A Meditation on Freedom

What passes for a dull news day in these times is a day on which there is not a single new crisis which threatens to exterminate all life on earth, and/or trash the U.S. economy. Truly, the bar has been raised mightily for what it takes to consider an event “important”. But at the same time, the news is full of bland, predictable “filler” that, like the soap operas, does not change appreciably from one month to the next. The custom of establishing “standing headlines”, i.e. ones that can be reused time and time again, has been firmly in place for years. And we see that even trivial, random ups and downs in the stock market can set off reams of newsprint and endless “analysis”. It seems to me that, where the Dow is concerned, any change less than 1% on any given day has to fall under the heading of “random fluctuation”. And yet to hear the analysts talk about it, anything greater than five points – that's .05 percent – merits deep rumination. (And you'll notice, the Dow never just goes up or down any more -- it either "soars" or "plummets".) And the interesting thing about the Dow, for example, is that there's no more of a reason for it to be above 10,000 today than there was for it to be below 8,000 a few months ago. Try and find the cause-effect relationships; there aren't any! The economy is every bit as fragile and crisis-prone as it was then... doomsday for the national debt and entitlement programs approaches as rapidly as ever... the dollar is under attack from places like India (!)... the balance of payments issue remains untouched... and wealth-hemorrhaging wars rage on. And yet the Dow is back above 10,000. What's going on here? One would almost think that market indicators like the Dow had very little to do with the economic health of any one country – the United States, for instance. And if you suspect that this is the case, you're right. There is, basically, only one market, and that is the world market – nationally- and regionally-based markets are only subdivisions, their names holdovers from a time when nations still had economic integrity. Today's empires, unlike those of Alexander, the Romans, the Mongol Horde, et al, are entirely based on international finance – and, as such, are based, geographically speaking, everywhere and nowhere. Oh sure, we can point to Brussels and Luxembourg and Switzerland... but if those places disappeared tomorrow, the global financial power structure would live on. It's like The Blob – it just keeps getting bigger, and if you try and fight it, it only gets bigger faster. And besides, it lives, by and large, largely in electronic form, which makes it harder than ever to comprehend and even harder to catch in the act of any of the countless machinations it must perform on a daily basis in order to maintain its power. Now granted, there are, undoubtedly, somewhere in the world, “Scrooge McDuck money bins” full of gold, other precious metals, and precious stones... and maybe art, stamps, rare wines, and coins as well. These are the most basic holders of value, and have proven reliable for eons -- compared to which, what we fancifully call "money" or "currency" is no more than a will-o-the-wisp. But the everyday manipulations – the incremental accumulation of wealth – its inevitable falling toward the center of gravity of the financial universe... these are done, by and large, through the magic of electrons. The powers that be know that national currencies are worthless (except maybe for Switzerland's), but they also know that most people do not know this -- so currency remains the medium of exchange for the ongoing world-wide scam of redistributing wealth from the ignorant to the wise. (And the stock markets of the world are simply the public face of the currency scams -- they are where the sheep go to get sheared, in other words.)

But then the question inevitably arises, “So what?” In other words, can't the common man – the average schmuck – go on about his life of quiet desperation, ignoring the battles that rage among the pachyderms? And the answer is yes, of course – the masses of humanity always have the advantage of being... the masses. There are just too damn many of us for The Power to keep track of at every moment, day and night, everywhere in the world – although, heaven knows, they try hard enough with con games like the Patriot Act. But then the question arises, are we really that much worse off under The Regime than we would be if we ran wild and free like the mountain gorilla? In other words, if the world had no power structure... if the only “power” in the world was that of local tribal chiefs, for instance... would we really be that much better off? And I think that the answer is – maybe not, but at least we wouldn't be slaves. Because the way things are set up now, we _are_ slaves, although we are much fatter and (we think) happier than most slaves down through history.

