Freedom to/from liberty… —lack thereof
Freedom to/from liberty… —lack thereof
policing the psychopaths without putting foxes in charge of the hen house
Liberty is a problematic term because it presumes it lack. This is true of each term in pair often contrasted in discussing freedom… —(free-from/free-to).
Many discussions in liberalism/libertarian/anarchism spin in their orbits as they circle this bleak sun of lack. By doing so, and by glorifying the endless struggle, they miss the main problem.
As a non-practising agnostic this is a good example of why believing in some set of outcomes in order to avoid some lack which defines those very outcomes is bad applied/moral philosophy.
Agency is a better framework to begin with/in, but that will be a separate post.
A struggle for liberty that tries to avoid that which defines it (a lack of liberty) may not be a lost cause, but it may loose the will to live once the objective is achieved. What to you do once you achieve it? What do you do once you realise you will never achieve it?
Liberty is a bleak sun.
For robber-barons and propertarian libertarians, once a certain level of wealth is achieved, general notions of liberty of the individual are thrown out the door.
Defence of property dictates that others be enslaved and the robber-baron’s freedom to enslave others must be enforced. The empire and the narcissist do not know where their body ends, they do not know where the borders are, and even if they did they would feel those borders to be an attack, borders like philanthropy are an existential threat.
This is how a road to freedom is captured, capitalised, and turned into a road enforcing serfdom where wealth is measured per capita in slavers’ stockbooks. This returns us to the panarchy of life, where all rules are available to those who would rule, and the world is turned to shit where the oppressed must rise up, yet again, into revolution. (See endnotes for links to my earlier uses of panarchy.)
But the endgame is always a narcissistic monopoly, in which the psychic reality of the psychopath must be made flesh, where there is only one body, and so everything in the world is their property. There is no market nor society, nothing is allowed to emerge but the sole supreme ownership entitled to its own supremity. There is only one world, a unipolar self-empire of the psychopath.
In direct analogy for revolutionaries and collectivised excuses1 seeking freedom for their people and not their gloriest self (as the men who would be king in the robber-baron example), the process of revolutionary war will also tend to capitalises society under the control of a management ostensibly seeking freedom for all (from/to), which in turned is captured and capitalised by fewer and fewer people who better represent that freedom. Where some are more equal than others. So special.
Examples include the capture of a broken colonised state by a revolutionary army controlled by a party. This includes are any revolutionary governments that arise out of major brackets of world war. Currently the clearest examples are China in which the party controls everything. Burma in which the army controls every thing including the party. And North Korea in which a member of a family controls everything (party, army & state). The robber-baron and revolutionary are made one in a glorious unanimity of oneness. So special.
Similarly, within a free market magnates arise, some or many of whom will be captured by their own grandiosity and will seek the same outcome as we see in North Korea’s non-revolutionary stagnation. Just because they are emergent phenomena does not mean they respect that sign of weakness. So special.
The robber-baron is born in the moment they realise they are born poor because their parents did not steal as much as other parents². Property is theft, they realise, only if you do not steal enough to escape and be free of your society’s constraints. The true libertarian steals so much that they have property enough to repel the conspiracy of do-gooders. The true propertarian libertarian respects notions of property in order to steal it, if there is no property, then there is nothing to steal and you remain poor. And if you steal enough you are protected, thievery is a way to liberty. Ask any mafia boss. For given/taken enough property, the sin will forgive itself. The sin becomes the world, a world is gained and created in your own image of your good self. So special.
This is why the nouveau riche un-ironically love gold taps. So special. GOLD!
The tendency of the propertarian libertarian, such as in the example of the mafia boss, is to use different excuses and different legal or extra-legal pathways of corralling other people (see gaslighting). It may involve actual slavery, or extreme social stratification, where the excuses for it are always based on freedom (from/to). With each prepositional form of (from/to) allocated according to one’s net worth. Borders are useful in maintaining walls between people.
Here class traitors are those woke enough to not act only ever in their own interests (as define by the narcissist in charge), and treason lies in expecting others to do the same (taxing peeps other than for defence of the narcissistic realm is bad).
For support, given by way of care and donation, is just as suspect as taxing others to defend the excuse used to unite a people in/across a geographic, cultural or economic area/network. Largesse given by anyone else other than the chief robber-baron or chief revolutionary is regarded as showing disloyalty. Obedience is your only allowed virtue, otherwise their freedom to enslave you is threatened.
I’ve said liberty is problematic, this problem-word does not give rise to the the problems I’ve described above in the panarchy of life across place and time. The problematic nature of words rarely structures the world. One does not make psychopathy go away by avoiding a word or two.
If only sympathetic magic worked…
Panarchy is bad worlding, and often very bad world-building. Problematic words and concepts are a part of that, but they are symptoms. Creating a separatist agenda based on words (or genders, and genders are just words) does not deal with the main issue. Bad behaviour that goes un-policed.
To repeat, all of the above is not the result of a set of words, or word use, by philosophers or any one else. All of the above is the result of narcissistic behaviour using our words, our current langauge, to suit their own pleasure.
The panarchy of life is then the result of dealing with parasites (via revolution or personal gumption) and trying to out-compete them as they co-evolve with/within our control measures. All of our control measures can be colonised where we allow narcissists into positions of power which, in turn, in cycle, in rhyme and rhythm, allows narcissists to create conditions which suit the very narcissism and psychopathy we are trying to police.
How do we word our way out of that mess, that panarchy, where foxes put themselves in charge of the hen house, and we let them because they tell us to?
Footnotes:
1 “Excuses” being any of: a nation, a class, an ethnicity, a religion without or with a state or any dubious notion of specialness that sees itself as having a glorious past needing to be regained or saved. Because because.
2 thanks to Peter Carey’s opening in The True History of the Kelly Gang
My use of ‘panarchy’ is first used in an introductory manner in two previous posts:
While Agency leads on from the freedom from/to morass.