Liberalism continued - a credo subject to correction by better and wiser people!

I'm almost done. The reason why I'm doing this is because - like I said - I just want to get this premature fermentation down on paper, so to speak: so I can look at it better and organize it if I have to, which I probably will.

The ultimate end of a society should be the liberty of its citizens, which leads to the formation of healthy communities. The next question is a psychological one. Why do socialists believe what they do? It’s because they haven’t made the psychological transition from seeing themselves as members absorbed in a community to autonomous individuals that can freely associate themselves in a community.

They don’t - or don’t want to - see themselves as individuals. I want to keep in mind exactly what that means. To true liberalism, being an individual is an arduous task, one of the goals of life, finding out who you are, fulfilling the Socratic maxim to Know Thyself. It takes time, discipline, work, humility, and ultimately Christ. Socialists might be guilty of one or two psychological pathologies. Of course, it’s only a pathology if Socialism isn’t true; but I’m working from the standpoint of it being false.

First, they don’t know about their ability to be an individual. They’ve been brought up to think or they have a bias to believe that the purpose of life is to be insulated in a community. But if you’re insulated in a community, you’re insulated from any challenge to compete for opportunities. Second, they just don’t have the faith to rise up to their calling. Some feelings that the Socialist might have: envy, resentment, self-pity, persecution complex.

It seems to me that a sense of individuality is a key to finding out what you excel at, finding out whatever it is that you do well, and that doing it makes you happy. It’s a way to love yourself. But this key alludes the socialist: the key that lets them through the door of loving self and neighbor. It’s exchanged for a love for a utopian dream, an abstract idea, a community, a state, and not a concrete individual, like your neighbor, Zachary Elvington or Matthew Johnson.

Socialists want a government that is a nanny, a boss, an organizer, someone that gives orders, someone that fairly distributes goods and services to all the citizens, no matter what work is done, how much, or how little. A true liberal merely wants an umpire, someone to call foul if already autonomous individuals, working in a civil association, violate the institution of the rule of law.

The liberal wants to succeed; the socialist doesn’t want to fail. But then socialism would lead to a society with a boss or a nanny that is itself short on being an individual. When they call the shots, it’ll revolve around everyone getting an equal share in a government sponsored economy, rather than individuals competing in a market economy.

The thing responsible for the pathology is sin. That’s not to say that liberals aren’t afflicted with sin as well: it’s just to say that sin in socialism seems to be built into the system, a psychological condition of its getting off the ground, so to speak.

The liberal point, then, is this. Socialism erodes communities as they should be, and one of the communities that is eroding is religion. The community erodes because it’s looked at as an ultimate end; but it’s not. The community is what it is because autonomous individuals who have as their final end liberty voluntarily choose to join that community. When that community is religion, the religion in turn feeds the community ‘spiritual capital’, which strengthens the nation’s culture and morale, and puts in place the proper conditions which allow its citizens to practice their religion authentically in the privacy of their inner lives. Socialism ruins that spiritual capital over time, because it ruins liberty and autonomy (by enlarging the tentacles of government), the conditions for the creation of an authentic community to begin with.

I say all this knowing that a lot is left hanging, and that lots of points are dangling, not sufficiently argued for. But this is my philosophy for the moment and I felt like spilling it all out with all its apparent, latent, or real weaknesses.

What Liberalism should be - a very brief credo

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. - Winston Churchill

I’d like to talk about true liberalism: the kind that a Marx would be against. Two things characterize this liberalism: emphasis on the individual over the collective and the free market. This blog will be very brief, but this is a credo that’s been fermenting in my head for a while.

There are five main institutions we should try to have: technology, free market, limited government (to protect freedom and our rights), rule of law, and an emphasis on personal autonomy.

The society that has these institutions seems to have the best material conditions. The main reason why this might be is because freedom itself is an institution. It is an axiom we start with.

But there are two main reasons why Americans are starting to forget that. First, they haven’t defined liberalism correctly - they’ve used the ideas of Ayn Rand, Rawls, and Nozick. Second, the discipline of social science doesn’t allow scholars to define it right. This was started by Marx, Freud, Durkheim, and the deconstruction of language. But this blinds them, because social science is secular, and the roots of liberalism are religious. Religion is an illusion to these guys.

John Locke and Adam Smith gave us the first great narrative for true liberalism. They both use religious language and concepts. But the second rival narrative came from Marx and Rousseau. Their main pillar was equality. Their view of art and science is strange: it doesn’t satisfy any human needs - it is an expression of pride. It deteriorates the ‘commune’, leads to consumerism, and so to dreaded capitalism. Locke, on the other hand, wants to make inequality an institution - not in terms of intrinsic worth, but talents, gifts, natural abilities, God-given endowments.

The 19th and 20th century socialists have agree with the second narrative: for distribution of wealth to be ‘fair’, for ‘equal’ opportunities, for reorganizing society into smaller communes. They don’t show us how this new economy will work, or really how to go from where we are now to where they want to go. What is common to all the socialists, though, is that the present system just doesn’t work. They show this by a moral critique, by labeling who the bad people are and who the victims are.

But true liberalism is about having what’s called a ‘civil association’; this civility is assumed in its economics, politics, and law. This association doesn’t have in mind the entire commune; it just prepares the soil to allow us to pursue what we want. Marx, Aristotle, Plato, and even Aquinas set out to absorb the individual into the commune. The community comes first, then the individual, says todays socialists and much of the Church.

Lets contrast. Socialists want the government to make the good of the commune the ultimate end, to absorb the individual into the commune, to serve the commune. True liberalism, though, wants to make personal freedom the ultimate end, in the context of civil association, based on a culture which allows individuals the freedom to choose to join communes if they want: communes such as religions, churches, schools, families, etc . . .

These voluntarily joined communes are true liberalism’s ‘spiritual capital’. This is the economical context in which we, in a society ruled by a government, approach, join, or shy away from the social institution of religion. That’s why we have so many religions here in America, instead of, for example, Iran, which has one religion, sponsored and made obligatory by the government.

The implication is that socialists, in the back of their minds, in their subconscious, in their philosophy of government and economics, haven’t made the switch from community being the ultimate end to individual freedom being that end. If community is the end, freedom is lost (along with true community); if freedom is the end, the community is saved.

I’ll finish my thoughts on this in the next blog.