The Truths That Make Us Free

On election night, a friend of mine who is aware of my political convictions and voting habits, commented – quite cheerfully! -- that, no matter who won, “You're always a loser” -- meaning, as long as I insist on voting for third parties I'm never going to have the experience of having voted for someone who won. My immediate response was, “No, I'm always a winner, because I keep my self respect!” And I suppose that's the essence of what motivates people to vote (or not) according to their beliefs, and not fall for the “wasted vote” propaganda, or the “lesser of two evils” scam, or (as Michael Matt recommended with regard to John McCain) “holding your nose”. Sooner or later it has to dawn on someone that not only do we not nominate, and elect, people to high office who are markedly superior to ourselves, as in the early days of the Republic, but that, of late, our tendency has been to nominate and elect people with serious moral and intellectual flaws, whose judgment and “reality testing” can in many cases be argued to be _inferior_ to that of the average person. Why we continue to offer neurotics, dullards, and sociopaths the laurels and honors of the highest offices in the land is beyond me. Is it because we've given up on government and see it as merely a “parliament of whores”, in P. J. O'Rourke's words? But nearly everyone is an entitlement junkie now... we have more people on the “take” in one form or another than at any time in our history, and that includes, of course, all of the Wall Street types who were so adamant that they represented “capitalism”, and “free enterprise”, and “competition”, and, above all, “risk taking”. It has now become crystal clear that, whereas small business is as fraught with risk as ever, big business (you know, the definition being “too big to fail”) is virtually risk-free. The government has explicitly insured the high rollers against some risks, and has reliably stepped in with bailouts the rest of the time. And this is not to say that profits have become outdated, far from it. But a new word has to be invented to describe “profits” that come from a corrupt relationship with government, rather than from sound business practice.

In any case, very few people now can honestly claim they're against “big government”, to say nothing of being against government in general. I could safely bet big money on not being able to find a true anarchist on the American landscape. The seductions of perpetual care (not to be confused with “caring”) and entitlement are just too great, and the belief in self-sufficiency has withered away to almost nothing. It survives only in that is occasionally mouthed on patriotic occasions, but it has about as much reality behind it as the notion that American agriculture is characterized by free and open competition. And it's interesting to speculate on where this morbid fear of liberty – true freedom – came from, and when. To a large extent it was the predations of government itself – starting in earnest with the Civil War – that converted us from a nation of pioneers to a nation of “safety net” addicts. Wars begun by provocation... engineered financial crises... social anarchy dictated by the courts... these and other instruments of oppression also served to establish and aggravate our addiction to socialism and collectivism, the same way an addictive drug, though dangerous, only creates a need for more of the same. Add to this the fact that our public education has been programming us, for well over 100 years, to believe that we have no real choices – that, yes, government will, and indeed must, grow larger because of ever-increasing “human need”, and that, yes, it certainly has to get involved in areas of public life that the Founding Fathers could never have imagined in their worse nightmares. And this is all because... well, to begin with, we're not pioneers any longer. We're weak, and ailing, and anemic, and dependent – isn't this the constant message? Entitlement is more important than opportunity, and the “safety net” is more important than unobstructed freedom. And gosh, we have so many more needy people around than we used to have. Why is this? No one knows. But all of a sudden we not only have the “poor”, but also the chronically ill, the malnourished, the unemployed, the _under_ employed, the “unwanted”, the “underprivileged”, people who need “social services”, people who need a hug, people who need to “die with dignity”, and so on. Surely no one expects a nation that “put the first man on the Moon” to neglect all of these folks who, through no fault of their own, simply can't cope with the demands of modern life. (But this category also seems to include the most high-powered CEOs in the country, if you go by who government policies are benefiting the most.) So we all have to “contribute”, or “invest”, in order to achieve “fairness” and level the playing field so no one feels left out, and no one has their feelings hurt.

