Freedom. A word we use a lot, but think about too little. And this is a shame, because freedom and the building of a free society is one of the most interesting things to try and wrap your head around. I'm told, by so many people, books, movies and politicians, that freedom is important; it is the highest ideal to strife for in life and a key ingredient for true happiness. Yet nobody tells me what freedom is, or exactly why it is so important.
source: StockSnap
The best they all can do is say that freedom means different things to different people and that we all need to decide for ourselves what it means to us and how we go about obtaining it. And the free market is there to provide more freedom to more people than ever before because it enables societies to produce enough wealth for people to climb up in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's simple really: only if you can be free from the need to spend all your time surviving and reproducing, you can spend time on the higher ideals in life.
So to climb in Maslow's hierarchy we can quickly conclude that we cannot manage that on our own, or even in a small community. Only when the first industrial revolution made possible large amounts of overproduction, our hands and minds were literally free to do and think about other things than mere survival. This represents the first obstacle to true freedom as some may understand it: we have to form a society, organize the efforts of large groups of people towards the common goal of creating wealth and freeing hands and minds. With organization comes rules, schedules, you have to be educated to be able to adhere to these rules, communicate and navigate through the labyrinth of actors in an organized society. As an individual you have to do your part in reaching that common goal in order to gain your own freedom within the larger society of men and women.
At least that's how we think and hope it works. And it does; in smaller communities up to a maximum of around 500 people, all actors in the common game are visible; no laws or police force are needed. In small communities social pressure is enough to keep the individuals "in line". If someone refuses to play their part, or otherwise hinders that common goal, they simply don't get spoken to anymore, they don't get help if there's repairs to be made to their house. If they damage Fred's property and refuse to pay for the repairs, his good friend Bob will make sure the bad actors don't get any eggs, meat or corn from his farm anymore. This is why so called Utopian communities like Quakers and Israeli kibbutzim also almost never grow beyond that maximum of 500 people per community.
Humans are tribal creatures in essence, but in larger communities this principle doesn't change: we're just as dependent on each other as we were in the tribe, only this interdependence is made completely invisible through the economy. Now we are given, on a daily basis, the illusion that we're independent, free agents who can choose to do and even be whatever and whoever we want. This compels some people to really think that being free means being able to do whatever you want whenever you want with whom ever you want. This unrealistic view on freedom would never have a chance in a community of people who are constantly aware of their interdependence.
Whatever dependencies we have, they disappear with every extra dollar we can manage to get for ourselves. Because if you have enough money you simply pay a doctor when you're sick or when it's that time to get a new nose or better lips. You never have to feel dependent on anyone as long as you can afford the price of this imagined freedom. In reality you are still dependent on the knowledge and expertise and craftsmanship of other people, you just never have to feel that way, like you did in the tribe. And we are constantly reminded, by the few who gained the most from this misunderstanding, that freedom is a purely individual thing. The importance of individualism and individual freedom are so deeply embedded in our collective western psyche, resulting from centuries of highly effective brainwashing coming from the very top of the social pyramid, that many will see any action from the government toward serving the community as a whole as illegitimate, suppression or outright authoritarian communism; I'm referring to the aforementioned anarcho-capitalists, who'll scream that "taxation is theft" whenever someone proposes that maybe the rich should pay their fair share in upholding the community of people that made them rich in the first place... For me it's the opposite: government, especially if it's a democratically elected representative government, is our collective reminder of our interdependencies, it's the body through which we show each other that we're not alone, that we take care of each other and not just ourselves.
Because freedom is something all humans long for, whatever that freedom may hold for any given individual, and because we are made to believe that independence from other people is a large part of that freedom, we have money as our highest goal in life. A good way to show this is, as almost always, through art and stories. I'll try to illustrate by giving an example from modern culture, a world famous movie called "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".
The story is very simple: three men who have every reason to mistrust each other, form a hostile alliance to find a treasure with 400 gold coins that would be worth several million dollars today. They don't want to, but are forced to work together to find this treasure because each of them holds a piece of the puzzle to find its exact location. This spaghetti western with Lee Van Cleef and a very young Clint Eastwood is a remarkable movie for what is not in it. But first, if you've never seen it, please take a two minute break to watch the trailer and enjoy the legendary music by Ennio Morricone:
The Good the Bad and the Ugly • Main Theme • Ennio Morricone
There's no love, no friendship, no beauty, no joy, intimacy or even a cheap sex-scene in this masterpiece. The three conspirators are all murderers, they want to kill each other every step of the way, none has a higher cause than to just get the money for himself, the desert locations used are all harsh and lifeless, and there's no justice or righteousness to be found, not even after the ending of the film. The only reason the story grabs us, is that treasure and the unrelenting hunt for that treasure. The treasure is the fulfillment of our deepest wish for freedom and happiness, and we forgive all ugliness needed to reach that coveted goal. We even admire the smartest scammer of the bunch for succeeding.
Is this movie not a perfect reflection of our modern western culture? We are not only made to believe we are independent from other people, no we're even their competitors in our individual race towards ever more money, wealth and fortune. Contrary to the truth of our ever growing interdependence, we're raised to be as independent as possible, and at the workplace we have colleagues who are at the same time our competitors because no one wants to lose their job, their income, their little slice of freedom and happiness they can celebrate in the weekends...
Many so called anarcho-capitalists and voluntarists believe that freedom means to be free from coercion, be it from other individuals or governments. Their free society is based, roughly, around the non aggression principle and respect for property rights. All interactions and transactions should be voluntary and therefore no forced taxes can exist and no government can exist to force people to do things or threaten them with force if they fail to do so.
In my mind this is paradoxical. Property is a legal construct that's backed by the laws decided on within the society, which are enforced by a police force payed for by that society. The voluntary police force in this anarcho-capitalist utopia must eat to. So only those who think they need a police force, and have the money to spare, will voluntarily pay for such a force. So what do you do with those who don't pay or can not pay? And will anyone pay? What do you do with the burning house of the one who volunteered to not pay for the fire-department? Leave it burning so the flames can travel to those who have payed? As a society we have known since centuries ago that some things are better done and decided upon together, as a community. These anarcho-capitalists want to go back in time to even before that. There's a name for their imagined system of a truly free market: it's called barbarism, and some of that can be seen in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"...
"The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!"
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I am of the opinion that private property and the accumulation of as much personal gains as possible, capitalism in a word, are detrimental to true freedom and a truly free society. We will have to find a way to separate wealth from freedom in our consciousness, because wealth and the pursuit of personal wealth blind us from our interdependence and make us compete where we should be working together. I think true freedom comes from the constant realization that we all depend on each other, that we all stand on the shoulders of countless men and women that came before us and are living together with us now, and that should make us feel safe. Because with that realization we also understand that we are not each others enemies but each others liberators. This is how I believe freedom works, or should I say, how it doesn't work in modern western cultures. I invite you all to ponder on this for a while. It's just something that's worth your time to think about, or at least it was worth my time to think about... Time isn't money, it doesn't have to be.
Oh, when you watch the below linked video, don't be fooled by the ones who claim that our current reality isn't capitalism. That this is "crony capitalism", "monopoly capitalism", "socialism for the rich" or simply "socialism". The system that's founded on the individual accumulation of personal wealth, a system in which players are eliminated through competition will always result in what we have now. What we have now is capitalism in its truest form; don't let the ones with unrealistic anarcho-capitalist aspirations fool you into thinking otherwise.
Capitalism vs. Freedom with Zephyr Teachout
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