Why Individual Freedom Sucks and We Shouldn't (Necessarily) Fear China

image courtesy of www.patriotdepot.comI'm about to commit an American taboo worse than almost anything except making a racist joke: I'm about to make the suggestion that the individual freedom held as a sacred value in Western Democracies can be bad.  As a libertarian, this is especially uncharacteristic of me, but self-criticism is necessary and awesome.  Keep in mind that I'm not saying that individual freedom is always bad; I'm simply making the point that there are trade-offs, and a strong case to be made for restraint coercive or otherwise, preferably otherwise.   

Over at League of Ordinary Gentlemen, the blog for long-form general discussion, two threads particularly have got me thinking about the downside of glorifying individual freedom: the first is Rufus F.'s continuing series on Confucian politics, wherein bans are enforced prescriptively and organically by sophisticated senses of public taste, and not by top-down (or indirectly bottom-up, i.e. Democratic) proscriptive edict as in the West (think: Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Goods).  The Inductive's Josh Weinstein has also written about this recently. 

The second LoOG discussion has been Will's series on immigration, and how the idea of open borders has its limitations.  Perhaps immigrants from other cultures really do threaten the fabric of American core values.  I don't personally believe this, and I think Mark Thompson has written a dismantling criticism of the current xenophobia gripping America.  But it's worth considering.   

From Locke to the founding of the American Republic, it is in our American bones to live and let live, but a downside to this which the I-having-lived-in-Japan-for-four-years can now appreciate is that we basically let assholes treat members of other countries like shit, because that's their right.  They're our assholes, and far be it from us freedom-loving Americans to tell them what to do, even if the results hurt everybody.  Two good cases in point of a few assholes ruining the Western Civilization are slavery and imperialism.  These are probably the darkest examples, but even in today's climate of corporate/government pseudo-imperialism, the attitude that Halliburton has an inalienable right to Iraqi oil remains. 

This privileging of American entities over the entities of other countries must come to an end at some point.  When I was writing my article on American foreign policy last year, I came across many different figures for the Iraq and Afghanistan death tolls.  Almost all of those figures seemed to prioritize American casualties, and ignore the far greater number of Iraqi and Afghan casualties (scroll down on the right for casualty figures), because nobody cares.  And, on the darker side for our children, we have yet to feel the blowback for those wars.

What I am suggesting here is that we as Americans value the lives of our own citizens more than the lives of the world's citizens, and while I realize that evil exists and we can't all sing kumbaya and hold hands around the fire, this attitude has to be purged in our increasingly international world if we want to be on the right side of history. 

As for being on the wrong side of history, slavery was not, despite what the soft, self-loathing liberal establishment might say (to do my best Michael Savage impression) perpetrated by a centrally organized, money-loving Old Boys Club like "The Company" from Prison Break.  It was perpetrated by greedy Goldman Sachs types, who were allowed to exercise the rights of free commerce by an ignorant leadership.  At their early stages, the empires of Europe were built by private companies which initially received the backing of European crowns and mobs but were eventually taken over by national armies in the world's first bailouts.   

I've often heard the argument that China has never invaded another country (with the notable exceptions of Tibet and the Uighur Autonymous Region/Xinjiang which were perpetrated under Communist and thereby necessarily expansionist ideologue regimes) as seeming proof that the Chinese are not a threat to American global hegemony.  While this argument is totally unpersuasive, there is something to be said for the empirical evidence: in its 3,000 years, China has had seemingly little interest in conquering the outside world.  There may be a cultural restraint that is clearly absent in the West, from Alexander to Hitler. 

As a semi-side note: a short case in point of why the Confucian model is superior: drinking beer on the streets.  In Asian countries there is no law against walking down the street or even riding in a car and drinking a beer, and if you think about it, why should there be?  Accordingly, since you're allowed to drink on the streets, and this activity usually doesn't convey any real benefits, no one really does it.  There's no thrill, and you're just left with a can to throw out somewhere.  In the U.S. on the other hand, proscriptive bans on open containers cause a lot of people to lash out in a biological fight-or-flight way, get riotously drunk, and set shit on fire, because, really, fuck the police, right?  It's a free country, and I do what I want.  It's amazing to see the absence of a law prohibiting an action resulting in that action's effective prohibition, but an unenforceable law prohibiting an action creates a culture where citizens buck horns.  Einstein is surely rolling in his grave.

It seems to me that the vision of America offered by the antiwar left-libertarian coalition holds the key to a non-aggressive America returned to its roots, seeking to lead the next stage of human development by neutral example like Switzerland.  This may be a naive pipe-dream, but it is what must happen next if humanity is to make any progress beyond our warring-states phase.  That is, individual freedom is awesome, but we should impose a communal restraint on the behavior of those who would tarnish its good name.      

Comments

[Joseph Cox]

A big problem with open container laws in the U.S. is that they are under the umbrella of "quality of life" crimes- vagrancy, creating a public disturbance, taking up two seats on the subway and simple drug possession are other examples- which exist mostly as reasons for the police to fuck with you if they feel like it. At some point we decided that public efficiency warranted tiny invasions of natural liberty and the next thing you know it, the cop is always right and you are always fucked. If you are driving then you necessarily must be doing something that warrants police intervention- if they feel like it- and if you happen to be young and black, they are gonna feel like it a lot more than if you are a white mom in a minivan.

This is the sort of area, like ending building and licensing restrictions that make most places in the U.S. inefficient and boring, where I wish more libertarians and liberals would work together instead of kind of sticking together in their little tribes. C'est la vie.