Rationalpolitik

 The Intellectual Virtue of Absolute Freedom

(Extract in Blog | Full text hereunder (Free))

    In philosophy, absolute freedom means the independence of all restraints, moralist as well as legal. It is usually marked as a negative freedom for reasons I am not going to dive into as we are not here to hold a Lycian debate on the philosophical stance; at least not purely, traditional-ly. (Other than that, we can note that negative freedom usually means the absence of a state to restrain one’s freedom of movement, speech or any other register) My interest is more obtuse, more politically coloured. I want to discuss the intellectual virtue of absolute freedom, although the word “absolute” is misleading, as it implies an egoist fashion pioneered by the likes of Ayn Rand and Max Stirner, the latter in particular. (Without turning into the true pioneers of ancient Greece, captivated by Plato in his dialogues, preserved in writings such as the «Politéia». As interesting as they may be, I haven’t read them and am uncertain about their value for the times we inhabit, with many more, much more current writers as those I mentioned heretofore and will add up in the later passages of this text) 

By absolute, I mean in all niggard relativisation, the freedom “absolutely feasible”, without falling aback one by one. In the apparent literature, we usually arguments heading into the two most common directions: “Give us more liberties!” or “We have to withdraw certain (at worst: All) liberties in order to restore public safety and well-being!”, or will be pushed into either extreme by the masses and populist “public intellec-tuals” who deck those irredeemable stances with an intellectual vigour, in an obfuscate fashion. No-one ever wondered at which point we could have reached a crossroad, leading us respec-tively to the cognizance of completion or the path of greed into disadvantageous malfunction through overencumberance . Promoters of the original Absolution would choose the latter, which statesmen and rational thinkers would choose the former. Lo, to reach this crossroad, one firstly had to pinpoint the condition at which we could say that the breaking point had been reached, that the crossroad had been reached and it was time to part ways. It is our task to find it out. This text shall make a humble contribution to this effort, hoping that it will serve at least one person alone. And if not, I am sorry to have disappointed your already-low expectations and instead having wasted your time. Do not feel coerced into reading it—no-one must ever be coerced into doing something one doesn’t want to, without thinking that there was but one piece of benefit left for him or her. Too long have we thought that there could be good reasons to coerce someone to do something without a proper revanche. 

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    To make such an effort, we first need to identify a means to measure freedom as such. Or-ganisations like «Freedom House» could be considered as having invented this measurement; «Reporteurs sans Frontières» (RSF) as well, in measuring the scale of press freedom; or «Trans-parency International» in measuring corruption. All of them release indexes to measure what they observe as watchdogs. But how do they measure the vague concepts they dedicate their efforts to? The reader hardly learns about their calculations, one can only scroll through their rankings. They all expose the impossibility to reckon what cannot simply be separated into sin-gle pieces. Laws could of course signify the state of its existence, or non-existence. The more laws regulate a specific liberty, the lesser remains of it. Tacitus comes to mind. Some things need a certain degree of oversight, this is not to be denied, but a state has never properly man-aged to hold this oversight gingerly, or maybe it did; history has it that it didn’t, never did. That is: While it does create good institutions to oversee the parts of our society that need to be watched—the market, for example, or main stations of metro regions—its overweight impairs its movement to such an extent as that it can no longer act swiftly enough to draw consequenc-es where violations against the rule of law have been executed. A body of oversight that cannot perform quickly and penalise perpetrators is due time with even few of them is not worth the expenses the people pay for this body. It needs them to either be reformed when there is hope for its merit when burdens have been removed from its back; or abolished where there is no hope left for the institution and the people believe that a wholly new approach would be to more satisfactory results. We shall dedicate a personal focus on the latter choice—abolition—to assess the well-studied premise that a stateless society is a necessity to achieve anything close to absolute freedom. 

    Assuming that the state had been abolished, at least through (mainly) non-violent action, in-troduced through the Utopian unanimity amongst the people, a premise I have considered in previous texts such as “De Mundo Pro Omniem”. All public officials had humbly resigned their thenceforth nullified offices and sent into retirement as their prior occupation didn’t qualify for anything better than “oratory” jobs (i.e. public speakers) or Advocati Diaboli. But the Devil already signed a future contract with Roy Cohn, so that there was no new job for them to pur-sue in Hell. Retirement it thus shall be. How else, aside of an armada of leisure-suit wearing, caddy-driving seniors inhabiting the Florida panhandle, would this society look like? Although I did address this question beforehand in full detail, it is important to speak about it again as w cannot speak about the intellectual virtue of freedom of any kind when we do not elaborate on the practical conversion of our theories in the real world. Many philosophers failed to convey their ideas from the theoretical base into the physical world, so that it was up to their interpret-ers to materialise their thoughts. Yet without a precedence from the originators, it cannot be safe to say who can speak in his or her behest. To speak of an abhorrent miss would be too much, though; it shall just be said that practical philosophers like Thomas Morus, John Locke and their modern-day descendants have to be practical; they have to create their theories in the outcast metaphysical world, indubitably but they have to eventually be transferred into realistic, practical examples . 

