The Philosophy of Freedom

by Caleb Nelson

  In the alleged interest of protecting rights, social liberals (closely linked with Progressives) have flipped 180 degrees from the original liberal ideas of free markets and limited governments; and now, regulated markets and expanding government controls are the order of the day. Unfortunately, it’s not much different for their more conservative counterparts.

  PART 7: CONSERVATISM

  This political and social theory promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and to “conserve” or “preserve” things as they are or even return them to what they were. American conservatives have historically differed from those in Europe by never advocating aristocracy or monarchy. Modern conservatism holds views closer to that of classical liberalism than of classical conservatism. They are in many ways attempting to conserve and preserve the old ways of classical liberalism. However, in other ways, they are not.

  There are a few basic conservative principles among most factions of conservatism:

  · Respect for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law on which it is based;

  · Respect for life as a natural, inherent, and unalienable right for all individuals at all stages;

  · An insistence of “limited” government so as to minimize conflict with each individual’s rights and freedoms;

  · Personal responsibility—the idea that the individual is accountable for all of his actions.

  The U.S. Constitution is held as the ultimate standard for traditional conservatism—it is the core foundation on which to base all the conserving and preserving. As we have seen, it is a fine, albeit imperfect, document with many loopholes and imprecise language that has been thoroughly taken advantage of or even outright ignored over many decades to bring us where we are today. While an earlier stage of our cancer may be desirable in that we would have a better chance to beat it, it still means we have cancer. Conservatives generally accept the philosophy that too much cancer is bad, but that we still have to have a little to get by.

  Conservatives mostly claim to base their political philosophy, not on a defined set of principles, but either on tradition or the Constitution. In this way, they substitute a reference to a legal or traditional framework in place of an understanding of the proper role of government. A major drawback to this line of thinking is that in answer to a “Why?” the conservatives will have little reason beyond an impassioned, “It’s unconstitutional!” That can often be a good legal reason, but as a moral reason it fails to say why something should or shouldn’t be in the Constitution in the first place.

  Modern American conservatism can sometimes best be understood in three groups: fiscal conservatism, social conservatism, and compassionate conservatism.

  FISCAL CONSERVATISM

  Fiscal conservatives support limited government, limited taxation, and a balanced budget. They argue that competition in the free market is more effective than the regulation of industry. Like liberals, they have a self-contradictory ideology which supports some taxation and some social programs, failing to recognize that “limited” government is different than “proper” government. A small tyranny is acceptable to those unable to quite identify the correct purpose of governmental force. They support free markets on practical or traditional grounds, not moral grounds. The free market is desirable because it is what works best, they say. They will run for public office pledging to do away with “excessive” regulation of small business and “excessive” taxation, not perceiving that this is an impossible concept to define. What is excessive? To whom? Why is a larger degree of fascism less desirable than a smaller degree? Fiscal conservatives accept the philosophical premises of the liberals they claim to oppose. They merely want to advance those ideas to a lesser degree and by alternative methods.

  SOCIAL CONSERVATISM

  Social conservatives defend social norms, values, and local customs. They strongly identify with American patriotism, supporting the military and police, and they emphasize traditional views of social units such as family and church. Social conservatism has also been infected with statism, and many conservatives now seek to use federal power to block local state actions they disagree with. Thus came the “No Child Left Behind” educational program, support for a Constitutional amendment opposing same-sex marriage, and support for federal laws attempting to overrule states’ attempts for legalized marijuana or assisted suicide. They have no problem using the force of government to uphold their idea of public morality concerning everything from gambling to doing business on Sunday to dress codes. They do this while ignoring the true morality of advocating change without force—such as through persuasion, education, and voluntary boycotts.

  The challenge with conservatives is that most don’t have political principles so much as political issues. On some issues they are the lone force for good, but without principles they cannot chart a straight course. They are like rock climbers attempting to free climb with no safety gear: their footing slips and they have nothing to catch them.

  COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATISM

  In 1999, George W. Bush began to frequently use this term to describe his views. This conservatism includes the moral philosophy that we, in partnership with our government, have a duty to serve the needs of the sick, homeless, poor, and the aged. “Compassion” refers to desiring to relieve the pain and suffering of others.

  Compassionate conservatives fully accept the liberal notion that we have a duty to help the poor; they merely differ from social liberals on how to help them. As soon as they substitute duty for desire, compassion becomes compulsion.

  These conservatives say the Federal Government is inefficient and unfair in its management of the welfare state and that these services should be outsourced to community, civic, and church groups who are closer to the problems and can better and more equitably manage them.

