N_E_S_S_R
19-03-2006, 11:12
Hi everyone:
I've posted for your review an essay I wrote, "Thoughtcrime and The Poisoned Libertarian Ideal". I wrote it as the opening post of a blog that I started... that's why the references to blogging at some points in the article, but they're not central to the theme. Enjoy, and I hope it spurs some discussion.
Thoughtcrime and the Poisoned Libertarian Ideal
In Orwell's "1984", protagonist Winston Smith seals his doom on page two by committing the cardinal sin of opening a diary.
Thoughtcrime... the existence of unorthodoxy within the confines of one's own cranium... is the nucleus of all dissent, and the Oligarchical Collectivist regimes of Orwell's Superstates strive to contain it by asepsis. Memory must be malleable, the recorded past readily mutable, if thoughtcrime is to be averted by such devices as doublethink. No citizen must ever be able to refer to any historical record that might challenge what the State has to say on any matter.
To keep a rational, sequential record of one's thoughts and observations, then, is to engender thoughtcrime. Winston opens a diary, and this consummate act of rebellion lands him inevitably in Room 101.
I'm opening a blog here today. It's one of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands on the internet. For reasons quite different from Winston's, I find myself wondering whether anyone will ever read it.
Winston writes his diary to an unknown reader from some future era when, he dares imagine, the oppression of the present will have passed. In America today, where I write, there is no totalitarianism, not in the sense that Orwell imagined anyway. There is Oligarchy all right... but it isn't Collectivist. It's Capitalist, certainly, and Corporatist to a great degree. It's also Libertarian-- whatever that means. More on that later.
Winston couldn't have shown his diary to anybody, or they'd have ratted him out to the Thought Police. I'm publishing my blog here for all to see... as so very many in the present day have done. And perhaps the utter anonimity, the complete insignificance of any one voice in this vast and clamorous expanse ensures a tyranny of opinion as absolute, a monopoly of expression as complete as the Thought Police could ever have established. Whether you are the only one writing or drowned out by a hundred thousand others like yourself, the net result is the same.
The alternative social and political culture that has sprung up on the internet, in response to the hijacking of mainstream opinion-making by the corporate media in recent years, appears to have made a fetish of the Libertarian ideal across the board. Left and right wingers both seem to agree, very largely, on the paramountcy of individual rights and civil liberties. A very popular website among the politically inclined, www.politicalcompass.org , has acknowledged this burgeoning trend by defining a biaxial map of political opinion rather than the conventional left-right spectrum we're used to thinking in terms of. The Political Compass folks have a horizontal axis ranging from the economic left (socialism) to the economic right (neo-liberalism), and across the origin, a vertical axis from social authoritarianism to social libertarianism. Thus, Stalin is considered economic left and social authoritarian; Gandhi is economic left and social libertarian; George W. Bush's neocons would be economic right and social authoritarian, while economists like Milton Friedman are economic right and social libertarian.
It's my contention that the libertarian ideal as it exists today is a dangerously pernicious mirage. In America today, it has replaced religion as the preferred opiate of a good chunk of the masses, and in effect allows a corporatist, authoritarian status quo to maintain itself by invoking the mantra of individual liberty. It is our "freedom", remember, that we are told the terrorists hate.
Certainly, it's hard to argue with the libertarian ideal on the face of it. Who except inveterate red-staters would oppose the precepts of individual freedom, the idea that the State should play a minimal role which impinges as little as possible upon the lives and choices of private citizens? Shouldn't we all be free to do and say as we want, as long as we don't tread on the rights of our fellows?
We should, of course. What often slips through the cracks in our understanding of the world around us, unfortunately, is the essential antipathy towards social responsibility that the libertarian ideal implies. Yes, we should all have individual rights, but is the abdication of social responsibility desirable when the rights of some are curtailed perforce by the disadvantaged position they occupy on the social and economic ladder? Yes, we should all have freedom of choice, but is this even possible when many individuals have far less choice and opportunity than others because the playing field is so far from level to begin with? Whose responsibility is it to level that playing field? Who is capable of such, other than the State?