    Liberties are categorised by niches in which they are professed. Sometimes they are also measured as either “Constitutional” and “basic” or as “civic”. Most wouldn’t consider civic lib-erties as secondary liberties, mostly because we in the Western World are used to all of them few of us had to experience infringements of these, so that the sudden limitations during the pandemic were experienced, all of the greater—one of the reasons why not all of the perceptibly fringe-right protests against “Corona Dictatorships” (in Germany) and the “Biochemical War-fare” on mainland China’s behest were all of the ideological affiliation: Some were left-winged pacifists, some were mystics; others anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. The groups were mani-fold, but assembled under a common cause: They wanted their liberties back, regardless of the reality they all were located in, and the dangers they inflicted upon themselves by not comply-ing with the common guidelines recommended by institutions like the US-American CDC, the German BMG, or the French «Ministre de la Santé», między innymi. Instead of obeying recom-mendations like two metres distance between one another, the wearing of a cloth or FFP2 mask or to wash one’s hands regularly, they would rather risk their lives and others’ too. 

Freedom can only work if everyoneconsiders
his peers and next ones as. mutuals.
(Source:Image by John Hain from  Pixabay)
  

    … Which also brings us to an important point in the question of how far freedom may go. Are restrictions fine when they assure that no-one’s freedom is to anybody’s downside? Stately rules of law, by and large, create laws in such a way, in accordance to the proverb that “my freedom ends where your nose begins”. (Not verbatim, and allocated to various names) Many Libertarians affirm the righteousness of this quote, but subsequently state that everyone should enforce their rights individually. Many people ridicule the so-called «Non-Aggressive Pact» (NAP) as a hotbed for vigilantism as everyone could make up their own laws and sanction vio-lations of these . Anarchists in the Leftist fashion behave in the same way: There will be no state to legislate, no police to… Police! (Sociology creates neologisms the American way) Communities would write their own Magna Charta, and declare their own militias, to go on “po-licing” in the community. The difference to the Libertarians: The latter are focused on the indi-vidual and (seem to) imagine a world in which all people lived as mavericks—inside their prop-erty, hollering at children who inadvertently kicked their ball on his front yard. (Yes, the omi-nous “Get off my lawn, you disrespectful brat” senior) Ayn Rand, through the third part of her novel, «Atlas Shrugged», transported a gaze at how a world in the Libertarian sense could look like. «Galt’s Gulch» is a simple world, and when Dagny Taggart arrived there, she immediately admitted that she was going to look for work to pay for her rent. She did not seek help but wanted to stay independent from anybody else. An honourable stance indeed, but not applica-ble onto everyone in general. According to Ms. Rand, the opposition sought coercion into mu-tual support; enforced empathy, one could say. One would be made to care, in the end. Is it realistic? Well, we do know about laws for failing to render assistance to victims of accidents. But there is little expected from the people who encounter situations as law describes them: One is not going to end up in gaol for failure to save a victims’ life, even (further) injuries—e.g. ribs broken when one tried to reanimate an important victim—are no reason for an arrest if they were inflicted onto the victim in the (botched) attempt to provide first aid. It’s the will that counts, in retrospective, even when one’s sole intent was to avoid legal repercussions. “Empa-thy in the legal sense” really does not expect much of one. Yet, if we went strictly by Ms. Rand’s comprehension of what this meant, this whole legal system, including this legal duty, worked wholly coercively, and therefore should be abolished; it should be up to passers-by whether they wanted to provide first aid, or dialled 911/112 (US—DE). How many people would have left a dying victim behind? Studies found out that there would have been too many in any such situation . Empathy and proactive sociality went to die in a world where people were not legally “coerced” but could decide whether to interact or not. Some might emphasise that botched first aid would worsen a victim’s state of health. This is true, and a reason for why emergency medics urge citizens to refresh their knowledge n first aid annually; but to dial for an ambulance could help the victim in its struggle for survival. And it does not require any ad-vanced knowledge in medicine, pharmacology, it does not require any experience or advanced equipment to assist the victim. To be a social being is hereby approached at its lowest level. 

    Any Rand of course did never think about a lethally wounded or terminally ill man; she speaks about people whose livestock was devoured by economic crisis , about the despised “parasites” and “fair-share vultures” who, according to her, want to live off the people’s taxes, without standing up to themselves, without becoming independent from this “fair share”. This would be the time when one’s (financial) liberty would be infringed for the benefits of an (alleg-edly) needy peer. 

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