Freedom: some ramblings

Human illusions persist, in the face of all evidence; and even well into the Sagittarian Age there were still planets whose people believed in the desirability of what they called "the free market." History had already amply demonstrated that this was equivalent to saying "the free plague of locusts" or "the free barbarian horde," yet they paid no attention. The locust has its due place in a terrestroid ecosystem, certainly, but unless kept in check by the inherent "regulations" of that ecosystem, it can do untold harm. Similarly, a community may choose to live nomadically, in a territory that will support such a lifestyle; but if it breaks out of that territory and begins to despoil other communities, it must be constrained.

The plain fact is that humans, with their well-known tendency to create abstractions out of things and then lose sight of the things in worshipping the abstractions, had no really well-formed notion of what "freedom" was. They believed it meant something like "not having anyone telling you what to do," and was therefore the greatest good to which one might aspire. And yet, put a human for three days in a trackless, lifeless, waterless desert, utterly free and beyond all human control, and they will gladly change places with the most downtrodden slave in a Roman senator's household if only the job comes with water, food and shelter. They may repent later, of course; but in that situation, their "freedom" is actually non-existent, their only choice being to die.

Or consider a man riding a horse. One might say "if the horse is free, then the rider is free." If the horse, though, being free, chooses to break into a gallop, then the rider is actually helpless. His choices are two; to go where the horse chooses to take him, or to throw himself off and lose, possibly his life, at very least his horse.

Consider, then, the proposition "if other people are free, then I am free." It seems logical. Yet if the other people are free to break into your house, to destroy your possessions, to force you to work for them or satisfy them in sexual ways, where is your freedom then?

The simple truth is that "freedom," as an absolute abstraction, does not exist. One can only be, in any meaningful sense, relatively free; and the maximum of relative freedom can only be attained when the objects, abstractions, and other people around one are relatively constrained. The goal of any society should be equality of relative constraint, leading to equality of relative freedom. Human beings are only truly free when no human in a community is more free than any other human in the same community. A moment's thought will show that this is so. In tyrannies, despotisms, and the like, the rulers are more free than the ruled; in a plutocracy, the wealthy are more free than the poor; in an aristocracy, the nobles more free than the common folk; in a theocracy, the priests of the god more free than the laity. Only in a true democracy, wherein each individual citizen has an equal standing, is nobody more free than anyone else, and therefore every citizen is as free as she can ever be.

Democracy, then, is the ideal most commonly sought after, and yet it remains the hardest to achieve; for each individual human instinctively desires to be more free than her fellow humans, or at least more free than she is, and rebels against all constraints. The desire for equality is a product of reasoned thought; no child plays a game called "I am a free and equal citizen of the castle."

A society based upon "the free market" is, in fact, a variety of theocracy, with "the market," the abstracted spirit of Commerce, taking the place of the god. Those who serve the god most effectively become more free by accumulating wealth and power, and then, in most cases that have been observed, begin covertly to constrain and regulate "the market" to maintain their position, at which point the society becomes a simple plutocracy. The end result of a "free market" is an enslaved people.

The definition of a slave adopted by the Sagittarians, for the purpose of their Second Accord, is "a person who has by deliberate action been made less free than others in the same community"; which, in a theocracy, a plutocracy, an aristocracy, a tyranny or a "free market" society, accounts for most ordinary citizens. Therefore, any world which seeks Affiliation must forego, along with all other forms of oligarchy, the worship of "the free market," and must impose such regulations on commerce as will maintain the maximum level of relative freedom for all its citizens.

Typically, the response to this is an outcry along the lines of "But we must have a free market! Suppose it is regulated badly, this way or that way? How can we trust our government to allow us the freedom to trade fairly?" To which the Sagittarians, were they in the habit of arguing the toss, might respond, "But when given freedom, you do not necessarily trade fairly, nor can you guarantee that everyone will even if you do. Fair trade must be enforced, till humanity becomes Mindful and can enforce fairness on itself. As for trust, you are now citizens of a democracy. Form a government that you can trust and you will find it trustworthy."

Only when the institutions and abstractions that constrain us are themselves constrained can human beings be as relatively free as they can be; and that, paradoxically, includes "freedom" itself.

A niggling thought

Okay, here's what I don't get about LSD.

(Full disclosure: I tried it twice, many years ago, courtesy of a friend. I felt very strange, admittedly, but neither saw nor heard anything out of the ordinary and experienced no cosmic revelations. The only thing that happened was that, about the time it should have been wearing off the first time, my entire field of vision rippled, just once, from top to bottom. It was like "all right, already, you want a hallucination? Here's a hallucination. There. Happy now?" On consideration, I possibly got off lightly; there are things in my deeper downstairs that I would definitely not want stirred up. So it's probably a good thing that I'll never have that kind of opportunity again. Anyway.)

So many people, writing about their acid experiences, have talked about how it showed them that reality was not a fixed thing. Alan Moore used those exact words, in fact. Now I'm quite prepared to agree that reality may not be a fixed thing, though at the macroscopic level where I live it seems pretty damn fixed to me (in a number of senses). I just don't see how one can logically arrive at that conclusion from taking a drug whose effect is to alter your perceptions. I mean, people who drink alcohol don't come away thinking that the world occasionally, of its own volition, goes blurry and revolves around them; they put that temporary impression down to the effect of the booze. How come people who drop acid (and actually get something out of it) don't put their perceptions at the time down to the effect of the acid?

I don't get it. It's not logical. Unless I'm missing something.