Freedom

When I was a very young man, back in the early 70s (some time before decided, around the early 80s, that I was actually a socialist) I I read a book called “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World” by self-styled libertarian Harry Browne, and decided that I, too, was a libertarian.  I later realized that what I liked about the book (and still do, at least in my fading recollection) has little to do with libertarianism as usually conceived.  It  is a theme that does run as a thread through libertarianism, submerged beneath a fetishization of property* and a mytho-heroic cult of the individual**, but it is far broader.  It is a theme in philosophies as old as classical stoicism and as new as the existentialism of Sartre and de Beauvoir.  This is the theme that, in the truest sense, freedom is not something that we strive for, but something that all humans inalienably have. 

In this idea of freedom, freedom is defined as the ability to choose between real alternatives.  This freedom is always constrained, by what the existentialists called “facticity” – by circumstances outside of ourselves that limit the alternatives actually available at any given time.  But the choice is real – and this is the only kind of choice we ever really have.  What we usually think of as “freedom” is to have a choice between more attractive alternatives.  This improvement of the conditions of choice is something that humans can often accomplish, but only if we start by exercising our freedom; by making good choices between the actual alternatives available to us, right here and now.

Hoofnotes:

*A case in point would be the political philosophy of Robert Nozick.

**Courtesy of Ayn Rand, I take it.  (Her, I haven’t read.)

Speaking the truth, precisely

“Nella politica di massa dire la verità è una necessità politica, precisamente.” - Antonio Gramsci

That Gramsci quote has been the tagline to my personal email account for quite a while, now.  “In mass politics, speaking the truth is a political necessity, precisely.”  It is one of my all-time favorite quotes.  I think about it all the time.  What does it really mean?  Not so much to Gramsci, but to me.  It flies so much in the face of most “pragmatic” political thinking, which is all about how you present the facts, phrasing, paraphrasing, restructuring, eliding, evading, to “win hearts and minds”… guided by your polls and focus groups.   Political activists, even left ones, usually seem perfectly complacent with some version of Plato’s “noble lie”.  But not Gramsci.  “..to speak the truth is a political necessity, precisely.”

Lately, I’ve been thinking the difference is one of goals.  If your goal is to win elections, even if your goal is to make people’s lives in some way materially better, then strategic lies and half-truths may be helpful.  If your goal is to emancipate people, then to speak the truth, as precisely and clearly as you can, becomes an urgent necessity.  You cannot free people with a lie.  The best a lie can do is to help them exchange one chain for another.

(I wrote about another take on this quote back in July of 2010.)

Freedom Man

When I was a very young man, for a time I adhered to a philosophy I called “libertarianism”, under the influence of a rather obscure author named Harry Browne, and his book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.  (No, I never read Ayn Rand.)

Later in life, I realized that one of the central premises of libertarianism, as I knew it, was irredeemably incoherent.  This is the idea that no one has the right to interfere with those of my decisions that affect “only me”.  I came to realize that, as we are members of a social species, unavoidably members of one or more overlapping communities, the conceptual boundaries of a decision that affects “only me” cannot be rationally delineated.  I also came to realize that some of the ideas that had attracted me to Browne’s version of libertarianism were less libertarian, and more like a version of classical (Greek and Roman) stoicism, absent the mystical underpinnings.  These ideas could be summed up by saying that you are responsible, on a certain level, for your own “happiness”, or physical and psychic well-being.  This is not to say that you cannot understand that you have been victimized, by fate or by other humans, but rather to say that, at any given point in your life, you are faced with real, de facto choices for how to move forward.  Regardless of how this came to pass, your future happiness is best ensured by taking responsibility for those choices, and making them  as wisely and resolutely as possible.  Further, to accept these facts, and this responsibility, is psychically liberating, in-and-of itself.

Browne’s contribution, which has had enduring value for me (long after I threw out the rest of his ideas), was to base this concept of personal responsibility in a materialist philosophy, unlike the classical stoics, who believed in a universal soul or mind, divided into parts or sparks indwelling in each of us – personal souls which desired nothing so much as to reunite with the universal.  Giving the stoical concepts a materialist base also avoids the worst rhetorical abuses of classical stoicism, like advising adherents that even if you were captured and tortured by an enemy, you could literally feel no pain, if you were true to the dictates of your own inner soul.

Speaking of the universal soul or mind (the ancient Greek term “psyche” did not distinguish between the two), leads me to a semi-related thought:  to say that there is no universal mind, and no souls to unite with it, is not the same as saying “we are tiny, isolated, alone.”   I’m not just referring to the aforementioned overlapping communities (the person who cries “we are alone” in existential angst on the denial of a supreme being hardly denies those).  But the concept of “us” as atomic individuals, as something that could be “isolated” somehow, separated from the matrix we are a part of, doesn’t seem consistent with the actual state of affairs.

The fact is, if you step back far enough, “we” hardly seem to exist – certainly not as indivisible atoms.  Physically and psychically, “we” are complexes of complexes, colonies of colonies, each, on each level, having fuzzy boundaries which rather vaguely distinguish and define both its limits and its interactions; stronger interactions each with “each other” (parts of the same organism); and generally and observably – but still vaguely – weaker ones with “the other” (the world beyond the organism).  These complexes of complexes are hardly isolated from the universe.  They could not possibly be – their boundaries are too fuzzy, and irreducibly overlap!   The “self” that feels oppressed with solitude is just a particular sub-bundle, and a rather confused one, at that, which invents a mystical purpose and something to commune with to try and solve an imagined problem.

The title I selected for this mini-piece was suggested by Jim Morrison’s song “Universal Mind”.  Which has almost nothing to do with the two disparate points of this essay.  But one of the complexes of my psyche happens to work like that.  At least I didn’t call it “Turning keys, setting people free.”  That would have been hubristic.  (And now, with my suitcase and my song, I’m off…)