22A041 Human Nature & Freedom by Jim Davies, 10/11/2022

In our travels in Social Media Land, we encounter all manner of weird people, and a recent one asserted that Libertarianism fails to account for numerous aspects of human nature. Ha!

He didn't name any of them, but like Winnie the Pooh I put on my thinking cap and tried to imagine one. It was tough. Can you?

One possible contender is the wish to rule other people. It happens. In the US, about 20 million (15%) choose to work for government, and while many of those do so only because the pay is generous and the workload light, there is also the sordid pleasure of telling the rest of us peasants what we can and cannot do. Visit any DMV or tax-collection office to see examples. That pleasure is one of the incentives to hold the job, and there's no denying that it's a part - a dark one - of human nature, and can't be squared with freedom.

As I see it "evil" consists only of exercising power over others; so this true aspect of human nature says that when handed the opportunity, we may do evil things. That is not at all the same as saying we have a bias towards evildoing - that we're afflicted with Original Sin - but it does say we're capable of it. Hence, war. And krime.

Another candidate is the tendency to go with the crowd. If "everyone else" is "doing it", whatever "it" may be, there's a serious pressure to conform and enjoy the popularity and not stand out as a spoilsport or dissident or even "traitor." Yes, I must admit that war fever and the "madness of crowds" are factual. It happens.

Perhaps there are others, but those are biggies. Now, does "Libertarianism" - the belief that each individual has the natural right to own and operate his own life - "account" for these ugly aspects of human nature? Or does it fail to do so?

It acounts for them very well - by correcting them. Here's how: a zero government society (ZGS) will come into being only after everyone in it has graduated from a freedom school like TOLFA, and will therefore know and accept the fact that (s)he owns himself and nobody else, by the self-ownership axiom. So the whole society will be well aware of it. Huge contrast to today!

Consequently everyone will have no inclination to go along with the crowd (except in the sense that the "crowd" will all now be libertarian too!) for he knows he has the pleasure and responsibility of making his own choices regardless of how others make theirs. Candidate #2 above will therefore vanish. This doesn't require any change in human nature, just a radical change of understanding of human nature; the error will have been corrected.

For exactly the same reason nobody will have any wish to rule anyone else, for the desire to govern will have been fully satisfied by the 100% control he enjoys over himself. Today we have only a small degree of such control; government takes most of it away, so some try to rule other people to make good the shortfall. But in the ZGS, the shortfall won't exist.

Can you think of any other human trait that might be though of as an ill fit with freedom? - if so, why not apply this kind of reasoning and see how it shapes up. Or let me know, and I'll build it in to a future ZGB Edition.