It is received wisdom among Objectivists (and many other freedom activists) that the way to deal with America’s freedom deficit is, in essence, through persuasion. Persuade enough Americans to be Objectivists or near Objectivists or even libertarians and America will once again be a free country.
Putting aside the questionable proposition that America was ever a free country, I’m of the view that persuasion has no reasonable chance of changing enough minds to make a difference. Two things have led me to this conclusion. The first is the failure of Objectivists and others to change the direction of the country. The second is what I saw when I tried to persuade.
1943 could be regarded as a watershed year, the year “The Fountainhead” was published and, arguably, modern libertarianism got its start. 75 years later, the federal government spends 44% more per capita (after adjusting for inflation) than it did then. The scope of federal regulation has increased dramatically and federal rights violations are now pervasive. Libertarianism has barely a toehold in American politics and thought, and the creatures in Washington who call themselves libertarian corrupt the term. There are plenty of Ayn Rand fans, including some of those same creatures, but few people have truly adopted her ideas. There’s little point in even calling oneself an Objectivist – most people haven’t a clue what it means and the rest mostly have it wrong.
In short, the modern attempt at persuading people to support freedom has been an abject failure.
The conventional wisdom is to blame the messenger, to suppose that the American public would be all for freedom if only its proponents were better at explaining it. I have to call BS on this notion; the quantity and quality of libertarian and Objectivist propaganda, not to mention that reality is on the side of that propaganda, make it impossible to believe that merely improving either quantity or quality would make a difference.
Besides, my personal experience with promoting liberty is completely at odds with that explanation.
Ask an American if they want the government off their backs and you’re likely to get a Hell Yes in response. They’re all for freedom and being able to live their lives unmolested by the government. Dig deeper, though, and you’ll find that most Americans really want “freedom for me, but not for thee”. The government should get off the little guy’s back but closely regulate business. Or, the government should get out of the businessman’s way, but regulate private behavior. However divergent the particulars, the typical American is like every other one in that he sees the government as the means of imposing his will on others. You see the same phenomenon when it comes to government spending. One group says the government should support social programs, the other business, but both are united in the view that the government should take money from those who have it and give it to some preferred group.
In short, liberal, conservative, or “independent”, most Americans see the government as a means of serving private ends, rather than public necessities. Those are grudgingly served. Ask any judge or cop.
This didn’t spring up overnight. I trace it back to 1824, when the Supreme Court decided that the courts were not to take into account the intentions of the Founders when interpreting the Constitution to determine the extent of government powers. With no principles to limit the federal government’s power, it was only a matter of time before those powers became effectively unlimited. Progressivism, around the beginning of the 20th Century, demanded and got the extension of those powers, and events since then have turned the government into Leviathan.
The effect of the New Deal was to cement into the American psyche the idea that the government was the cure to all ills. Government was no longer to be limited, solving only particular, public problems, it was to solve all problems, public and private. Compulsory education, by precept and example, reinforced this notion. Entitlements went from being the province of those who wielded power to something everyone expected – and then needed.
Freedom and government power are incompatible. A person who believes in freedom and government power must necessarily distort his thinking in order to embrace the contradiction. He must evade the fact that freedom includes the freedom to fail and the freedom to suffer and even die; he must evade the fact that every government action by its nature involves a restriction on others and, when not limited to the absolutely necessary, is necessarily an infringement of freedom.
But it doesn’t stop there. Any person who accepts what he knows, deep down, to be evil, must necessarily condemn himself. And, to continue as he is, he must necessarily hide from himself both the evil and the condemnation. And all of this is aided and abetted by others around him, by the structures of society and, above all, by compulsory education. (Yes, I think it cemented America’s downfall. But that’s another topic.)
The result is a nation of people who literally cannot think rationally about liberty. To do so, they would have to go against everything they’ve been taught, from infancy (share your toys!) on. They would have to confront the ways that they have used, or contemplated using, the government immorally. They would have to confront the fact that they do not know how to live free.
And this is exactly what I discovered when I tried to persuade people of the rightness of freedom. The closer I got to the central necessity of freedom – individual responsibility – the further their counterarguments veered into the irrelevant and the just plain irrational.
Americans have, deep down, rejected the idea that a person can stand alone on his own two feet. Sure, they have heroes, but heroes are them, not us, they are not ordinary people living ordinary lives. Americans do not want freedom; it frightens them. Arguing for freedom is, to the typical American, like arguing for stepping off a cliff – because they have forgotten their wings, they know that doing so can only end in disaster.
This is why persuasion has failed. As the saying goes, you can’t reason a person out of what he wasn’t reasoned into in the first place. Only two things are likely to change a mind so damaged: therapy and bitter experience. There aren’t enough therapists to go around, so America – and we – will have to wait for bitter experience to teach it to value liberty.
Before deciding what to do instead, one really needs to sit back and look at one’s goals. If you’re really, truly committed to getting America on the road to liberty, I might suggest joining the government and working for its expansion. Well, not really. Such a course of action might hasten the day that Americans get tired of their unfreedom, but it would be profoundly corrosive to you. Another approach would be to become a revolutionary and try to bring down the government, but it’s waaaay to soon for that to be effective, and it’s a good way to get pointlessly dead.
It becomes easier if one’s goal is not to save America, but instead to live as free a life as possible. In that case, the idea would be to form a community somewhere that is free at least within its borders. That particular idea has been looked at from many directions and I won’t rehash all the things that didn’t or can’t work.
One thing that might work is living on the oceans. You’d have a large floating object where people could live and carry out a reasonable life. This has been looked into, but the only real project I know of is the one by The Seasteading Institute. But they’re suffering this political nonsense that makes even libertarianism look reasonable, and they’ve wimped out on the population and the independence that a viable free community would need. Still, another project for seagoing life, one more philosophically sound and large enough to be worthwhile, is a possibility.
That said, my own proposal also involves a floating object, but 24 kilometers up. I’ve given it some thought and I’ve seen no show stoppers, but it’s still a rough idea, one I hope to flesh out if I can get enough people interested in talking about it.
My proposal would support up to 10,000 people (in families) living in an enclosed habitat with 100 square meters per person, for living space, food production, recreation, and so on. With that many people, the city (well, town might be more accurate) would have a real economy, capable of diversity and a little economic slack. Also plenty of people with whom to have a social life. The government would be designed from the ground up, grounded in Objectivist principles.
Floating that high and moving with the wind, the city wouldn’t be under any government’s jurisdiction and wouldn’t even be over any country for very long. The city would do its best to maintain friendly relationships with other countries and would be economically integreted with the rest of the world. However, it would also be able to self-sustain for long periods, to avoid being blackmailed into giving up its freedom.
I completely expect a host of “No way, can’t be done” for a whole bunch of reasons – it’s what I got when I, ahem, floated the idea to some people I used to know. I’ve gone much deeper into this than I’ve written, but before I say more, I’d like to see what others have to say.
BTW, I’m not wedded to this particular idea. If it proves impracticable, there’s always the seagoing approach, and a few less likely possibilities. But I’m serious about getting out of America; unlike most of us, I have – courtesy of the federal government – no life to lose and every reason to want to be elsewhere.
