The Seditionist

Oh my, an expletive in the title. And I’m a whiny bleeding-heart socialist small-l liberal. Why am I dissin’ freedom?

It’s because I have to balance out Freedom’s rep. There are enough hoarse voices screaming how great freedom is, how we need lots more freedom, blah blah blah. I think that’s a load of crock.

The truth is that freedom is a double-edged sword.

Of course we all like being free ourselves. I enjoy many of my freedoms. My freedom to live my life, my freedom to eat, my freedom to be educated, my freedom of speech, my freedom of (non)religion; these freedoms are all great.

Then there are the freedoms I don’t really care about. My freedom to potentially own a billion dollars. My freedom to potentially earn the equivalent to the GDP of a small country. My freedom to potentially own the world’s most expensive house. These freedoms I don’t care about because they’re constrained. Wealth is the measure of freedom here, and having the potential “freedom” to own lots of stuff is not the same as having the freedom to own lots of stuff, because that potential is only fulfilled if I’m: incredibly lucky, incredibly clever and/or incredibly wealth and famous to start off with. If I’m ugly, with an IQ of 75, have an unemployed drunk for a father and an HIV-positive prostitute mother, then I have zilch chance of that potential being fulfilled (well, with a lottery ticked it goes up to one in a gazillion).

And then there are the freedoms I really wouldn’t want anyone else to have. The freedom to enslave me. The freedom for someone else to own everything I need. The freedom for a hospital to throw me sick and dying on the pavement because I can’t pay. The freedom for rich people to not pay taxes. The freedom for other people to deprive me of my freedom of movement or to kill me.

When we’re putting together a society, we can go two ways (no more, no less):

First, Total Anarchy. The freedom to do whatever you want. The problem is that that’s a potential freedom, and bigger people can take it away from you to increase their freedom. They’re “freedom-rich” and you’re “freedom-poor”. Too bad.

The second is a social contract as proposed by Hobbes. We all give up those freedoms that impinge on someone else’s freedom to a more substantial degree than they add to our own. No, you’re not free to shoot me with that gun because that will take away my freedom to be alive. No, you’re not free to enslave me because that’ll take away my freedom of action and of expression. No, you’re not allowed to buy that extra mansion to stay in over summer with the money I need to buy food.

Today, we’re moving further and further away from a stable social contract to more and more anarchistic freedoms which empower the few but disadvantage the many. And freedoms don’t “trickle down”.

So what’s the answer? A paradigm shift. We have to stop talking about freedom societies, because achieving perfect freedom for everyone is by definition impossible (because we’d need the freedom to impinge someone else’s freedom) and there’s really no good reason for advocating excessive freedoms. What we need is a fairness society; a society in which freedoms are guaranteed in order to provide all of us with quality lives, and freedoms are restricted to prevent a minority from absconding with our rights and our toil. Fairness is at least theoretically realizable. Practically it will be a struggle, but at least it will be a struggle worth fighting for. Progress will mean progress for those least well off.

Freedom must mean many freedoms for all, not all freedoms for some and none for you because you’re the sucker.

I’ll be the first to admit it; compromising is an important part of adulthood. To be able to give up something you want for fairness sake, or to close a mutually profitable deal, is very important indeed.

Some may argue that’s what happens when we go to vote today. Some people may have liked Howard’s fiscal policy, yet disagreed with Australia’s involvement in the Iraq war. Yet, after considering their options, they decided Howard best fit their interests and their opinions. A Liberal vote. A good compromise, no?

But there’s something fundamentally flawed with the core promise / key issue horse trading that goes on in voter’s minds. It’s not really a compromise. A vote is a vote, and you get the whole package. The only means of judging individual policies is by casting a vote against, and even then it must be a very important issue; otherwise the defeat of the party in question will be attributed to other factors, and public opinion, no matter how strongly held, counts for nothing.

The Iraq war was a point in case. When Howard decided to join the looming fiasco, he explained his strong reelection had given him a mandate to do it. A vote for Howard on economic policy was a vote for war. Never mind the huge protests, vast outpourings of dissent that haven’t been seen on this scale for any one issue for a long time (probably since Vietnam). Howard dismissed them. He essentially called them a sham. Yet protests represented the only other powerful way that voting citizens can show dissent aside from the ballot box.

Overall, the majority of Australians were opposed to the war, and to Australia’s involvement in the war. The rest were uninvolved, uninterested. There were certainly no major pro-war marches. So how was Australia saddled with this policy decision? Well, we vote for one fellow and then he goes off and does whatever he bloody well wants for three years. Sure, we have the Senate which acts as an unreliable safety some of the time. But is that really enough?

I don’t think so. Direct democracy is still a little ways off; the technology isn’t mature enough to deliver reliable and safe voting powers to citizens; and paper ballots are obviously unsuited for regular voting on policy decisions. But more effort should be made in developing the technology, and more thought invested into how such power should be delivered to citizens, and what the implications might be. With a little effort, Direct Democracy is right around the corner.

And what about the naysayers? Aren’t we a herd of stampeding cattle? Won’t direct democracy fail simply because of the idiocy of people when taken as a sum? Well, if that’s the case we have a choice to make: either give up the pretense that we’re living in a real democracy, that a country’s citizens can really rule themselves; or to begin the process of teaching the next generation not mere language and maths skills, but Ethics and Politics and what taxes actually do, so that they’ll be ready to be empowered.

I came across an article in the SMH today warning against the Labor “nanny state”. There seem to be a lot of people interested in making us fear the “nanny state”. The term suggests a government that waddles us in diapers and feeds us milk. Aren’t we responsible adults? Can’t we take care of ourselves, make our own choices, choose our own poisons?

The answer seems pretty obvious; no, we can’t rely on our own good sense to make all the smart decisions. Otherwise there’d be no smokers, fewer obese people, no sun bathers, no alcoholics… who honestly believes that if we really understood the consequences of our actions, the enormity of suffering we risk, we would still maintain those behaviors?

The truth is that we don’t become adults when we turn 18. We don’t stop growing up and getting wiser just because we hit a certain magical age. Some people take longer to wise up than others. And last but not least, there are hundreds of thousands of very smart people out there whose job is to make us do things we might not do otherwise because it earns someone money.

Should government tell us what to do, and we just sit back and take it? No. There needs to be a dialog, there needs to be democracy, there needs to be reason. But there are certainly many areas in which it is right for government to impose limits, laws and regulations based on scientific research and reasonable community standards. Otherwise, why is crack cocaine illegal?