This leads us to the libertarian paradox. If the State intervenes to level the playing field, ensuring equal rights and freedoms for all, it curbs the rights and freedoms of the more privileged by virtue of its intervention. If it stays out of the game as required by the libertarian ideal, it effectively guarantees that some individuals will have more rights and liberties than others in perpetuity ... contributing to the maintenance of a hierarchical status quo that is anything but "libertarian". The fine line between asserting one's own individual rights and freedoms to the maximum extent without trampling on those of others, is a border that must be demarcated and consistently policed... but if not by the State, then by whom? And if the State does it, is it libertarian anymore?
The epigenesis of American Libertarianism, according to a psychologist I once knew, derives from the bizzarre upbringing common to many of the baby-boomer generation. Their parents strove never to deny them anything they might want or ask for, perhaps as a reaction to the privations they had themselves endured during the Depression and the Second World War. When they grew to the age of 18, their parents turned them out into the world with a sense of entitlement that no generation of Americans had grown up with before. A tendency to claim as rights what their forefathers might have recognized as privileges. To speak plainly, a vein of selfishness and irresponsibility quite unprecedented in American society.
The trend continued with each successive generation of Americans growing up to be protracted adolescents, by and large-- wanting what they wanted and wanting it now, and the hell with everyone else. Some had more power to act on their desires legitimately and legally than others. No one was willing to give an inch, and as conflicts inevitably arose, a Culture of the Victim took hold. Litigation grew into a multi-billion dollar industry.
Drifting on the currents of intense anti-Communism during the Cold War era, those who professed Libertarian beliefs began to drift towards more conventionally conservative viewpoints. Smaller government and fiscal conservatism were co-opted into the Libertarian platform. Coupled with the tendency to abdicate social responsibility and look out exclusively for number one, these political currents led us to the sort of Libertarianism that is prevalent in present times.
It is our very obsession with defending our individual liberties that traps us in the prisons within which we find ourselves encaged today. We've asked the government to lower taxes, and they have. Almost entirely to the benefit of the rich, widening the gap in distribution of wealth. We've asked the government to play less of a role in our lives, and they have, by cutting back on programs that benefit the underprivileged. We've demanded a smaller role for the government in the economy and they have obliged us again... allowing the corporations to become all-powerful, to establish a system of political patronage so that they own all the politicians we actually have a choice to vote into office.
Call the government on any of this, and its supporters will respond by taking a leaf from the libertarian book, and playing the victim. Class War, they will rage, as if there weren't already a class war being perpetrated on the disadvantaged by the privileged with the full backing of the government.
However, greatest fallacy of all in the Libertarian ideal lies in the completely warped perception, in the eyes of self-described Libertarians, of the alternative.
From the point of view of the form of government... the opposite of libertarianism, as reflected in the Political Compass map, is authoritarianism. However, from the point of view of individuals, it is collectivism. It is the right of individuals (guaranteed in the fourth amendment) to form associations and bargain collectively in their common interest.
Libertarians are inclined to be suspicious of collectivism, because of the implied sacrifice of individual liberties and freedoms in favor of collective interests... after all, you can't make looking out for number one your primary interest while bargaining collectively. Today's Libertarian, for instance, is more likely to chafe and complain over the inconvenience caused to him by a striking public-works union than respect the rights for which the union workers are demonstrating. This sort of frustration and antipathy was amply demonstrated by many New Yorkers who consider themselves Libertarian, during last December's transit workers' strike for example.
What they fail to realize is that the alternative to changing the status quo through collectivism... pretty much your only choice in a democracy, where numbers matter... is to accept the propogation of the status quo in perpetuity, however illiberal it might be. We can have a hundred thousand individual blogs here ranting about the Bush regime, and yet... if we continue to insist on the paramountcy of individual rights while Bush's supporters from red-state parishes continue to vote en-bloc as they did in '04, we're effectively ensuring that the government's illegal wiretapping of phone conversations and detaining citizens without trial for long periods continues. We hand victory after victory to collectivist single-issue voters on such battles as abortion rights, because to us, a gestalt of issues that each of us feels strongly about as individuals is more important. How libertarian is that?
The fact is, modern libertarianism in America is the Trojan Horse of the conservative defenders of an illiberal status quo. Until we realize that some things might be more pressing than making sure our individual liberties are sacrosanct... we will remain a hundred thousand anonymous bloggers spouting off ineffectually into the darkness.
From the age of libertarianism, from the age of Bush, from the age of no man is his brother's keeper... greetings!
