The state and liberty
On initial inspection, there seem to be two mutually excusive epistemes: the Hobbesian episteme of a belief in freedom from a summum malum , which when writ large gives rise to a nanny state, which is very popular with the people who don’t live sheltered lives vs the episteme of the sheltered intellectual advancing an argument as to the moral bankruptcy of such as state, as it denies my freedom to think thus representing a total and systematic oppression. If those two people were different we could say that the state which is a precondition for true liberty depends on which group is the majority: the group that wants the nanny or the group that wants the nightwatchman and a marketplace of ideas? These two states are a dichotomy, yet we cannot have either: we need to have a mix of both. For two reasons: first, both options individually would necessitate a tyranny of the majority which would act as a systematic, total and oppressive ‘special coercive force’ on the minority , thus presenting a moral harm which destroys true liberty. Secondly, and most importantly, as we move through life we are members of both groups (sometimes simultaneously) and thus the groups are never clearly defined. As such, the state which is a precondition for the most liberty is one which gives the freedom to self-actualize to both camps in some capacity. Let us consider the fluid nature of our beliefs as to what is true liberty by extrapolating from empirical observation. When we are children we want security. Most of us do not concern ourselves with the morality of our parents making us put on a warm hat in the winter or force-feeding us vegetables; we willingly submit because if our parents (representing the Leviathan) disappeared and there was no one to protect us from the world we would be scared. Our happiness as children is contingent on this freedom from fear: we ,as children, are ultimately Hobbesians. As we grow up, provided we feel safe to venture into the intellectual sphere, we start thinking about how our individual actions define who we are; we start to resent imposition from above, constraints placed upon our ambition by redistributive taxation, moral messages delivered through institutions or furthering the powers of state. We, as safe, high-achieving thinkers want a freedom of thought and from imposition. We become liberal, to some extent existentialist and allergic to nanny Rousseau telling us he knows best. Then, as we are put in a position of having things to protect – our children, livelihoods, bodily safety – , we start to value safety once more. We want imposition of authority as it delivers us from fear; we want nanny, if not for us, then for our children . This sketch is highly general, and yet even when we don’t consider changes in social standing like wealth or class, it is clear that on an individual level our episteme shifts constantly between a want for unfettered freedom to total security. Thus, th ere is no singular ‘good’ or ‘correct’ state for the creation of total freedom. Total freedom is the freedom to choose between the different conceptions of freedom and it is in the golden zone between the nanny state for the children, the elderly and people plagued with fear, on the one hand, and the nightwatchman state for cloistered intellectuals and absurdist teenagers that the state for liberty maximization lies, on the other. In some ways, the multicultural agenda of the British state attempts to put itself into that zone. It protects you from the summum malum with stop and search, facial recognition and sentencing guidelines, while attempting to allow cloistered intellectuals like Berlin to talk and theorize and try to move the public to their end of the pendulum. The answer is complex and I don’t have it, but what is certain is that the state needs to allow the co-existence of these epistemes of liberty while respecting and safeguarding against both a mother’s fear for her children and my insatiable desire to think. Still, freedom from violent death, at the very least, must always come first.
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