s
right to be free and the vigilance with which the rule of law must protect
that freedom.
All societies erect barriers to unchecked freedom. That response is a
necessary and appropriate consequence of nurturing human relationships and
building a society, as I indicated in my depiction of the social contract
and ordered liberty in Chapter Two. Societies must account for freedom and
responsibility in order to maintain communities.
In my field of family therapy, we believe the drive toward human
relationship balances the drive for pure freedom, and thus, human
organization seeks balance between these two fundamental human desires.
People want and need three interdependent elements: independence, structure,
and love. The question thus becomes, what is the optimal balance between
pure freedom (anarchy) and social and psychological constraints. The
psychological question thus supersedes the governance question, as the
enlightenment philosophers well knew. They were pushing civilization away
from religious and governmental repression, which had been the norm for
centuries, and toward individual liberty, which made the age of reason an
astoundingly liberal period in the history of the world.
The Founders believed we needed just enough restraint on liberty to sustain
a central government but not too much restraint, so that tyranny would
prevail. They were students of history who knew man’s unchecked desire for
power usually destroyed individual freedom, the same conclusion that Sigmund
Freud later drew when he postulated his famous theory of libidinous
energy.[i] They also knew too much constraint on freedom created repression,
in the same way that Freud knew too much superego created psychological
repression. Therefore, they created a system that attempted to balance
freedom and control (ID and superego).[ii]
Given their experience with the tyranny of the English Crown, the Founders
were most concerned about vigilance against the inevitable tyranny that
comes with unchecked power. Edmund Burke was perhaps the most specific when
he wrote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men
to do nothing.” And, “There is no safety for honest men except believing all
possible evil of evil men.”[iii]
Thus, the Founders envisioned a society that was decentralized and barely
beyond anarchy, giving the maximum opportunity for individual expression.
They understood that human beings seek structure, and structure is part of
free choice, but because of the controlling instincts of man and the
corruption that power often provokes, they needed Constitutional protection
against the threat of others imposing structure upon them. I believe their
hope for freedom in America also mirrors the best recipe for human happiness
on an individual level and that is what gives the idea its legitimacy.
I offer a blog for clients called Kevin’s Korner that talks about ways to
find more happiness and productivity.[iv] This is a post from that blog:
“The older I get the more I value freedom. It strikes me that most of the
things that trouble people are connected to psychological or relational
tyranny. That may sound like radical libertarian language but if you think
about it, the happiest people we know are the freest. That does not mean you
should jump on the next train to anarchy and dump all of your moral and
social responsibilities. But it does mean that you have the right to live
your life based primarily on your wants rather than your shoulds. Living
this way allows one to choose his responsibilities and relationships wisely
to the extent he can, and avoid being an emotional pack-rat that comes from
the tyranny of the incorporation of other-imposed requirements. Choose your
responsibilities wisely and live freer and happier.”
According to political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, liberty implies a
system of rules, and a network of restraint and order, while freedom has a
more general meaning, which ranges from an opposition to slavery to the
absence of psychological or personal encumbrances.[v] In today’s usage, the
words are used interchangeably even though a more precise usage would
probably bring about a renewed preference for liberty. Since I am focusing
on psychological and sociological effects, I am choosing to use the more
general term, freedom, but I do not wish to be disrespectful to the more
precise notion of liberty, which has a stronger epistemological basis in
American identity. Liberty is man’s natural condition that our Founders
believed was a universal right. Thus, the concept cannot be trivialized in
the manner that the less specific word, freedom, often is in common
discourse.
This psychological notion, that free people are happy people is not without
real world evidence. If one looks around the world it is readily apparent
that countries high on authoritarianism tend to be low on happiness and
countries high on free choice tend to be high on happiness.[vi] Furthermore,
there is significant research to suggest that happiness is positively
correlated with work schedule flexibility and personal control.[vii] People
that have control over what they do and when they do it tend to be happier
than people who are on fixed schedules and with tight job requirements. The
freedom to make one’s own work schedule is an important happiness factor.
