The View From Here: Freedom

Freedom may very well be the most dangerous thing in the world.  It's probably also the most desired thing in humanity, with the possible exception of sex.

The very concept of government and law could be described as the management of freedom.  If you think about it, the complete absence of laws and governments would lead to a very messy world.  What do you think would happen if everyone got used to the idea of no laws against things like robbery, murder, and so on.

Looking at freedom in the extreme gives some insight into human nature, which then leads to the interesting dichotomy between the world views of liberals and conservatives.  Conservatives tend to hold to Judeo-Christian beliefs that human nature is normally sinful, and yet profess to allow freedoms that liberals would restrict.  Liberals, on the other hand, lean toward the idea that human nature is normally benign, and yet insist on restricting the behavior and especially the business practices of the most successful members of society.

There is, of course, a third possibility; that there is no empirical Human Nature, and we're all just ourselves.  And yet, so much of philosophy and religion is based on the inherant goodness or badness of us all that it's quite possibly true, one way or the other.  Personally, my observations suggest that, while human nature seems to run strongly to the low side, it is possible for one to elevate one's self through the application of the will.  And long-term study of Judeo-Christian scriptures would back this conclusion.  Which means, we're bad, but we can choose to be good.

Which brings us back around to; what if there were no laws?  What if we could do anything we want with no repercussions?  Do you think that everybody would suddenly search for ways to help their fellow man?  Do you think everyone would automatically be more accepting of everyone else?  Would rich people become more generous in sharing their largesse with those less fortunate?  Would crime end?  Would war cease?  Are these dumb questions?

So will the "people are basically good" believers reading this actually consider changing their minds, or is that also a dumb question?

Law is all about the restriction of freedom.  Speed limits keep drivers from going faster than they can handle a car.  And because just about everybody gets to use the roads, it's easier to set one limit for everybody, and then restrict the privilege of driving to those who can pass a basic competency test.  Laws against murder keep those with anger issues from killing people they get mad at, but allow the government to kill those people as an added incentive not to kill for those who might insist on going ahead.

This manipulation, this system of incentives and punishments, is where law and government get more nuanced.  Let's say, for instance, that we had a government that thought that the country was too dependent on petroleum products.  They might start setting up a series of incentives that would discourage people from certain behaviors and purchases with an eye toward lowering petroleum use.  They might follow a foreign policy that would put us at odds with oil producing nations, and then curtail domestic production forcing us to become all the more dependent on those same countries.  This would raise the price of petroleum products like gasoline dramatically.

At the same time, they might throw as much money as they could get their hands on at alternative energy sources, probably wasting a lot of it but hopefully coming up with something that would wind up being a useful alternative for the nation's energy needs.  The downside would be that these things would also badly slam the economy, possibly even in the long term.  The upside would be that it would lessen the amount of power the petroleum industry would have over the country.  Not that any government would actually do that . . .

It's kind of like the debate over slavery.  The owning of slaves, and the submission to slavery, were probably seen at the time as economic necessities.  The very founder of the nation of Israel, Jacob, was a slave for fourteen years in exchange for his two wives and a stake from which he built his own fortune.  As noted in the picture above, slavery is talked about quite a lot in the Bible.  Personally, I see nothing in any of it suggesting that God likes slavery, but it was a reality of the times in which the Bible was written.

The Bible offers advice to those who are slaves, and those who own them.  At the same time, it is loaded with words about defending the oppressed and freeing those in bondage.  So to say that the Bible "approves" of slavery is to prove you've never really read it, just taken a few passages out of context.

On the other side is a picture of two men who are probably gay.  The caption opens up a common misconception about the Bible, and Christianity.  What the Bible says, which is intended to reveal to humanity the mind of God, is that God does hate the act of homosexuality, while loving the practicioner.  My own personal experience has borne this out.  Indeed, the Bible is clear that this is the case with any kind of sin.  Some Christians feel otherwise, proving that people really are faulty.

This brings us back to the difference between liberal and conservative political philosophies.  Modern American liberalism, especially in the extreme, chooses to allow and even endorse behaviors that traditional Judeo-Christian mores view as "sinful," such as homosexuality, extramarital sex, drug use, and so forth, all in the name of freedom.  Social conservatives would pass laws restricting these behaviors, and so liberals paint them as restrictive and even fascist.

Conservatives, on the other hand, allow business a much freer hand.  The wealthy are seen as "job creators" and encouraged to do even more.  The downside of this is that they tend to abuse the power their money and influence grant them.  It's human nature, I suppose.

The reason I lean more to the conservative side is that the economy is better.  Simple as that.  Conservatives also tend to be far more open to religion.  Many liberals make no bones about their view that religion is, as Mao once said, "the opiate of the masses."  Or was it Lenin?  Whatever.  Conservativism also seems to be a fairly fluid thing.  For instance, it's highly doubtful that you'd get any conservative Republicans to sign on to the reinstatement of slavery, which was something that Democrats were happy to allow to continue back in 1860.  And it was Republicans that put the Civil Rights act of 1964 over the top.

As I've said before, the main reason I'm a conservative is that it leads to smaller government and a better economy.  There are a lot of things that liberals want that I want, too, but I believe that smaller government and a better economy lead to them, too.  All the basic things this series has been about; peace, prosperity, equality, freedom; are found through conservative government.  And instead of being achieved through government intervention and managed by government agencies, they happen because of the action of the citizenry.

You see, freedom is dangerous.  Freedom, as defined and managed through the Constitution, allows for things that many people don't like.  It allows people to have sex with people that other people think we shouldn't.  It allows someone to produce a product that many people want and are willing to pay for, therefore allowing them to become wealthy.  We, the people, have to become involved in the ongoing process of fine-tuning our system of laws and governance to counteract expressions of human nature that benefit a few to the expense of the many.  And we have to do it in ways that do not overly restrict the freedom that we all want.

It would probably be easier to put a government in place and simply take our hands off the wheel, allowing those people in government to make all these decisions for us.  Then, we just have to hope that they're more capable of making those decisions than we ourselves are.