The classical liberalism propounded by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Murray Rothbard is pivoted on the concept of liberty. More in particular, and especially so within the framework of the Austrian School of Economics, the great libertarian minds place liberty in the setting of human economic interaction, for which von Mises coined the term praxeology. In this setting, liberty runs the risk of being understood as a secular and human affair. Yet, in the context of what Thomas Jefferson described as “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the American Declaration of Independence, together with Life and the Pursuit of Happiness, Liberty is to be understood as one of the unalienable rights endowed to Man by his Creator. This ‘truth’ has enormous implications, since it defines Man as a spiritual being and places the God-given right called Liberty in the heart of Man who lives in partnership with God and as such in partnership with other Men.
The libido liberandi
In my book Liberating liberty, I explore this unique perspective on the Divine origin of Man and Man’s unalienable rights and describe what happens when Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are intentionally and systematically unmoored from their true origin, the Creator of Man. In this regard, the American Declaration of Independence must be seen as the expression of the American Founders’ deep-seated libido liberandi, the urge to liberate liberty and to keep liberty liberated by defending it against the libido dominandi, the Will to Power. In this regard, the Preamble of the Declaration of Indepence is in full alignment with classical liberalism: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Check your premises
As Ayn Rand wrote in her novel Atlas Shrugged: “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” While few libertarians will contradict the truth that the securement of Man’s unalienable rights concerns the institution of “just” Governments by the “governed”, it is doubtful whether all contemporary libertarians will unconditionally accept the truth that Governments are instituted to secure liberty as an endowment coming from the Creator of Man. The latter truth contradicts the modern “truth” that God is dead, buried and forgotten and that in our day and age all problems that concern rights, law, politics and economics must and can be solved by placing them within the strict confines of human action. But if God is dead, who or what is at the origin of rights such as Liberty? Nature? Government? Other men? So, if contradictions don’t exist, and more in particular in light of the fact that the Declaration of Independence is a seminal document in the field of Liberty, it might not be a bad idea for libertarians to check their premises. After all, the notion that God is dead creates an inner contradiction in the Preamble on which the entire Declaration rests. If God is really dead, the Declaration is reduced to no more than an enumeration of some of the most pressing reasons for declaring political independence from the British Commonwealth.
Metanoia
Other than this, if the Creator of Man really died some time after 1776, His death also profoundly alters the meaning of the word happiness and what its pursuit shall entail. In the classical traditions of the philosophy of law and politics, Man is a speech- or Logos-enabled being, whose happiness can only be thought of in terms of the classical idea of the highest good, of eudaimomia. Those traditions invariably turned to the relations between the human and the divine without losing sight of the relations between human and brute nature. Man – i.e. every human being – exists in the “Great In-between” that connects the secular World and the Divine Ground of Being. Plato called this In-Between the “metaxy” (in Greek “μεταξύ“, between, in between).
The revolt against reality
The metaxy is thought to engender a gravitational interaction between its poles, a ‘pulling’ and ‘thrusting’ force, the orientation of which steers Man’s pursuit of happiness as eudaimonia, his search for order and meaning, in the direction of his very Beginning, his Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being. But, the metaxy becomes dangerous ground when the failure, incapacity or plain resistance to discover this divine source as the essential and indispensable element in the articulation of order and meaning brings the metaxic search to a halt. However, the thrusting force oriented towards God won’t go away or wither, so that it will now ignite and feed a revolt against reality. However, the revolt cannot resolve the tensions of existence that come with living in the Great In-Between.
Second Realities
The revolt against reality often leads to the creation of all sorts of “second realities”, which are really Ersatz or pseudo-realities, imaginary concepts construed by individuals who, instead of confronting and dealing with existential insecurities seek to attain happiness by creating an imaginary self, ego or identity that – as they imagine it – is the sole creator of a reality of their own making. Man thus assumes the identity of Übermensch. But because Second Realities are always utopian in nature, their justification, pursuit and realization inevitably energizes the utopists’ Will to Power, which brings about the use of force, coercion and suppression of “dissent” and “dissenters” who live and act in First Reality. In this struggle the Creator of Man is the enemy Who is feared most by the Übermensch, which is why He must be declared dead and buried.