I've posted for your review an essay I wrote, "Thoughtcrime and The Poisoned Libertarian Ideal". I wrote it as the opening post of a blog that I started... that's why the references to blogging at some points in the article, but they're not central to the theme. Enjoy, and I hope it spurs some discussion.
Thoughtcrime and the Poisoned Libertarian Ideal
In Orwell's "1984", protagonist Winston Smith seals his doom on page two by committing the cardinal sin of opening a diary.
Thoughtcrime... the existence of unorthodoxy within the confines of one's own cranium... is the nucleus of all dissent, and the Oligarchical Collectivist regimes of Orwell's Superstates strive to contain it by asepsis. Memory must be malleable, the recorded past readily mutable, if thoughtcrime is to be averted by such devices as doublethink. No citizen must ever be able to refer to any historical record that might challenge what the State has to say on any matter.
To keep a rational, sequential record of one's thoughts and observations, then, is to engender thoughtcrime. Winston opens a diary, and this consummate act of rebellion lands him inevitably in Room 101.
I'm opening a blog here today. It's one of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands on the internet. For reasons quite different from Winston's, I find myself wondering whether anyone will ever read it.
Winston writes his diary to an unknown reader from some future era when, he dares imagine, the oppression of the present will have passed. In America today, where I write, there is no totalitarianism, not in the sense that Orwell imagined anyway. There is Oligarchy all right... but it isn't Collectivist. It's Capitalist, certainly, and Corporatist to a great degree. It's also Libertarian-- whatever that means. More on that later.
Winston couldn't have shown his diary to anybody, or they'd have ratted him out to the Thought Police. I'm publishing my blog here for all to see... as so very many in the present day have done. And perhaps the utter anonimity, the complete insignificance of any one voice in this vast and clamorous expanse ensures a tyranny of opinion as absolute, a monopoly of expression as complete as the Thought Police could ever have established. Whether you are the only one writing or drowned out by a hundred thousand others like yourself, the net result is the same.
The alternative social and political culture that has sprung up on the internet, in response to the hijacking of mainstream opinion-making by the corporate media in recent years, appears to have made a fetish of the Libertarian ideal across the board. Left and right wingers both seem to agree, very largely, on the paramountcy of individual rights and civil liberties. A very popular website among the politically inclined, www.politicalcompass.org , has acknowledged this burgeoning trend by defining a biaxial map of political opinion rather than the conventional left-right spectrum we're used to thinking in terms of. The Political Compass folks have a horizontal axis ranging from the economic left (socialism) to the economic right (neo-liberalism), and across the origin, a vertical axis from social authoritarianism to social libertarianism. Thus, Stalin is considered economic left and social authoritarian; Gandhi is economic left and social libertarian; George W. Bush's neocons would be economic right and social authoritarian, while economists like Milton Friedman are economic right and social libertarian.
It's my contention that the libertarian ideal as it exists today is a dangerously pernicious mirage. In America today, it has replaced religion as the preferred opiate of a good chunk of the masses, and in effect allows a corporatist, authoritarian status quo to maintain itself by invoking the mantra of individual liberty. It is our "freedom", remember, that we are told the terrorists hate.
Certainly, it's hard to argue with the libertarian ideal on the face of it. Who except inveterate red-staters would oppose the precepts of individual freedom, the idea that the State should play a minimal role which impinges as little as possible upon the lives and choices of private citizens? Shouldn't we all be free to do and say as we want, as long as we don't tread on the rights of our fellows?
We should, of course. What often slips through the cracks in our understanding of the world around us, unfortunately, is the essential antipathy towards social responsibility that the libertarian ideal implies. Yes, we should all have individual rights, but is the abdication of social responsibility desirable when the rights of some are curtailed perforce by the disadvantaged position they occupy on the social and economic ladder? Yes, we should all have freedom of choice, but is this even possible when many individuals have far less choice and opportunity than others because the playing field is so far from level to begin with? Whose responsibility is it to level that playing field? Who is capable of such, other than the State?
