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Video Description
Freedom is the air you breathe without noticing — until it is gone and you feel yourself dying. This lecture from Academy of Ideas gives a full-throated defense of freedom by examining its opposite: coercive state force. It shows how centralized government attracts the power-hungry, how constitutional limits quietly fail, and how a population of broken ‘ciphers’ keeps the Leviathan alive. Mencken’s warning cuts through the noise: the urge to save humanity is usually the urge to rule it. The video ends with a question each of us must answer: on which side do you stand?
Full Video Transcript
Freedom is the air we cannot do without, that we breathe without even noticing it, until the time comes when, deprived of it, we feel that we are dying.
It is a startling fact that throughout history, freedom has been considered so precious that some individuals have preferred death to a life in which it is absent.
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Give me liberty, or give me death.
Samuel Sharpe, the leader of a Jamaican slave rebellion, upon facing imminent execution in 1831,
professed the immortal words,
I would rather die on yonder gallows than live in slavery.
Yet freedom is no longer considered what the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen called our finest treasure.
As the heroic cry of give me liberty or give me death has been replaced by what Aldous Huxley referred to as
The cry, give me television and hamburgers, but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty.
Instead of cherishing our liberties, many of us are willing to forego them for the mere promise of a bit more safety, security, material gain, or ease of life.
But this exchange proves to be a Faustian bargain.
For as humans, we do not flourish in the safety and security of a caged existence.
Rather, we suffer like all other animals.
What is more, freedom is an essential, not optional, condition for a prosperous society.
We need freedom to generate the wealth that supports human life.
We need freedom to unleash the creativity that moves civilization forward.
And we need freedom to promote the voluntary social cooperation that keeps a society peaceful and prosperous.
Poverty increases insofar as freedom retreats throughout the world, and vice versa, wrote Albert Camus.
In this video, we are going to provide a defense of freedom, so as to counteract the complacency that many hold with regard to its life-promoting value.
To do this, we will utilize the technique of examining a thing’s antithesis, or opposite, to better grasp the nature of the object under study.
So what is the opposite of a society structured on the foundation of freedom? It is a society structured on the use of coercive force.
force. Can you not see that there are only two creeds in the world possible for men? That there
are only two sides on which a man can place himself? Are you for a free world or for a world
placed under authority? Are you a believer in force or do you take your stand on the fixed and
inalienable rights of the individual? Force used defensively to ward off aggression against one’s
person or property is almost universally accepted as necessary and justified. But in the modern
world, most people accept an additional type of force as necessary, namely, coercive force used
by centralized governments in order to exert extensive top-down control of a society. But
unlike force used defensively, there is not universal agreement as to whether centralized
government force is necessary, justified, or whether it even contributes, rather than inhibiting,
the order of a flourishing society. Some suggest that the massive centralized states that dominate
our world are parasitic and destined to destroy the societies which function as their hosts the
19th century british philosopher oberon herbert was one individual who opposed the unchecked
course of force of modern governments if course of government need exist at all then like many others
in his day herbert believed they should be more decentralized operate at a local level and that
the sole role of such governments should be to defend the individual against attacks on
person or property and that beyond that government force has no place in a free world that is the one
and only one rightful employment of force force in the defense of the plain simple rights of liberty
part of the reasoning behind his conviction was that once you grant a government the right to
use force for purposes other than defending the simple rights of liberty then a whole slew of
perilous problems follow in the wake the real danger begins where any body of persons central
or local are equipped with powers which exceed those of the individual then we prepare for
ourselves a formidable source of oppression from which as time goes on it becomes more and more
difficult to escape the first danger of granting a government the ability to control us with force
is that like any occupation politics attracts a certain type of personality it is comforting to
believe those attracted to politics are the best among us and that the electoral system prevents
megalomaniacs from attaining power, but the lessons of history suggest otherwise.
Like moths to a flame, centralized governments attract authoritarian and narcissistic
personalities who believe they know better than the rest of us, and who experience little remorse
or guilt when they manipulate, deceive, lie, or use force to sculpt society in whatever manner
they please. This is on full display in the modern world, as almost all politicians promise they will
use the power of the state to remake the world in their image, while rare to non-existent are
those who campaign to step aside and allow the individual the proper right to be free.