  As writer C. Bradley Thompson explains, compassion is a sub-rational moral guide. It processes political topics emotionally through a “no-fault” morality, saying, “Don’t judge people, just accept their plight and help them.” This denies the Law of Causality, asking you to ignore what caused the jobless person to be jobless, what caused the elderly to have saved nothing for retirement, or why those with coastal homes did not have insurance—you just need to give them a job, a retirement, and a home. (We can be charitable and voluntarily help others, but why shut off our minds and ignore the causes of why they need our help in the first place?)

  Compassionate conservatism accepts the collectivist premise that man must live for the needs of others; solving the problems of the poor is the duty of society as a whole, and some people must be sacrificed for the greater good.

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  Liberals are actually more consistent with their ideology. In holding statism as the primary means to a compassionate end, liberals are willing to go whole hog, while conservatives uncomfortably follow along, wanting to reach the same destination, just not quite as fast.

  This is why the national debt soared up by $4 trillion under President George W. Bush, and President Barack H. Obama beat that in half the time.

  [191]

  The basic premises of compassionate conservatism are as follows:

  · The needs of others constitute a moral claim on our lives and property;

  · We, the taxpayers, have a duty to love and support the poor;

  · The federal government must coerce our love and compassion by taking our wealth and giving it to private organizations that will use it to serve.

  The Heritage Foundation, allegedly conservative in its views, resisted President Bush’s prescription drug entitlement program, not on any principled grounds, but on the grounds that it cost too much, was too restrictive, and didn’t give seniors enough choice. “There is no debate,” they wrote, “over the need to assure that all seniors should have access to prescription drug coverage . . . The danger is that Congress will enact badly designed Medicare prescription drug benefits that end up dumping senior citizens out of the coverage they do have into a government program that wil
l be plagued by explosive costs and constrained by regulatory restrictions on the availability of high-quality prescription drug coverage.”

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  In other words, conservatives agreed with the liberal welfare state in principle, and merely disagreed as to the means by which policies should be implemented. Thus we see that compassionate conservatives are merely thinly veiled social liberals.

  PART 8: RACISM

  “Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned . . . [for] automatic knowledge . . . [and] unearned self-esteem.”

  [193] - Ayn Rand

  Racism is the lowest and crudest form of collectivism, in part because we are biologically primed to mistrust that which is different. Racism usually refers to the belief that the collective group of one particular genetic ancestry is better/worse inherently than the collective group of another—that a group’s skin, blood, race, or nationality somehow makes that group more/less human or more/less deserving. This collectivist thought is based in fear, ignorance, and inadequate self-esteem, resulting in the belief that one has value only in regard to one’s race.

  Peikoff observed that, “Every central doctrine of the Nazi politics, racism included, is an expression or variant of the theory of collectivism,” and that the collectivism of the Nazis was more racist than nationalist, but they “were able to combine the two doctrines easily, by the device of holding that Germany contains the purest Aryan blood.”

  [194]

  A favorite idealist of the National Socialists was J. G. Fichte, who claimed the “individual life has no real existence since it has no value of itself, but must and should sink to nothing; while, on the contrary, the Race alone exists, since it alone ought to be looked upon as really living.”

  [195] We can see here that collectivism has a literal, metaphysically different view of existence than that of individualism. Collectivists such as Fichte and Dewey described the collective as an actual living entity in reality, and denied that individuals really even exist by themselves! Somehow, they manage to miss the fact that for groups to exist, individuals must exist first.

  Racism has more than one definition and is a much larger concept than how it is typically used in common discourse. Explicit racism—open antipathy for those of different ethnic and racial backgrounds as exemplified by the Nazis and KKK—is easy to see. But there is another kind of racism of which most people are completely unaware.

  Implicit racism is unconsciously held beliefs and prejudices which create a social system that offers advantages and privileges for those of lighter skin. Generally, when white people talk about racism, they usually mean the explicit kind—hating others based on race. But, when Black people talk about racism, they’re usually referring to the more complex definition of implicit racism that involves the social structure.

  Believing “racism” to only have one definition causes misunderstanding and can further racial tension. Have you ever been outraged to hear someone say, “Black people can’t be racist”? Likely you wondered how someone could be so out of touch with reality. It’s not that they were out of touch, they were simply referring to implicit racism—something most whites are ignorant of. Racism is not merely prejudice. It is not merely thinking one race superior to another. It is a social system which rewards those with lighter skin and punishes those with darker skin. Please notice the word “system.” In America, people with lighter skin have historically held more social and economic power and influence. As the majority culture, whites have driven the social ethos, and through millions of individual actions and decisions, a system is in place where discrimination exists. The only people with the power to discriminate on a meaningful scale are those on the top. Since the social system is based on skin color, those with dark skin are at the bottom of the social pecking order. In this system, therefore, Black people can’t be racist in the implicit sense. They might hate those with lighter skin, but they have no power to oppress or discriminate on any significant scale.