The Apostles of Freedom
In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek, wrote: “To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached. The new [socialist / utopian] freedom promised, however, was to be the freedom from necessity; release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us, although for some very much more than for others. Before man could be truly free, the ‘despotism of physical want’ had to be broken, the ‘restraints of the economic system’ relaxed. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. […].”
The promise of greater freedom
Regarding “power”, Von Hayek remarked: “The characteristic confusion of freedom with power … [is] as old as socialism itself. It is so closely allied with it that almost seventy years ago a French scholar, discussing its Saint-Simonian origins, was led to say that this theory of liberty ‘est à elle seule tout le socialisme’ [‘is all by itself all there is to socialism’].” Von Hayek explained how the socialists and progressives subtly redefined the word freedom so that the term that once served as an unmistakable road sign at the Freedom-Serfdom bifurcation would now redirect those in search of genuine freedom towards serfdom. “There can be no doubt”, so Von Hayek, “that the promise of greater freedom has become one of the most effective weapons of socialist propaganda and that the belief that socialism would bring freedom is genuine and sincere. […] Unquestionably, the promise of more freedom was responsible for luring more and more liberals along the socialist road, for blinding them to the conflict which exists between the basic principles of socialism and liberalism, and for often enabling socialists to usurp the very name of the old party of freedom. Socialism was embraced by the greater part of the intelligentsia as the apparent heir of the liberal tradition: therefore it is not surprising that to them the idea of socialism’s leading to the opposite of liberty should appear inconceivable.” The classical liberty and freedom were surreptitiously substituted for the socialists’ fraudulent version of liberty which would open the door for “willing into reality” all kinds of “second realities”, Utopias and dreamworlds.
Freedom for me, but not for you
“Free will” is the “will” of Man’s higher self, of the spiritual being who is aware of himself. This freedom seeks expression in society, politics, culture, art, economics, in the “life of Man” in the broadest sense of the word. Pure freedom always remains spiritual – ethereal – in nature. It is the bread of life in each human soul. Hence, all efforts made to use freedom for ends other than the production, establishment, maintenance and protection of freedom, will suffer shipwreck on the cliffs erected by Man’s fellows who use false versions of freedom for ends serving their particular needs. Whoever is capable of wielding the most force will reap the fruits of the freedom that he permitted himself but denied others. In this regard, those who promise freedom as an instrument in the establishment of some unselfish and altruistic Utopia are to be feared most of all. Their moral arguments and reasonable intentions serve no other end than feeding their unsatiable libido dominandi, their uncontrollable Will to Power for no other reason than satisfying this particular libido. Their freedom shall mean another Man’s prison. A prison that has written “Freedom from Want and Necessity” above its entrance, and where the slogan hides the fact that all inmates will be equally poor. They will own nothing, but they will be happy. Likewise, all attempts of worldly Man to transform himself to Übermensch will falter and lead to disappointment, frustration and antipathy towards God.
Freedom is … God
In Das Evangelium, the German pastor Emil Bock wrote that Man is most unfree when he receives his freedom from an external giver of freedom, such givers including an external God, a God Who hands out or withholds freedom in accordance with His proprietary rules of predestination and election. Genuine freedom, though, is not given or received. Which implies that the Liberty endowed to Man by his Creator, for it to be genuine Liberty, was not a freedom given by an external “party”. If that were the case, our Liberty would be contingent, which it isn’t because it arises at the level of being where all externalities have disappeared and where “Oneness” of Man and his Creator of Man is fulfilled and consummated. “Freedom”, so wrote Bock, “is one of the subtlest notions that we can encounter in our thinking. This is the realm of paradoxes, such as are found anywhere where we find ourselves at the borderline between the physical-mental and the spiritual. The earlier interpretations were correct that substantive freedom, the Son taking up his place within man, are never engendered by man himself, but can only ever be bestowed on man through grace, that is the free devotion of spiritual powers. The free human being is no longer merely man. As long as man is ‘merely man’, he remains unfree at the very foundations of his being. True freedom can only come to life where something Higher, something Divine, has a place in man. Freedom is God.”
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