See, this is what the Ron Paul campaign was really about – and why it attracted a few fervid believers, and failed to attract the vast majority of willing serfs. Beyond a certain point, “liberty” becomes – for most people -- an abstraction, because they are simply uninterested in whatever true human liberty means, or has to offer. Offer a fat house cat a chance to go wandering through the jungle – chances are he'll come to the door and take a few sniffs, and decide it's not for him. And who can blame him, since cradle-to-grave “security” is all he knows? See, libertarians, and Objectivists (of the Ayn Rand type) always assume that unfettered liberty... freedom, whatever... is man's highest goal and aspiration, and that anything less is a betrayal of human nature and a compromise with the forces of collectivism, statism, evil, etc. But what if it turns out that a huge part of human nature is the desire to sit on one's ass and let someone else do all the work? What then? Can this possibly be some sort of mutation in the human genome that has opportunistically bubbled to the surface with a vengeance in this age of socialism, collectivism, and welfare? If you go by the results of the 2008 election, the dominant species among the voters seems to be the one that wants ever more government power and control over their lives – or at least over the lives of everyone else. They may want, or enjoy, a few meagre crumbs of liberty with which to pursue their own agenda... but as to granting it to everyone, why, that's far too risky. It's easier to give up unused freedoms oneself than to retain them and take the risk that everyone else is retaining theirs as well. See, this is the basic point – people are afraid of freedom for themselves, but they are absolutely terrified of it for others... so the “compromise” is to give up their own in order to maintain “law and order” (or whatever it's called by liberals). So the world sinks into increasing blandness, and very few people see the difference, or care. And those lone voices crying in the wilderness – like the ex-Ron Paul campaigners – remain alone, and in the wilderness, because they really and truly do care about ideas – ideas that are mere abstractions, and therefore irrelevant, for everybody else. They care about freedom so much, for instance, that they are even willing to grant freedoms to others than they themselves are not all that interested in, or are unlikely to ever use. But do they consider this a sacrifice? No, because they are willing to grant unto others the same legitimacy as individuals – as created beings – that they grant unto themselves. Whereas for liberals, there is, ultimately, a sense of solipsism: I am all that exists, everyone else is mere wallpaper. (This is somewhat, but not a lot, better than the psychopath's basic premise that he is all that exists, and everyone else is just there for his amusement.) For a typical liberal, any “right” that he does not value should not be granted to others, because they are wrong to value it. Thus, he imposes his value system on the world. A genuine respect for “diversity” would involve valuing the right of others to value things that one does not value. Got that? But that is not what liberals mean when they talk about “diversity”. What they mean is, it's OK to act out some superficial, folksy “differences” as long as, on the core level, we all believe the same thing and all vote the same way. So the “diverse” world for a liberal is like a bunch of kindergarteners all dressed up for Halloween – under those colorful costumes we're all the same, and that's as it should be. Whereas people interested in true liberty are perfectly willing to accept a world in which, under those colorful costumes, we really _are_ extremely different, and no amount of “foreign aid” or empire building is going to change that. It's the liberal attitude that welcomes people into the U.S. without regard for their racial, ethnic, and cultural attitudes – no matter how much violence and hostility are contained therein – because, as we all know, those things are mere illusions... only skin deep... and the moment our “new Americans” gaze upon the benign countenance of Obama, they will become loyal subscribers to the New American Utopia, and all will be well. Well, OK then, so explain, if you please, characters like Nidal Malik Hasan. Oh, but – they'll say – he was only an aberration. Not true! Not if you accept that his attitudes, and the actions he took based on them, are shared by millions of Moslems the world over.

When we were fighting the Germans and Japanese in World War II, it was remarked how much better our POWs were treated by the Germans than by the Japanese. This was simply the sign of a very different, very alien, culture. We had a similar experience with the North Koreans and the Viet Cong. Does this make them less than human? No – it just makes them humans of a vastly different stripe... and we have yet to effectively deal with that fact in our dealings with other nations and cultures. We assume that because every country on earth sends representatives to the United Nations, and they all dress decently and know how to use the bathroom, we are all pretty much the same – which really means that everyone on earth is like an American, or could be if they would just make a few trivial changes in their life style. And it doesn't seem to matter how often this premise is proven wrong, it continues to dominate our foreign policy and dealings with other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups, including our own “minorities”. No – underneath those colorful native costumes, people are still different, and no matter how deep you dig and probe, they stay different. Thousands of anthropologists have made a career of studying this phenomenon. Of course, all human beings have the same basic organic needs – air, water, food, and what not. They tend to form families, and villages, and tribes. They tend to develop division of labor. They tend to develop agriculture and technology on some level. But deep in that mysterious core of the human psyche – where the religious impulse is born, as well as its alternatives (philosophy, ethics, politics, global warming, etc.) -- there are vast and profound differences in both metaphysics (how does the world work?) and epistemology (how do we know?). And the vainglorious thing about America – as about all empires – is that we care little, if at all, for these differences, assuming that with enough silver crossing enough palms, and enough bombing, we can bend the world to our will while completely ignoring anything that makes the rest of humanity tick. And again, this premise has proven wrong time and time again, but we continue to base our entire foreign (and much of our domestic) policy on it, because... why? Because we are, in fact, so insecure about our own world view and view of ourselves? Because if that were ever questioned, the entire edifice might come tumbling down? And if this is the case, why is our self image anchored to something so ephemeral... so arbitrary... so false? Is it because America is a nation – perhaps the first and only nation to date – founded on ideas, rather than the much more solid and reliable factors of race, ethnicity, and faith? Is it possible that those ideas, which seemed to serve us so well in the early years, have been played out, and are now more of a burden than an asset? When one contrasts our ideas, or ideals, with debacles like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as with our ongoing and daily-compounding economic and social crises at home, it is tempting to think that they were all a terrible mistake from the beginning – that mere secular concepts cannot make up for the older, more traditional bases for social organizations. In a sense, it's like what happens when one substitutes “ethics” for morality – it works for a while, provided it has internal consistency and obvious means of application. But eventually we find that mere “ethics” has no heart, and no soul. Likewise, we are now finding out that an ideational, propositional basis for a society – and a nation – served about as well as could be imagined, but now that we have gotten “up close and personal” with the rest of the world, and all of its troublesome real diversity, we are finding that those things only go so far, and that they ultimately lack legitimacy where much of the world is concerned (and don't their opinions count, after all?)... and that what we have always considered the moral high ground, on which we firmly stand, is made up of the same clay, sand, and muck as everyone else's point of view, so they are no longer (assuming they were ever) awed by our moral superiority. So we go into battle, and continue to fight it out on the world stage, as equals... to everyone else, even if in our delusions we still consider ourselves superior. The crown on our head is, in fact, only in our head – the rest of the world doesn't see it. Wouldn't life be easier if we just, once and for all, admitted this fact and took a huge dose of humility... and tossed out that boxcar full of hubris?