This leads us to the libertarian paradox. If the State intervenes to level the playing field, ensuring equal rights and freedoms for all, it curbs the rights and freedoms of the more privileged by virtue of its intervention. If it stays out of the game as required by the libertarian ideal, it effectively guarantees that some individuals will have more rights and liberties than others in perpetuity ... contributing to the maintenance of a hierarchical status quo that is anything but "libertarian". The fine line between asserting one's own individual rights and freedoms to the maximum extent without trampling on those of others, is a border that must be demarcated and consistently policed... but if not by the State, then by whom? And if the State does it, is it libertarian anymore?
The epigenesis of American Libertarianism, according to a psychologist I once knew, derives from the bizzarre upbringing common to many of the baby-boomer generation. Their parents strove never to deny them anything they might want or ask for, perhaps as a reaction to the privations they had themselves endured during the Depression and the Second World War. When they grew to the age of 18, their parents turned them out into the world with a sense of entitlement that no generation of Americans had grown up with before. A tendency to claim as rights what their forefathers might have recognized as privileges. To speak plainly, a vein of selfishness and irresponsibility quite unprecedented in American society.
The trend continued with each successive generation of Americans growing up to be protracted adolescents, by and large-- wanting what they wanted and wanting it now, and the hell with everyone else. Some had more power to act on their desires legitimately and legally than others. No one was willing to give an inch, and as conflicts inevitably arose, a Culture of the Victim took hold. Litigation grew into a multi-billion dollar industry.
Drifting on the currents of intense anti-Communism during the Cold War era, those who professed Libertarian beliefs began to drift towards more conventionally conservative viewpoints. Smaller government and fiscal conservatism were co-opted into the Libertarian platform. Coupled with the tendency to abdicate social responsibility and look out exclusively for number one, these political currents led us to the sort of Libertarianism that is prevalent in present times.
It is our very obsession with defending our individual liberties that traps us in the prisons within which we find ourselves encaged today. We've asked the government to lower taxes, and they have. Almost entirely to the benefit of the rich, widening the gap in distribution of wealth. We've asked the government to play less of a role in our lives, and they have, by cutting back on programs that benefit the underprivileged. We've demanded a smaller role for the government in the economy and they have obliged us again... allowing the corporations to become all-powerful, to establish a system of political patronage so that they own all the politicians we actually have a choice to vote into office.
Call the government on any of this, and its supporters will respond by taking a leaf from the libertarian book, and playing the victim. Class War, they will rage, as if there weren't already a class war being perpetrated on the disadvantaged by the privileged with the full backing of the government.
However, greatest fallacy of all in the Libertarian ideal lies in the completely warped perception, in the eyes of self-described Libertarians, of the alternative.
From the point of view of the form of government... the opposite of libertarianism, as reflected in the Political Compass map, is authoritarianism. However, from the point of view of individuals, it is collectivism. It is the right of individuals (guaranteed in the fourth amendment) to form associations and bargain collectively in their common interest.
Libertarians are inclined to be suspicious of collectivism, because of the implied sacrifice of individual liberties and freedoms in favor of collective interests... after all, you can't make looking out for number one your primary interest while bargaining collectively. Today's Libertarian, for instance, is more likely to chafe and complain over the inconvenience caused to him by a striking public-works union than respect the rights for which the union workers are demonstrating. This sort of frustration and antipathy was amply demonstrated by many New Yorkers who consider themselves Libertarian, during last December's transit workers' strike for example.
What they fail to realize is that the alternative to changing the status quo through collectivism... pretty much your only choice in a democracy, where numbers matter... is to accept the propogation of the status quo in perpetuity, however illiberal it might be. We can have a hundred thousand individual blogs here ranting about the Bush regime, and yet... if we continue to insist on the paramountcy of individual rights while Bush's supporters from red-state parishes continue to vote en-bloc as they did in '04, we're effectively ensuring that the government's illegal wiretapping of phone conversations and detaining citizens without trial for long periods continues. We hand victory after victory to collectivist single-issue voters on such battles as abortion rights, because to us, a gestalt of issues that each of us feels strongly about as individuals is more important. How libertarian is that?
The fact is, modern libertarianism in America is the Trojan Horse of the conservative defenders of an illiberal status quo. Until we realize that some things might be more pressing than making sure our individual liberties are sacrosanct... we will remain a hundred thousand anonymous bloggers spouting off ineffectually into the darkness.
From the age of libertarianism, from the age of Bush, from the age of no man is his brother's keeper... greetings!