Communalism is not the opposite of freedom as some Radical Libertarians
wrongly postulate. On the contrary, free people tend to choose to put energy
into the relationships that matter to them and eschew those that are
repressive. Forced charitible giving is frequently at odds with happiness.
Free people also tend to be better neighbors because they are unencumbered
by the resentment that often comes with forced neighborliness. Psychological
freedom is thus, the antidote to an overactive Superego.
Free will allows us to live intentionally without emotional baggage, or as I
like to label it, psychological tyranny. Psychological tyranny is when we
allow things that haunt us from the past or fears about the future to
disrupt our enjoyment of the present. Psychological freedom is letting go of
those past or future tyrannies in order to experience the present fully.
Psychological freedom produces the opportunity for happiness. Consequently,
much of the work in psychotherapy is helping people learn to let go of
psychological tyranny so they can make deliberate healthy choices.
A fulfilled life is an intentional life. The happy person is aware of his
interdependence with his community and the opportunities it presents, adds
positive energy to it, but does not let himself become entrapped by
tyrannical darkness. Darkness usually comes in the form of narcissism,
dependency, or attempts to control. Happy people make deliberate choices in
order to experience the full breadth of humanity without getting engulfed by
tyranny. A freedom mindset enables one to do so.
Thus, the real goal of all western influenced psychotherapies, in my
opinion, is to help people discover the freedom to act on their own
intentions, which involves, first clarifying those intentions and removing
the barriers to the free expression thereof. Great therapists have faith in
the power of individuals to decide what is best for them when they are free
enough to act intentionally. The neurotic individual is constrained by
controlling social introjects that overly inhibit free will and
choice.[viii]
Our Founders may not have been psychoanalysts but they understood this
phenomenon well. Indeed they were operating from the same enlightened
principles that eventually gave birth to the Analytic Movement that was
itself a reformation against social tyranny. Free people can choose to act
in ways that bring them happiness and can thusly share that happines in
their neighborliness with their families and their communities. Forced
neighborliness, conversely, is akin to martyrdom and often leads to
resentment because the controlled individual feels he is a prisoner of
other-imposed expectations. Consequently in societies where people are not
free to choose neighborliness we often find pseudomutuality and despair. And
when we limit choice we create powerlessness.[ix]
It has been said that Americans are the most generous people on earth, a
notion that is supported by the huge amounts of giving we do after natural
disasters that occur around the world. But most of us do not want our
government telling us how and when to give. We want to make those choices
ourselves. We want to apply our free will to do good for others. This is of
course a key distinction between Liberals and Conservatives in the United
States. Liberals often advocate mandated giving in the form of taxation for
the redistribution of wealth from those that have more to those that have
less. Conservatives usually advocate for voluntary charity. In today’s
parlance this difference of perspectives is often couched in the social
justice vs. voluntary charitible giving debate.
In a command system, even if the command elements are virtuous, free will is
subservient to collective authority, which is authoritarian in nature. Man
is not free to give. He is compelled to give in a manner that is reminiscent
of how his mommy expected him to share his toys with his four-year old
playmate. He does it but has no choice in the matter and derives pleasure
only from the knowledge that he has pleased his mommy and thus will not be
punished or abandoned. He enjoys no existential freedom or intrinsic
satisfaction until he can decide for himself from his own volition whether
he wants to share or not. Voluntary charity, thus, in contrast with coerced
redistribution of one’s resources, reflects an advanced psychological and
moral stage of development.
If the importance of freedom is so intuitive and the social science
supporting freedom so well articulated, why am I including it in a book
written in 2010? Because not everyone agrees. Even after our Founders risked
life and limb to fight for freedom and codified freedom into every aspect of
our governance system there are still those that believe freedom is the
enemy of fairness. They believe they must limit your freedom in order to
create more fairness for other people, or for other creatures, or for the
environment. They don’t understand that their attempts to make the world
more fair, even if well-intentioned, often have the effect of making the
world more controlled, more regulated, less creative, and less enlightened.
