We all want to be free, don't we? Well, I'm not so sure about that; I'm not sure that most people have really thought about the subject in order to get a good understanding of what "freedom" even is, and consequently I'm not sure at all if we are ready for true freedom.
source: YouTube
Most people I've met in my life think that "freedom" is the ability to do whatever they want, without someone or some institution telling them what the can and can not do. And most of them add to this the caveat that their freedom has some limits, in the sense that their ability to do whatever they want ends where it limits other people's ability to do whatever they want. Voluntarists have some beautiful phrases to illustrate this principle, like "my freedom ends where yours begins" or "my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins." All of this I agree with, as it shows an awareness that "freedom" can only exist within the society of people we live in; it's some variation on the Golden Rule, and an admission to the fact that we all should apply that rule to each other. I'm painting with big strokes here and won't delve into much detail on the ideas and ideals discussed herein, but I'll try to briefly illustrate why some people's ideas on freedom are flawed.
Like I said, the above described principle of freedom is beautiful, except for the fact that most voluntarists and other modern freedom-lovers combine their love for freedom with a love for capitalism. And that simply won't work. Now I'm still using the big strokes here, but the notion that freedom is gained and lost within a society conflicts with capitalism's highly individualistic nature. Anarcho-capitalists, voluntarists and the likes see "the state" or "the government" as the biggest enemy of freedom because that government has the sole right of the use of force. They see, for example, taxation as an involuntary transaction because it's made under the threat of force and jail-time. But that's not completely fair in my opinion because looking at it that way stems from a purely individualistic interpretation of freedom, and loses sight of the fact that freedom is gained or lost in a society, not as an individual. That is unless you ive on your own on an uninhabited island.
And if there was no state or government, we would all live under the rule of those who've managed to accumulate the most wealth, we would live by the rules of the insanely rich. And capitalism makes sure that these insanely rich will exist. A plutocracy is the final station in any system that's based on the "free and unhindered" accumulation of private property. And private property in itself demands the existence of a government or some similar institution to guard and defend that property. The fact that we now live under the rules of the insanely rich, despite the existence of a government, is because of the same reason; those plutocrats have bought our governments, which is why our governments don't work for us, but for the owner-class.
The answer is simple, but terribly difficult at the same time; we'll have to get rid of that class of owners. Democracy is the answer, because democracy, the process of debating and exchanging ideas and then submitting them to a vote, is the way we as a society can discover where our individual freedom ends, and where the maximum amount of freedom in that society begins. Freedom can never be absolute, except for that hermit island dweller. But we maximize freedom by flattening the materialistic hierarchy that has gotten so out of control under capitalism. We need democracy to be extended into the economy. That way it's not the board of directors who decide who gets hired or fired, who gets paid what wages, or if the production facility is moved to a low wage country, but the workers themselves who decide these things in a democratic fashion. And that, my friends, is socialism, it's the placing of the ownership of the means of production into the hands of the ones who do the producing instead of the hands who simply own the factory.
Do we need the rules that are dished out from top to bottom? No, we don't. I'll even say that all those rules make us morally lazy; we do things because we're allowed and we don't because we're forbidden, instead of letting our own judgement, our own morals speak. The white collar criminals who caused the 2008 economic and financial crisis have gotten away with their crimes because no crimes were committed, no laws were broken. And we collectively have lost our outrage over these crimes because no laws were broken; in our subconscious minds we're reminded that they acted within the law, so we conclude that they must just have been very smart individuals who were able to maximize their profits within the existing rule. That's what blindly following rules brings us. But I believe we can actually do without a lot, if not most of those rules.
To illustrate this, let me tell you about an experiment that's been done decades ago in some Scandinavian city, I don't remember which city or country it was, but that's not important. One of the places we most blindly follow rules is at intersections with traffic-lights: when it's red we stop, when it's green we step on the gas. On one of those Scandinavian intersections, of which there are many in every city around the world, many accidents happened with a lot of injured and dead people as a result. The experiment was simple: remove the traffic-lights and see what happens. Well, the results were eye-opening: the amount of accidents dropped drastically. What happens is this: people couldn't blindly follow the directions given to them by the lights anymore, so now they approached the intersection with much more caution. No one just steps on the gas, instead everyone hits the brakes, looks left and right, and waits for an opening. And most of the time that opening is created by one or two Golden Rule applying drivers who give way to other drivers they've seen waiting. Suddenly that intersection was full of gentlemen drivers instead of road-rage drivers.
I know, that's just one isolated example, but it's one that gives me hope that we are in fact able to organically make our own rules when we're on a reasonably even playing field. Most people are reasonable and most unreasonable to criminal behavior stems from the highly individualistic and egocentric foundation of the world's overarching economic system and its underlying ideology. That's my belief, and I know it's going to take time and effort, a lot of it, to change this.
Are You Really "Free" Under Capitalism?
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