  There’s a good chance you’ve never heard this topic discussed in such a way before. How can this be? It is because of socialization. Socialization (in the non-political sense) is the process by which we unconsciously learn from our parents, friends, neighbors, and culture. We pick up the beliefs, attitudes, and philosophy of the culture we grow up in without knowing it. In this way, people are much like computers. Computers run on a basic operating system such as Microsoft Windows. The programming of the operating system determines how the computer works. As people, we have an “operating system” that is made up of our core beliefs about the world. These core beliefs affect how we think, what we value, and how we make decisions. But our operating systems are not something we consciously created; the majority of our programming is written by the people around us and our culture long before we’re ever old enough to realize it. The good news is we don’t have to believe everything we were taught; the bad news is we can’t change something we’re unaware of. We do not have the option to decide what to keep and what to discard if we are ignorant of our beliefs and their roots. In order to change, we must become consciously aware of our beliefs, and through a process of rational deliberation, decide what to keep and what to reject.

  Before you read this book, it’s likely you’d never explicitly noted your collectivist beliefs. Unless someone pointed it out to you in the past, you had probably never questioned the idea that you must sacrifice your own good for others. You’d been raised to unquestioningly accept that we have no choice but to support the elderly with government programs. If you had been raised in ancient Egypt you would have believed that the Pharaoh was a god on earth. If your father was a plantation owner in the 1800’s you would have accepted slavery as moral. If you were born in the Korowai tribe of New Guinea, you would think cannibalism was perfectly acceptable. We accept the beliefs and assumptions we are raised with. Even when people rebel it’s still usually within the dichotomous set of choices offered by society. Children raised conservative become liberals, and vice versa. Heads and tails may seem separate and distinct, but they’re still part of the same coin.

  Society trained you with a philosophy that it never named or pointed out. As children, we swallowed it all hook, line, and sinker. It’s incredibly hard to discover our implicit beliefs because they are the lens through which we see the world. Just as light passes through the lens of our eye and is bent to focus on our retina, so our beliefs influence our very perception, and we can’t exactly remove our eyes to get an objective view of how they work. In the same way we can’t see the back of our own heads without a mirror, so we cannot see our worldview without external help.

  The dominant culture has its own narrative that is written from its own perspective. For example, in most states the Civil War is called “The Civil War.” But in some places in the South, it is still referred to as the “War of Northern Aggression.” The victors write the history books, and they don’t trouble themselves with understanding the perspective and motivations of the conquered. In the same way, the white cultural narrative doesn’t incorporate the culture and perspective of minorities.

  Our worldview is tied to our sense of identity. It provides an organizing framework by which we make sense of the world. Humans crave stability and security. Anything that shakes our worldview shakes our sense of self. We have a lot of psychological defense mechanisms that our unconscious mind uses to protect our conscious awareness from information that would challenge what we already believe. Confirmation bias is one of these cognitive distortions we use to avoid the anxiety of questioning ourselves. Whenever we are exposed to information that supports our beliefs, we seize on it (usually taking it out of context) and remember it. Anything that challenges our beliefs is ignored. We have a tremendous capacity for self-deception, and are no different in this regard from the emperor with his new clothes. The most disturbing part is how insidious defense mechanisms are, not only do they avoid conscious detection by being primal, automatic, and instinctual, but
they deny their own existence when challenged! It is pure arrogance to think we are unaffected by these universal human frailties.

  A major factor in the creation of our worldview is our ethnicity and the culture we grow up in. A Black kid in the projects of Harlem is going to have a very different worldview than a white kid from Staten Island.

  [196] Their ethnicity will provide them a large portion of their identities and philosophy about life. The Black kid will face prejudice and racism. The white kid, as a member of the majority culture, will not face persistent, generalized discrimination. As a member of the dominant ethnicity, the white kid likely won’t think of himself as having a specific culture, but will instead see white people as the normative status quo, the default, the standard by which all other things are judged. The white kid will assume his experiences have universality and likely never have to face what it means to be white. [197]

  A PRO-RACIST IDEOLOGY

  Why all this talk of worldview and the socialization process? Because racist tendencies have some biological predisposition and are unwittingly reinforced by the process of socialization. While most Americans find racism a horribly evil and ignorant ideology, even the most well-meaning of us may accidentally and unknowingly act in ways that support the superiority of whites. These unconscious, unintentional actions and beliefs are known as a pro-racist ideology. A pro-racist ideology falls under the category of implicit racism and unconsciously supports a system of rewards and opportunities based on skin color and can also be manifested through tolerating and refusing to challenge racist conditions.