American Libertarianism and the Co-operative Nature of Civilization

Here you are reading this blog.

This simple process is one that requires very fundamental agreement. Our symbols, letters, words, grammatical constructs, etc must agree in order for us to communicate.

We have many similar points of agreement: the money we use, the roads we drive on, as we conduct business or trade, how we are employed. Similarly we regulate our behavior so that we minimize the stress when engaging others.

This co-operation usually extends to our childcare, healthcare, welfare and other social mechanisms. We have law and policing to guide and regulate us. We also co-operate with the leadership we nominate or elect in our community.

All told, co-operation serves us very well. It has allowed us to transcend the harsh realities that nature would have us suffer. What we have had to relinquish with this co-operation is some of our personal freedom. This is the price we must all pay to enjoy the benefits of civilization.

Relinquishing some freedom can be viewed another way: we need to accept some amount of self-discipline to make our societies work.

Different societies demand different degrees of self-discipline. Japanese society demands personal discipine that the people of many other countries would find oppressive.

Conversely, a society that makes little demand of its people becomes ruled by tyrants and/or organized crime who victimize the majority as they employ their disciplined thugs.

Also, in any given society, there is a baseline for the personal effort required by the average person to maintain that society. When a person chooses not to do his/her part, or can't be bothered, they either end up in jail, banished, or living on the street.

Now we come to a crutial matter regarding civilization: how much personal effort do we wish to accept for the kind of society we would find desirable to live in?

This is a careful balance everyone of us must make. The first way in which we can choose is with our feet: if we don't like a particular community, we can move away. If even the nation is undesirable, we can emigrate.

We are allowed an opportunity to make small changes when we vote for our leaders. We can choose to be still more active by becoming part of the political process.

This range of involvement reflects the variety of jobs within a social infrastructure (organization).

None of this has come painlessly. Our histories are rife with smaller disciplined bands seeking to rule majorities, usually through vicious force. Wars fall within this.

The social infrastructures (assumptions) that we enjoy today were bourn at the cost of much suffering.

When a soldier's headstone reads 'Fought and died so others may live free', this freedom isn't the freedom that nature allows animals, this is the freedom from oppressive bands of thugs.

We have reached a level in the maturation of our societies where the majority of societies have outlawed undemocratic thug governments or organisations.

Generally speaking, we try to promote this kind of society.

Enter America.

America was born opposing thugs (the British Army). As such, the American leaders of the time, charged with the mission of defining this nation with its Constitution and other documents of incorporation, wanted to instill social mechanisms that minimized the chances that any oppressive regime could succeed in the future.

To that end, they wanted to empower the individual. They wanted to balance the powers of society with Constitutionally entrenched powers of the individual.

While this balance is certainly laudable, there was one small problem with what they were attempting: they were trying to balance social and individual priorities under warring circumstances.

Through necessity, this demands the individual be excessively empowered, at the expense of society, because the society will otherwise always win out.

Thls has had a profound affect on America. This gross imbalance favoring the individual has resulted in Americans largely dismissing the benevolent side of civilization so that anything of a social nature is viewed with suspicion.

This makes for a very schitzophrenic nation. On the one hand they are very proud of their national achievements, but in the next breath they will complain about their government saying how much they don't trust it, and typically denounce anything of a co-operative 'socialist' nature.

The Libertarian philosophy sums up this attitude against society: basically everyone should be free to do as they like, and no one should have to suffer any manner of imposition. Whatever co-operative arrangements that are desirable should take place as necessary.

So what's wrong with this? As noted earlier, our social infrastructures didn't just 'happen', there was a long painful process of social evolution whereby we earned the equitable societies we enjoy today.

Libertarianism, particularly as Americans wish to employ it, would maximize personal freedoms without recognizing the huge debt owed to the countless lives given to making our societies as fair as they are today.

When we can claim today that our best societies are basically democratic, that was no small feat. As anyone in any law-making capacity can attest, our laws are continually evolving and can never be neglected, let alone abandoned in favour of the ad hoc or laisser-faire approach of the Libertarian philosophy.

One group that can find Libertarianism particularly attractive is the Christian Fundamentalists of America. This can be true because their terms of reference, the Bible, is based on a level of social evolution two millenia primitive to our's.

Since Libertarianism largely dlsmisses social evolution, this fits beautifully with the Christian Fundamentalist's idiology: first, dismissing two millenia makes the world described by the Bible more contemporary, which it isn't, and second, the whole concept of evolution can also be dismissed.

Dismissing all manner of evolution is particularly attractive since the similar mechanism of natural evolution is particularly dlstasteful to Creationists, a majority among Christian Fundamentalists.

Is this 'Individual favouring' imbalance such a problem? What are the consequences? What symptoms should we be able to observe?

What would a society look like if there was an imbalance between social and individual priorities favouring the individual?

Since social priorities, like healthcare, education, etc weren't given the attention they deserve, they would be immature, if not altogether arrested in development.

The advantages of large scale financing for expensive benefits like healthcare wouldn't exist, and such concerns would languish.

This would be true except that America has many social mechanisms despite the Libertarian rhetoric. The military, education, medicine, and even welfare are financed through necessity. It would seem that for all the talk about maximizing freedom, it is too obvious that everyone's life is bettered through co-operation.

The most obvious symptom of the imbalance between individual and social priorities can be witnessed in the interpersonal exchanges among Americans. There's an assumed 'every man for himself' attitude that can be seen in many matters.

For example, this 'everyman for himself' attitude promotes the categorizing of people as winners and losers. The winners are rich and good-looking, the losers are poor dorks. Money is everything, the measure of success, and losing or second place is nothing. Bill Gates, Hugh Hefner, and Donald Trump are to be admired, emulated as heros, masters of success.

Yes, it's vain and childish, but it still serves as marching orders for the lumpenprole (typically conservatives), those who've never given their own existence a moment's thought, because if they did, the rapaciousness of it might horrify them.

Never would you hear from these people that they would wish their fellow man the best of luck in their struggles for a bit of success, because that might be wishing them more than they got themselves.

'Every man for themselves' has created tribalisms that could never exist in a socially cohesive society. These tribalisms have created gross imbalances in the American social fabric because 'everyman' is always stronger in some manner of co-operative association, even if it only includes family, or gang, or church.

Addendum 2pm, 10/14/05

The Democrats' uphill battle against the imbalance favouring the individual can be seen in this post.

In an effort to see some serious social improvement, Robert L. Borosage demonstrates how the lives of Americans can be improved. He shows many co-operative mechanisms that would do this however, there is a fundamental matter any Republican rebuttal will include: do we want a nanny state that infringes on personal freedom?

With this, one can witness the unending struggle the Democrats have. It would seem that as a survival mechanism, they have largely ignored this aspect of their Constitution, in much the same way as the Third Amendment is, and probably as they would like to ignore the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, the Republicans never allow them to succeed.

So what will have to happen? Perhaps these matters will need to be revisited, and re-evaluated in the light of modern perspectives. That however, will be a rare political platform.