The Education of a Libertarian, by Christine L.

As some of you may know, I’ve stolen the title from Peter Thiel. While Peter Thiel despairs in politics as he doesn’t believe democracy is compatiable with freedom while looking for escape in the utopian cyberspace. I am afraid he might be looking at the wrong (but no harm) place for cure – we don’t have “freedom” (extra-care needed in discussing this word as it can be philosphical/controversial) not mainly as a result of democracy-induced government intervention, the real culprit lies in human nature. We live in a real world, a world that faces constant threats of invasion and conquer, a world that high-decentralized, small-community-type, loosely-associated egalitarian societies will eventually pay hefty prices – being conquered by more efficient and less egalitarin societies (see Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, Steel). I am NOT advocating for big governments or totalitarian rule, though I do believe highly-centralized/efficient government is needed in this stratified and strategized world. On the one hand, I do see problems facing kleptocracies overtime – because of the natural state of inequality in any stratified society, the natural tendency of any ruling elite is to deploy state’s coercive power for greater sel-benefit. The stability of power leads to overreach and overthrow. On the other hand, while individual liberty/freedom should be respected and protected, it’s naive to believe that we can peacefully live in a total free world. So neither extreme is desirable – we should aim to strike a balance.

My understanding of political philosophy has greatly changed over the course of last 1-2 years. Grew up in the communist/authoritarian China, I came out as a libertarian and used to abhor any kind of government intervention and advocate absolute individual freedom/right. I first cast my doubts on the “rational individual” concept/assumption after watching Adam Curtis’ BBC documentary series “The Century of the Self” – most human minds are after all, irrational, easily manipulated and subject to subconscious desires and primitive impulses.

No longer I am a subscriber of ideologies such as objectivism (Ayn Randian), free mkt capitalism, and pure democracy, etc. As I get older, things appear to be less bipolar to me — less black or white, less good or bad, and less right or wrong. I grew more tolerant of nuances and less needy of definitiveness. It’s relatively easy to argue against Ayn Randian, using her very own words and logic. Blinded by passion and biases, my energy and reasoning skills were served to justify my innate biases instead of searching for the truth. Ayn Rand considered government as main source of evil – but can she not see that govt is the scapegoat, and the real evil lies in our human nature? Government is just a group of people acting in their own self interests after all using her very own logic – consistent with her advocation and promotion of self-interest. Humans are social animals, and we are conscious of our social status – we play games, we have strategies, we collaborate/conspire, and we are never fully independent individuals (human society is a multi-layered complexity network). If there were no government, there will be other “coercive” forces imposed upon us – maybe oligarchs, large corporates, factions, community authorities, classes, and informal rules (such as lower ranked monkeys are obliged to clean fleas for the alpha males). So called rights, liberty, individuality are all relative/dynamic, NOT absolute/stable.

Sorry Miss Rand, the world will not be at peace if everyone is left free to pursue their so-called rational self interests. Human understanding of the world is mostly biased, at best limited. Can we really rely on the emotional, passionate populace to make “rational” decisions? Even when we assume a well-informed, well-educated crowd, our understanding of the world can never achieve perfect objectivity. Soros famously argued that human uncertainty principle bears a strong resemblance to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principles (which holds that the position and momentum of quantum particles cannot be measured at the same time) – people’s understanding of the world in which we live cannot correspond to the facts and be complete and coherent at the same time. According to Soros “Insofar as people’s thinking is confined to the facts, it is not sufficient to reach decisions; and insofar as it serves as the basis of decisions, it cannot be confined to the facts. The human uncertainty principle applies to both thinking and reality. It ensures that our understanding is often incoherent and always incomplete and introduces an element of genuine uncertainty – as distinct from randomness – into the course of events.” If our understanding is doomed to be incomplete – from where we derive this so-called “objectivism” and how we can decide what are the best self-interests for ourselves?

Rand lets her philosophy, using her own words: “accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusion, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fear, thrown together by chance, but integrated by subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, sold weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where her mind’s wings should have grown”.

My faith towards unconstrained individual-liberty/freedom and pure democracy has shaken as well. let’s do not forget – it was democratic court of Athens that sentenced Socrates to death by drinking hemlock!

According to Greek thinkers such as Aristotle and Polybius (as well as America founding fathers James Madison and Alex Hamilton), balance within government is necessary to preserve liberty. The government that best reflects human nature, in this view, blends the elements of:

- Monarchy (a strong executive)
- Aristocracy (an independence judiciary that could and should overrule the “popular will” if it destroyed liberty) and
- Democracy (a strong legislature)

But they have to stay in balance, because an excess or corruption of any one of these elements will destroy liberty, by becoming, respectively:

- Tyranny
- Oligarchy or
- Mob rule

Quoting from a special report on the “Perils of Democracy” (from the Economist):

Thus Aristotle considered Rome balanced, but Athens during the time of Socrates to be too democratic to be stable. In Alexander Hamilton’s day, French Revolution might illustrate the point even better: tyranny and oligarchy gave way to mob rule, which gave way to another tyranny (Napoleon), without any intervening liberty in more than motto. Democracy was inherently unstable because it led to mob rule (in the same way that monarchy deteriorated into tyranny and aristocracy into oligarchy). Those three elements, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, thus had to be balanced for a state to remain free, they argued. Rome (before the emperors) became the prime example of such a mixture. It was a republic, a “public thing”, but not a democracy, a thing “ruled by the people”. It had executives (in the shape of two annually elected consuls), an elite in the senate, and outlets for the vox populi in the popular assemblies.

I was in awe by the bursting talents of Hamilton and Madison while reading Federalist Papers, which was about how indirect America democracy should be. Hamilton and Madison explained why they wanted a republic, not a democracy – they feared tyrannical minorities and majorities equally.

Hamilton put it brilliantly in the opening of Federalist Paper:

An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. on the other hand, it will be qually forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well informed judgement, their interest can never be separated; and that a danerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

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