What is FREEDOM for? … by Martin Willett

The chances are that if you can see this page you live in a "Western Liberal Democracy". It is also just about certain that you have been told to believe by both your mainstream culture and your own "counterculture" that FREEDOM (also known as LIBERTY) is the ultimate virtue.

I do not start out from that point. I used to, but I have changed. For me a true insight into evolution has changed my thoughts on everything.

I do not believe in a G-d, a plan, a fate or a destiny for the human race. There is no meaning of life. So what is the ultimate virtue? Is it happiness? Equality? Fraternity? Liberty? Errr... I don't know, but it is surely worth pondering rather than just accepting what you are told, isn't it?

Equality

As a contender for the slot of ultimate virtue equality falls at the first fence. It is not credible. It is so obviously not the right answer. All animals and plants are born different, with different potential to succeed, if this was not the case there would have been no evolution. There could be a value and a virtue in equality to a degree but it is self evidently not the prime virtue. All the things that we acknowledge as being great about human achievements have been against the grain of equality and uniformity. Genius is a relative concept; it only has meaning when compared to the normal. Equality may be a virtue but it doesn't excite people a lot, except perhaps those who are in the gutter looking up, and for them equality is spelt R E V E N G E.

I don't believe in absolute equality. I do not believe that all human lives are of equal value or worth. I believe that humans are animals. I do not believe that animals have rights. I do not believe that humans have rights. That is setting my stall out. Some people are more people than other people.

Whatever it is that makes people special it is not equally distributed amongst all Homo sapiens. The bloke down the road who reads the gas meter is not equivalent to Shakespeare; the blind beggar in Delhi is not of equal value to Nelson Mandela. Pretending to yourself that you believe the contrary is a stupid piece of self-delusion. Whatever you did to change the circumstances and opportunities the gas meter reader is unlikely ever to change the world much; people of average talent cannot be made into geniuses.

People with the talents to be geniuses can be stifled and kept in mediocrity, feminists seem to believe that all women are in this category. This is not the case. Women are not by nature extremists, they do not specialize or excel to the same extent as men. This is due to women's (or more accurately, the female's) naturally evolved role as generalized survivors. Nature takes fewer risks with females. This makes complete sense from an evolutionary perspective, females are the low risk, low prize gambles. Women can, at best, hope to have a dozen or so offspring in a lifetime. Nature has far more room to speculate with the male, of whom many will not breed at all, some may be able to father hundreds of children (the record is over 800). Men are more variable and far more likely to be mentally handicapped or possessed of great genius. The female bell curve of normality is much taller, there are far fewer women at either extreme.

This is not to say that there are no women in the genius category, but there are fewer than the feminists would like us to think. Women's studies aficionados have scoured the history of science and the arts to find them, and the lists still look fairly short and rather feeble. Compared to a list of great men that any schoolchild can reel off in half a minute; Darwin, Newton, Plato, Marx, Beethoven, Alexander the Great, Buddha, Gandhi, Einstein, Freud, Bach, Edison, Shakespeare... How many women would stand comparison in that company? Doubtless they are right in saying that women have been thwarted by prejudice in the past but even today the highest ranks of most fields of human endeavor are populated mostly by men. The glass ceiling is a myth; women are naturally all-rounders to a much greater degree. It has often been said that genius and madness are very close. Both are more common among males.

Women are generalists, if they have any specialization it is in survival. Nature seems to take more gambles with men, men are cleverer and more stupid, closer to the edge, more likely to be a genius and more likely to be a human vegetable. Think about couples of stupid people, do you know any couples in which it is the woman who is the more stupid?

Fraternity

This one is left in the starting gate too. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity makes a great slogan for exactly the same reason as does One people, One nation One leader, or Father, Son and Holy Ghost; or Faith, Hope and Charity, wine, women and song or Friends! Romans! Countrymen! The rule of three is a simple rhetorical tool. All slogans sound great if you can get them into one sentence with three equally stressed clauses or words. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity also has the benefit of internal rhyme. It also scans better than liberty, equality and decapitate the aristocracy. Higher human thought should never be subject to the dictates of rhetoric, poetry, scripture or dodgy pop song lyrics.

Liberty

The only entrant left in the race wins by default. Or does it? What is liberty actually for? Is it ultimately all about the right to pursue happiness? In the absence of any better explanation this is where I sit. It is all about pursuing happiness and achieving it. Liberty allows the pursuit, and all too often prevents the achievement of, happiness.

What is freedom good for? It is good for the rich and the powerful. That much is obvious. Is it good for you? The jury is out on this one. A lot of money is spent every year by the agents of the rich and powerful in telling you that you, the common man, are the main beneficiary of freedom. In whose interests is it to promote the idea that freedom is a good thing in itself? It is in the interests of those people who are rich enough to be able to exercise choices, to enjoy freedom.