History repeats itself and we need to learn this lesson continuously, the
lesson that Thomas Paine knew when he made his famous quote: “Those who
expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue
of supporting it. "[x]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[i] Adrian Worsfold, Freudian Psychology in Brief, accessed December 13,
2010; available at:
http://www.change.freeuk.com/learning/socthink/sfreud.html. Libidinous
energy is a component of Drive Theory, which concludes that humans are
motivated by aggressive and sexual “drives” (ID) to seek power and
restrained by social conscience (Superego).
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Wikiquote Contributors, United States, “Edmund Burke,” Wikiquote,
accessed December 13, 2010; available at:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke.
[iv] Kevin Kervick, Kevin’s Korner (blog) Available at:
http://kevinkervick.wordpress.com.
[v] Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, “Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?” Political
Theory, 16, no. 4 (November, 1988) 523-552.
[vi] Ronald Inglehart, Robert Foa, Christopher Peterson, and Christian
Welzel, “Development, Freedom, and Happiness: A Global Perspective,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, no. 4 (1998): 264-285.
[vii] K. Christensen and B. Schneider, eds., Workplace Flexibility:
Realigning 20th Century Jobs to 21st Century Workers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2010): 274-308.
[viii] The Free Dictionary, accessed 12/14/10; available at:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/introjects. Introjection means to
incorporate characteristics of a person or object into one’s own psyche
unconsciously.
[ix] Lyman Wynne et. al., “Pseudomutuality in the Family Relations of
Schizophrenics,” Psychiatry, 21 (1958): 205- 220. Pseudomutuality refers to
a dysfunctional family condition that is characterized by false intimacy.
[x] Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, no. 4 (1777).
Chapter Eight - Personal Responsibility
If people believe they have some influence over how regulations that affect
them are constructed, they tend to trust the structures. If they see the
regulatory authority as separate from them, they resist the control. I
believe this is where we are today. Most people today do not believe the
government is an extension of their authority.
regards,
Kevin
Hi Billy,
On Nov 1, 2011, at 12:56 PM, [email protected] wrote:
How Not to Argue for Limited Government and Lower Taxes
T. M. Scanlon
This article is part of Libertarianism and Liberty, a forum on arguments
for libertarian policy conclusions.
Libertarians embrace liberty as their fundamental starting point. From
this, they advocate a program of limited government and lower taxes.
But it’s not clear how they get from their starting point to their policy
conclusion.
Very nice analysis, though I'm a little fuzzy about his conclusion.
I also realized a fundamental flaw in Libertarian reasoning: the assumption
that humans are rational.
We aren't. The human brain isn't designed for rational calculation. It is
designed for *heuristics* -- determining behavior by matching patterns
against the environment.
In fact, this is the only kind of system that can deal with the real
world -- in the mathematical sense. The world is real, not rational --
continuous floating-point numbers, not discrete integers. The only robust
way to cope with reality is to use some kind of fuzzy logic --- which leads
to heuristics. Logic is one important heuristic, but frankly of limited
validity, because it depends incredibly precisely on the initial conditions,
and in complex systems the relation of outputs to inputs is generally
chaotic not linear. The mapping between the analog real world and the
digital rational world -- analog-to-digital -- is really hard, and in fact
one of the most difficult problems in computation.
The requirement for rational thinking is the requirement for perfect
information. Most libertarian utopias assume that everyone has access to
sufficiently accurate information to decide for themselves. But we don't.
All information is imperfect, our time and attention is limited, and frankly
our brains (mine included) are too stupid to really make effective decisions
about *most* things that matter to us. We *need* each other to provide
abstractions and rules to simplify our lives to the point of manageability.
This is not to entirely dis rationality or logic -- heck, I make my living
off of computers and production systems designed for maximum rationality.
But I never forget that they are the servants of human beings, and that all
the interesting and difficult questions lie on the *analog* side of the
equation.
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this rant, but it struck me that
this myth of rationality runs deep in Western thought, and I only now
realized that the emperor has no clothes -- or at most, a headband.
DRB, Kevin -- as the Libertarian-leaning among us, what do you think?
-- Ernie P.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
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<[email protected]>
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
