U Not Gonna Like This

by Tibor R. Machan

Across the centuries an important idea emerged as crucial for how people should live in their communities. Finally, in the US Declaration of Independence, this idea gained official recognition and, eventually, worldwide popularity.

I am talking of course, about the idea of individual rights. Although there had been rumblings about them already in ancient Greece, not until the English philosopher John Locke wrote his book, Second Treatise on Government, (link) did a full blown theory back up the idea. This was Locke's theory of natural rights. Its essence is that because of the kind of beings we humans are — because, that is, of our nature — we must treat each other without forcible intrusion. We have basic rights, among them, most importantly, to life, to liberty and to property. So, it is because of our human nature — not because we are men, women, English, French, Asian or Indian — that none may force us to live other than how we choose to live. This is true even when we choose badly, so long as the bad choice does not involve violating the rights of another human individual.

One reason this idea caught on is that most people held the view that people are free agents and have moral responsibilities they need to fulfill. They need to do this of their own free will, otherwise their dignity, their distinctive human capacity as moral agents, is defeated. So, a just or good human community had to be governed by a constitution that gave legal standing to our human rights. And that community came to be referred to as the free society.

In time, however, certain developments in how prominent thinkers thought about the world began to change things significantly. Mainly, when it became fashionable to explain everything by factors over which we, as individuals, have no control — so our own power to choose was dismissed as a myth — the idea that we have the right to live as we choose became difficult to defend. Instead another idea of rights took over, namely, the view that we all have the right to a good life, however it is secured. So that if you were poor or sick or ignorant or immoral, none of it had anything to do with you. Individuals have no such powers, namely, to choose to neglect or to improve on their lives, to be lazy or to enrich themselves, to stay ignorant or to educate themselves and so on. Everything happens because it has to happen — it's all in our genes or the stars or the contingencies of our family history. Nothing is up to us.

This idea had its origins in the fact that the natural sciences revealed that a good deal of nature is, indeed, governed by invariable laws, regularities that must happen, period. Because this idea yielded some great successes in our efforts to make things turn out as we'd like — in agriculture, transportation, medicine and computer science — many people thought it a good idea to simply apply it to ourselves. The social sciences were born this way, hoping to come up with a resulting social engineering that would set everything right, by means of the manipulations of experts, in human personal and social life.

The major task of government was then envisioned not to secure our individual rights to life, liberty and property but to provide us all with supports, those things that have come to be called "entitlements," things that would set everything right for us. The transfer society was gradually developed, so now government is far more concerned with schemes of wealth redistribution than with the provision of security! And the results are not difficult to spot — it doesn't do well at either of these tasks.

The fact seems to be clear: human beings are not just billiard balls being shoved around by impersonal forces, even if much around them is such. Indeed, technology is nothing other than people making creative, imaginative use of their understanding of how the rest of the world lawfully operates. But we are able to make use of this knowledge because we are not just being pushed around but have the free will to give direction to our own conduct and our institutions — or to fail in those tasks.

Sadly, however, the idea that we are indeed just being pushed around has given ammunition to those among us who love imposing their own ways on everyone else. The belief that we are ultimately helpless in the face of the forces of nature has provided the power-hungry with the excuse that none of us have any rights to liberty, that we can be at their disposal to regiment about as they see fit. And the further excuse they use is that since we are all helpless, without the power to redistribute wealth via entitlement programs, many of us could not succeed at living.

Never mind that this is all a ruse. If what these people believed about us were really true — indeed, if they actually believed it — they would be helpless and uninterested themselves to do anything for us or to us. Yet, clearly, this isn't so. Their choices — and they are choices they like to reserve the right to make without extending them to others — have caused havoc upon the social-political world. But because the idea that everything is moved about by impersonal forces has wide appeal — it seems like a practically useful idea — it is difficult to undercut their power, to dispute their supposed scientifically backed authority.

The sooner we understand, however, that this power to regiment others is ill founded, that it rests on a mistaken extrapolation of ideas from one field of study — the hard sciences — to all others, including politics and ethics, the more likely it is that all this power-mongering will be abated, eventually. Then we can perhaps begin to fully enjoy the idea that John Locke has developed and the American Founders set into political motion, namely, that the just and good human community is one that protects our individual rights without any compromise at all — the free society.

It will not, however, be enough to simply reiterate the Lockean theme or to shout from the hill top that we have the rights Locke helped us understand. It will also be necessary to understand and explain why there is some honest belief backing the idea that Locke was wrong and that we have no choices to make and, thus, require no rights that serve to provide us with our own sphere of authority, our own personal jurisdiction. We need to learn what supports this anti-individualist, anti-libertarian philosophy that makes it possible for power-hungry people to enjoy intellectual standing. Only if we do, can we also discover that their ideas are flawed and the policies they derive from them do violence to our human nature — meaning, to each and every one of us.

(End of article)

The above article is from the Internet Archives it was orginally posted at the The Laissez Faire Electronic Times (link).