Is freedom good for the planet? Obviously not. We are using up the earth's resources at an enormous rate. Destroying landscapes and ecosystems. We destroy in minutes what has taken thousands of years to accumulate. Species are being driven extinct by our actions.

Freedom is a two-edged sword. Your freedom to play your stereo conflicts with my freedom to enjoy the peace of the sounds of nature. Your freedom to publicize your business as you see fit conflicts with my freedom to enjoy television, the Internet, radio, the city landscape and my mail free of intrusive messages that I do not want. Your freedom to cut your hair anyway you want interferes with my right to a beautiful and stress-free environment.

Freedom is just a respectable word for having things your own way. License is just a disrespectful word for being able to do what you want.

It is impossible for everybody in a complex society to have their own way all the time. For life to remain fair there has to be a referee to stop foul play. The only fair way to do this is to democratically elect a government with the power to limit freedom in order to allow the optimum level of freedom. Total freedom is total chaos. Do I have "the right" to buy a weapon and shoot it whenever and wherever I choose, including at you, without any other reason than the fact that I want to. I don't think so. There must be limits to freedom to allow anybody to enjoy it. I can hardly think of many people being able to deny the idea that freedom must be limited in order that the more important freedoms can be enjoyed. Once you allow that freedom cannot and should not be absolute, black and white, you are plunged into a world of shades of grey. The real world.

I believe that many freedoms that we enjoy at the moment in the west should be curtailed because they do not meet the test of maximizing human happiness. There should be many more limits to freedom in order that the whole of the human race can reap real benefits. The first major heading under which I would like to see new limits is energy use. The current state of affairs is ridiculous.

Oil is priced by the marginal cost of extracting it. It is a limited resource that cannot be replaced and it is being priced as if it were an agricultural commodity, as if charging more for it will create more of it.

When new reserves of oil are discovered the price of oil often dips. But that is the result of speculators expecting it to dip, making it dip. If there was a new discovery that doubled the reserves of oil the price would not halve. Similarly when half the reserves are used up the price will not rise unless the rate of supply drops.

The price of oil will go up only when it is no longer available at the current rate, there is no mechanism in place that limits the use of oil in the light of known reserves. Oil will be pumped out of the ground at an ever increasing rate and a fairly constant price until suddenly, probably in the space of a year or two, the world will realize that all the wells will run dry at once. If you do not sell the oil from your well somebody else will sell from theirs, then use the money to buy your well, the forces of international capitalism will fall over themselves to finance the hostile take-over if necessary.

When the world realizes that all the oil is about to run out there will be war. The modern world is now so dependant on fossil fuel energy that it is frightening to contemplate the consequences of it running out. So we don't contemplate it. We just carry on as if the increasing price of oil will magic up more reserves, perhaps Adam Smith's unseen hand will bury some oil where it would be profitable to find.

We are falling off a skyscraper, so far so good, don't look down, keep smiling, still OK... perhaps I will be all right after all, I haven't hit the ground yet... Pricing oil by the marginal cost of extracting it is like valuing your life savings by the price of the bus fare to visit the bank to withdraw the money.

Once the oil is used up it will be the end of the world as we know it. Can you imagine the USA without a plentiful supply of cheap energy? Is there any price the USA would not pay to prevent that nightmare scenario? Some Presidential candidate will find a way to make the invasion of the Middle East (or wherever the last oil in the world happens to be) backed up by nuclear weapons sound like a legitimate act of self-defense. Americans will want to believe him, when you live seventy miles from the nearest town on a farm stocked with machinery that will take years to pay for the supply of fuel is as important to you as any issue that has ever caused a war.

America with nuclear weapons and hundreds of millions of privately owned guns but without oil would be a very strange place to see; you wouldn't want to live there. A bit like Afghanistan, but with more religious extremists.

I suggest that a world government putting limits on oil consumption is a better prospect than an energy resource driven nuclear holocaust.

You doubt we could be so short-sighted enough to destroy the resource on which our lives depend? Go out into the deserts of New Mexico or the deserts of Jordan and you find great lost cities. Cities that deforested themselves out of existence, cities such a mighty city as Petra, could never fall. How could such resourceful people destroy themselves? By destroying their resources. At least when they had felled the last tree the people of Petra could walk away. Think of the poor wretches on Easter island, what did they do after they had felled the last tree?