Oberon Herbert served as a high-ranking member of the British Parliament for nearly ten years,
and as he wrote, I saw that no guiding, no limiting or moderating principle existed in
the competition of politician against politician, but that almost all hearts were filled with the
old corrupting desire to possess that evil mocking gift of power and to use it in their
own imagined interest without question without scruple over their fellow men another problem
with granting a government the right to use force to sculpt a society is that it then becomes
practically impossible to determine what the limits of these powers should be if it is right
to use unlimited power to take one-tenth of a man’s property is it also right to take one half
or the whole if it is not right to take the half where is the magical undiscoverable point at which
right is suddenly converted into wrong if it is right to restrict a man’s faculties in one
direction is it right to restrict them in half a dozen or a dozen different directions who shall
say it is a matter of opinion taste feeling some may say the solution is to reach some sort of
reasonable consensus regarding the limits of political power and then to encode such limits
and a constitutional document, as the intention of constitutions is to serve as a political check
on the abuses of power. But when centralized governments lord over tens or hundreds of
millions of people, it becomes exceedingly difficult to prevent those with political power
from breaching constitutional limits through devious strategies and means. The American
Constitution, as one example, has long been a mere relic, as senators, congressmen, presidents,
and judges have supported countless laws that mock the intentions of the Founding Fathers.
And as recent events have shown, the masses are easily duped into accepting constitutional
breaching power grabs, so long as they are backed with sufficient propaganda and appeals to public
safety, security, and the so-called greater good. The urge to save humanity is almost always a
false face for the urge to rule it, wrote H.L. Mencken, or as Albert Camus likewise observed,
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
But perhaps the most disturbing problem that arises when a society grants a government the right to use unchecked force is that, in doing so,
such a society lights the spark that will, in the words of the historian Arnold Toynbee,
kindle the slow and steady fire of a universal state where we shall in due course be reduced to dust and ashes.
For if politics tends to attract the power-hungry, and if political power is exceedingly difficult
to limit, then once a society comes under the dominion of a centralized government,
then such a government will over time grow itself into a system of leviathan proportions,
which, like a parasite, sucks all the lifeblood from the society it governs.
Reflecting on Toynbee’s survey of history, the author Kirkpatrick Sall wrote
Time after time, Toynbee shows that civilizations begin to decay after they are unified and centralized under a single large-scale government.
For a centralized government to grow to Leviathan proportions, Herbert believed that the masses must be transformed into what he called ciphers.
Ciphers are individuals lacking in moral autonomy, deficient in critical thinking, and incapable of acting with courage.
The cipher is too afraid or incompetent to think for himself, and so, he submissively regurgitates slogans heard in the media, and robotically obeys orders from the political class.
These dehumanized non-entities are molded by years of indoctrination in state schools, decades of propaganda from media and popular culture, and constant exposure to numbing and dumbing distractions.
The cipher is the man or woman whose spirit has been broken
and who is the easy prey of the power-hungry amongst the political class.
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.
Or as Herbert explained,
the great trick, the winning of power, requires ciphers
and can’t be played in any other fashion.
Having once turned men into ciphers,
you must appeal to them as good, loyal party followers.
You can’t appeal to them as men,
possessed of conscience and will and responsibility.
For in that case, they might once more regain possession of their suppressed consciences
and their higher faculties and begin to think and judge for themselves.
The great struggle for power would die out, would come naturally to its end,
when the suppression of self in the making of ciphers had ceased to be.
Along with a population of ciphers, a centralized government of a Leviathan scale
also requires hordes of minions, or state functionaries, who, as ciphers themselves,
dutifully and obediently carry out the orders of the political class. And lastly, it requires a
political class, or so-called elite, who, from behind the scenes or on high, exerts increasingly
tighter clamps of control, and in the process, suffocates all free enterprise, voluntary exchange,
spontaneous action, innovation, hope, and progress, until the whole system collapses in on itself due to its dead weight.
The system is doomed as inexorably as the Tower of Babel, wrote Herbert, or as he explains the situation,
Try to picture the huge, overweighted, groaning machine of government, the men who directed vainly,
miserably struggling with their impossible task of managing everything.
picture also the horde of countless officials who would form a bureaucratic all-powerful army always engaged in spying
restraining and repressing forever monotonously repeating as if they governed a nursery
Don’t you mustn’t and then picture imprisoned under the bureaucratic cast a nation of dispirited ciphers
Ciphers who would be as peevish discontented and quarrelsome as shut up children
Because, shut off by an iron fence from all the stimulating influences of free life, and forbidden, as if it were a crime,
to exercise their faculties according to their own interests and inclinations.
Picture also the intense, the ludicrous pettiness that would run through the whole thing. For those who have not been transformed into state ciphers,
Herbert’s description of centralized governments may sound ominously similar to the governments across the world which, for decades, have been rapidly growing in
size and power and so if centralized government is a parasite destined to destroy its host
then it seems as if more people should be questioning the validity of centralized
government power and considering whether a move back towards the foundations of freedom
is the panacea needed to find our way out of the absurd contemporary socio-political mess
for as herbert cautioned time is a great logician and succeeding generations will either press
steadily on to the system that is the perfection of force or to the perfection of liberty.
On which side, then, do you take your stand?
Source: Academy of Ideas