I suppose the real turning point in this paradigm shift was the Great Depression (maybe we should start calling it the First Great Depression) when, as usual, government rode in on a white horse to “solve” problems it had a heavy hand in creating to begin with. And again, like the heroin addict who started with morphine in the hospital, a semi-legitimate and “temporary” remedy became a habit, and then we forgot that there was any other way to live, and that's where we find ourselves now, and that's why third-party appeals fall, by and large, on deaf ears – because they are not merely asking people to vote for a few “tweaks” at the margins of public policy. They are asking people to vote for a paradigm shift... for “creative destruction”... for what appears to be anarchy, and that's way too scary and upsetting, not just on the material side but on the cognitive and emotional side as well. Ask people to give something up when they're familiar with the alternative, and you might have a chance. That's why the Baltic States have had such a relatively easy time converting back to independent democracies – because there is plenty of living memory of how that works. It's also why Russia has had a much tougher time, and why its government is oligarchic – at least that's “the devil they know”. Animals born in the wild, then captured, are happy to be set free again. Those born in captivity are terrified, and shrink away from that open cage door. How many Americans remember pre-New Deal times? (And how many future Americans are going to remember how things were before the government took over the financial sector in 2008?) Why it's so hard to re-establish concepts of freedom, and liberty, and self-sufficiency is another matter. Is it because there's a natural human tendency to go soft, and become dependent, and abandon all responsibility for independent action and thought? But this seems to fly directly in the face of evolutionary theory, and of what we know about the human race from history. It is still the strong, in nearly all cases, who wind up running things and dominating world affairs. Yes, there is a certain creative weakness in deference and modesty, and the spiritually strong often seem to have no visible material resources or power. But an entire society founded on weakness and passivity? I don't think that can be found anywhere, and I suspect that as this becomes an ever more embedded characteristic of our society we will find that, indeed, we are not surviving. Other societies where totalitarianism reached critical mass have either collapsed of their own weight (the Soviet Union), been reformed from above (China), been overrun (Cambodia), been defeated in war (Germany), or become more and more isolated and irrelevant (Cuba and North Korea). In no case have we witnessed a high level of collectivism, or totalitarianism per se, responsible for sustained growth, not to mention prosperity or contentment among the citizens. And it doesn't seem to matter what the rationale for the collectivist development was; the most benign (or least vicious) collectivist societies will fail and crumble, generally sooner than those with alternative systems.

So... with the just-concluded election season, we see that those qualities – or the remnants thereof – which have contributed the most to our prosperity over the years are being held responsible for the recent setbacks, completely ignoring the fact that, in nearly all cases, things were going along just fine until government came along and started meddling. So the heroin addict just gets, not even methadone but an even purer and more expensive grade of heroin. And the results of this – i.e. the next set of crises – will spur even more “remedies” and so on in a descending spiral. At least with Obama at the helm the process might be sped up a bit – who knows, by 2012 we might have already gone through total collectivization, abolition of private property, suppression of all rights, and be coming back the other way. So far Obama seems to be hiring the most ruthlessly efficient socialists from the Clinton administration to enact his programs. Maybe a few years of sharp pain are preferable to the slow, lingering death of the kind of half-hearted “mixed economy” programs the Republicans are so fond of. In any case, you and I won't have a thing to say about the matter – what's going to happen will happen whether we like or not.

And that's where self-respect comes in (at last I'm getting back to that!). When you vote – i.e. when you perform that one very miniscule act every four years that represents, really, your only input to how the country is run, you're not only trying to have an impact on things (even though, on some level, we all know that's delusional) but you're making a statement to others (when and if you share your opinion) and, most importantly of all perhaps, to yourself. Are you a person of principal, or just another slob who “votes his pocketbook” or – even worse, in my opinion – votes on the basis of ill-formed and morally dubious “ideas” or “memes” that have already been proven to be invalid and produce oppressive, failing governments? One criticism of third-party voters this time around was that they were too “perfectionistic” -- as if third-party candidates are perfect! Well, they aren't – how could they be? -- but if their world view, and their ideas, come close enough to mine that I would trust them with running the country (or appearing to, or even pretending to), that is good enough to get me to provide them my one small vote. Anything else is a capitulation to the Regime – to propaganda, to manipulation, to business as usual, and in many cases to outright evil. The thing the Regime fears most in this world is people who think – who really _think_, rather than “fancy”, as one of my science teachers used to say. If this country was founded on the premise that the citizens would also be thinkers, it has foundered on the reality that most people now want to be treated as newborns or cripples. I suppose that in the early days there were people around who would have loved the New Deal and all that followed... but they were outvoted and, more likely than not, wound up dying in a ditch of sheer sloth. Nowadays this world view is taught, encouraged, and rewarded, and people who think like the “embattled farmers” of New England are socially isolated, viewed with suspicion and alarm, and ultimately censored and ignored. And so a culture evolves – from initial expansion, to consolidation, to decay. And I defy anyone to claim that we're not well along in the “decay” part of the cycle, as all of our political, economic, and social woes seem to indicate. And yes, it is depressing, but again, one starts with self-respect, and self-sufficiency at least on a cognitive level, and works from there. It is possible to be righteous when a society is collapsing around one's ears – it has been done, time and time again, in history. And there are still voices that will not be silenced – those who present real ideas, and a real vision of what is possible. Freedom is, to a great extent, not a material phenomenon but a state of mind, and if we continue to listen to those voices – and our own – we can have a good measure of freedom in the midst of the darkening chaos which seems certain to come.