Next I would look nearer home, more on the small domestic scale. Cars, what are they for, and who says you have the right to one? You can afford to buy one, you can afford to run one. But nobody has ever decided that it is right. It happened by default. Nobody decided that it was OK to let the user and the manufacturer decide what was a legitimate engine power, it just happened. Think about it. Nobody ever questioned anybody's right to put any engine in any vehicle. So now you can legally buy a motorbike that will cover a quarter mile from a standing start in less than ten seconds. Why would any government want to allow such a vehicle to be operated as part of a sensible transport system? What possible justification is there to allow such a vehicle to be sold?

You can also buy a car with a 600 horsepower engine. Imagine a chariot with 600 horses. What possible justification is there for such a product to exist? It has no legitimate function. It is a lethal penis enhancement that costs the equivalent of twenty years work at minimum wage. All such vehicles should be banned. They could be put in museums alongside the grave goods of the pharaohs, beautiful reminders of an age past and not regretted.

I have a bicycle. I know when I ride it I do so in a very different way to when I drive a car, because the fuel is so very expensive, accelerating my bulk using muscle power hurts. Compared to a car a bicycle is very under powered. I have also had experience in driving a heavy goods vehicle. That compared to a car seems underpowered. No it isn't. All cars are overpowered. The motorist has expressed a desire for more power; the manufacturer has been able to provide it. The motorist has convinced himself that his desire for more power is legitimate. It is not.

No car needs to have more power than is required to take it up to a sensible cruising speed of around 60 miles per hour. A desire for more performance than that is not legitimate, if it clashes with the freedoms of others it should not be allowed. It obviously does clash with the rights of others to enjoy clean air and the prospects of some fossil fuels available for their grandchildren to use.

On a similar tack the right of a woman to feel safe behind the wheel is not enough of a reason to allow the use of huge off road style vehicles. Vehicles should be licensed in the same way as shotguns are in the UK, you should first have to demonstrate that you have a legitimate reason to own one. Wanting to look macho, wanting to feel safe behind bull bars and wanting to look important are not reason enough to allow people to drive thirsty overweight four wheel drive vehicles around the suburbs. At all times you should ask yourself what good is the freedom you are enjoying. If it has no benefit it has no justification.

Liberty is not a virtue in itself.

Liberty is just a lack of a constraint. If everybody is constrained a little we can have a much better and fairer world. The more complicated and the more populated our world becomes the more likely it is that constraints will be of more value to us than liberty.

Highways can take significantly more people to their destination within a reasonable time with a 50 mile per hour speed limit than if speed limits are not enforced; this has been proven in several studies. Yes, it would be wonderful if there were enough open highways for all to enjoy at whatever speed they wanted but it cannot happen in the real world. To allow people to travel safely at 200 MPH requires enough lanes to allow a vehicle doing 200 to overtake one doing 175 while that overtakes one doing 150, while that overtakes one doing 125... The price of that kind of freedom is far too high. In contrast a mere two lanes of traffic traveling at 50 MPH would carry more cars, with much higher safety, much more cheaply than that monster landscape-destroying multi-lane perfect freedom freeway.

Speed limits were simply an analogy, the lesson can be drawn much wider. At school a teacher can raise their voice and get everybody in a noisy room to speak more quietly, so everybody can hear and nobody needs to shout. That is a perfect model of constraining freedom in the common good. The right to talk loudly is a freedom of no value compared to the benefit that all can gain by mutual restraint. In a modern world full of people and conflicting claims to "rights" the best way to optimize liberty is to constrain it, in the interests of all. Those who currently enjoy a particular freedom, people who are rich in choice if not in cash, will always complain about limits to their freedom. The wider community must not weaken, if there is a net gain for all to be had by limiting freedom it should be done. Some cases are quite clear-cut. Men complain when their "right" to beat their wife is limited, most decent people know how to resolve that problem.

Other cases are much harder to judge. Does a child of thirteen have a "right" to expect the state (that is you and me) to ensure she has everything she needs to look after the child she has conceived against our will? You may think you have every right to blow half a week's income on a fireworks display, does that mean Bill Gates could toss up a couple of nukes to mark the fourth of July?

Belief in rights always leads to very woolly thinking and can lead to impossible choices. My stance is that there are no rights. We should treat everybody as we wish to be treated ourselves. Then we should act in common as a state in a way that ensures the optimum levels of human happiness for all. That may involve using the concept of a right as convenient mental shorthand in order to help define what should be done. But there is no collection of basic human rights that is either given by God or self-evident. Saying that does rather put me out in the cold, I do not hold by the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" or any similar nonsense. I could not sign my name to it; I could not endorse it. I have too many moral scruples.

That is rather inconvenient as I would love to see a world government, at the moment the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the closest thing we have to a foundation stone of a world constitution; most inconvenient. However I will never subscribe to any view I do not believe in not matter how awkward the consequences.

You don't need a religion to be pigheaded, but it usually helps.