Amerika

Discharge put out a song years ago called “Free Speech For the Dumb” whose lyrics were the title as if making a point in the least subtle way possible, namely that free speech mostly enables idiots to say idiotic things and then anyone who says something intelligent gets censored for making everyone else look bad.

This pattern repeats throughout humanity. Free markets, until someone rises above, then we need a wealth tax. Free association, until someone creates a really nice neighborhood that you and I cannot get into, at which point we need to drop Section Eight housing in there to really screw it up.

The same applies to “freedom.” It is an easy answer, and like other easy answers, operates by ignoring most of the problem in order to focus on a detail. The detail here is that governments like to limit freedom, so in theory, having lots of freedom keeps governments away.

That produces the mature version of the “weak men make hard times” meme: freedom makes chaos, and in response to chaos, the panicked voter-consumers demand more government. Libertarianism creates socialism, as Marx argued, and socialism creates anarchy, as the conservatives always said.

The famous comedian Bill Cosby — a really funny man, and deplatformed now on dubious charges — had a great riff on mind-expanding drugs (psychedelics). It expands your mind, he said, then paused and asked, “But what if you’re an asshole?”

I thought about this many times while using psychedelics. Well, not that many; I never got into hard psychedelics all that much because as Alan Watts famously said, “When you get the message, hang up the phone!” Like Buddhism, psychedelics offer limited vision. At some point you need new mountains to climb.

Cosby made a point that should resonate with all of us as we consider easy answers. Freedom for the good is also freedom for the bad, and they will promptly burn down whatever you have, a variant on the tragedy of the commons.

In the same pattern, free stuff given out by government attracts parasites and soon converts the population entirely to parasites, at which point you get a Jacobin/Soviet crash where no one produces enough food to sustain the society. This should be a Darwinian error where everyone in that society dies but alas it is not so.

There is a sweet spot for freedom where those who rule do not interrupt non-harmful activities. The kings would exile pedophiles, but also refused to muck around with mere eccentrics, a broad category at the time. They recognized their main power was rewarding those who do good and removing the bad was a means to that.

Absolute freedom would be anarchy, and anarchy leads to oligarchy, which is what the ancients called libertarianism. That in turn produces a huge population of workers who through unions and democracy quickly demand socialism, since they are not able enough to see that this will backfire.

In humanity, we struggle similarly with the individualism-realism axis. Individualists think that the desires of the individual come before all else; realists think that the order above the individual comes before all else. The latter allows for limited freedom, the former does not allow for functional social order.

Individualism takes many forms, mostly religious and ideological. Metaphysical dualists like Christians and liberals will never place reality in front of their own individual desires. They want to force everyone to conform to moral rules so that outcomes are equal. Ideologues do the same.

“Freedom” seems like a sensible compromise position between that and the need for order, but really it is simply slow decay. We need goals, not methods, and “freedom” is not a goal. It is a method for achieving the goal, which is the Darwinian need to adapt and thrive. It cannot save us any more than can openers can.

Tags: discharge, freedom, hardcore punk, individualism