Keeping Freedom Alive: a response to Vodkapundit
<p>In a trenchant essay he posted on the 30th of January, Vodkapundit<br />
<a href='http://www.vodkapundit.com/archives/005115.php#005115'>fulminates</a><br />
against people he calls &#8220;doctrinaire libertarians&#8221;.  While I sympathize in some<br />
respects &mdash; I too have been attacked for my pro-war position &mdash; I<br />
think there is some serious danger that Steve&#8217;s arguments are throwing out the<br />
baby along with the bathwater.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m an individualist anarchist.  In most peoples&#8217; books that would<br />
qualify me as a &#8220;doctrinaire libertarian&#8221;.  I got reminded why<br />
recently by watching a Babylon 5 episode, the 4th-season one in which<br />
Sheridan is interrogated by an EarthGov psychologist who uses torture,<br />
isolation, and drugs, to try and break him.  But more frightening than<br />
the torture is the ideology that comes out of the interrogator&#8217;s<br />
mouth; the command that truth is fluid and must bend to power; the<br />
disingenuous disclaimers of any responsibility for the hell Sheridan<br />
is being put through; and beneath it all like a constant drumbeat, the<br />
seductive invitation that if Sheridan will just surrender his will to<br />
the State, his pain will end.</p>
<p>The interrogator is never named. Like his prototypes in Nazi<br />
Germany and Soviet Russia, he is a case study in the banality of evil<br />
&mdash; the true face, the night face, the real face of the State.<br />
And what is truly terrifying is that the interrogator is not a mere<br />
thug but a man with a subtle and flexible mind.  There is an angle on<br />
the world from which all his lies and acts of coercion issue from a<br />
coherent moral position &mdash; but it is one that promises everyone<br />
but his masters hell on Earth, forever and ever, amen.</p>
<p>In this episode J. Michael Straczynski gives us a fictional<br />
depiction of a type that is all too real.  Anyone who has read Arthur<br />
Koestler&#8217;s <cite>Darkness at Noon</cite> or Aleksandr Solszhenitzyn&#8217;s<br />
<cite>The Gulag Archipelago</cite> knows that if anything, JMS (who<br />
clearly did his homework on the real-world techniques of brainwashing)<br />
<em>understates</em> the soul-destroying depths to which the ideology<br />
of statism can sink, trapping the interrogator and his victim in a<br />
machinery of coercion that will ultimately consume them both.</p>
<p>The moral climax of that episode comes after Sheridan says &#8220;You<br />
know, it&#8217;s funny I was thinking about what you said. &#8216;The pre-eminent<br />
truth of our age is that you cannot fight the system.&#8217; But if, as you<br />
say, truth is fluid, that the truth is subjective, then maybe you can<br />
fight the system &mdash; as long as one person refuses to be broken,<br />
refuses to bow down.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;But can you win?&#8221; the interrogator asks, almost gently.  Sheridan,<br />
knowing it is likely to mean he will shortly die under torture, rasps<br />
out the bedrock libertarian reply &#8220;Every&#8230;time I&#8230;say&#8230;<em>no</em>!&#8221;</p>
<p>If I were the praying kind, I would be on my knees every day<br />
praying that if there ever comes a moment when I must confront the<br />
night face of the State, I too will meet it with that kind of courage.<br />
And that day may come.  Because the hell that spawns creatures like<br />
that nameless interrogator is what waits for all of us down the road<br />
to serfdom that is paved with good intentions like &#8220;welfare&#8221; and<br />
&#8220;protecting the children&#8221; and &#8220;saving the environment&#8221; and, yes,<br />
&#8220;necessary war&#8221;.</p>
<p>This is why I think we all ought to be grateful for &#8220;doctrinaire<br />
libertarians&#8221;, even the ones more doctrinaire than me.  It&#8217;s their job<br />
to keep reminding all of us where that road leads.  And it frightens<br />
we when anyone replies to &#8220;War is the health of the state&#8221; by saying<br />
fearfully &#8220;Let&#8217;s be blunt here, kids. When foreigners are rearranging<br />
the Manhattan skyline because, in part, our women drive cars, then<br />
goddamnit its <em>time</em> for a healthier state.&#8221;  Because it&#8217;s in<br />
the shadow cast by that kind of fear that creatures like the<br />
interrogator and his masters grow and flourish.</p>
<p>Necessity, as wiser men than me have observed, is the credo of<br />
tyrants and the excuse of slaves.  It disturbs me to hear anyone<br />
talking like a slave.</p>
<p>I agree with you in conceding that the state is at this time the<br />
only way we have to answer the terrorist threat.  The world in which<br />
Osama bin Laden would be killed by troops hired by a consortium of<br />
crime- and disaster-insurance companies rather than a government does<br />
not yet exist.</p>
<p>But having conceded the present necessity of state action makes it<br />
<em>more</em> necessary, not less, that we listen to the most<br />
contrary, ornery, anti-statist libertarians we have, and to hold<br />
harder than ever to our intentions for a libertarian future.  Otherwise<br />
we risk becoming too comfortable with that concession, and letting the<br />
statists seduce us further down that road to serfdom.</p>
<p>Does this mean we can&#8217;t slam the LP for its attribution of the 9/11<br />
attacks to American foreign policy?  No, you&#8217;re right; that position<br />
is not just wrong, it bespeaks a lack of moral seriousness and a kind<br />
of blinkered parochialism that cannot actually see anything outside<br />
of U.S. politics as having causal force.</p>
<p>But there is a big difference between observing that the LP is<br />
contingently wrong about the liberation of Iraq (true) and suggesting<br />
that our only course is to abandon our longer-term commitment to the<br />
abolition of drastic shrinking of the state (false).  Beware of<br />
throwing out that baby with the bathwater.  John Ashcroft is not yet a<br />
greater threat to liberty than Osama bin Laden &mdash; but that day<br />
may come yet.  Only libertarian thoughts, libertarian words,<br />
libertarian deeds, and a principled libertarian opposition to the<br />
arrogance and seductions of power will prevent it.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Gary Farber <a href="http://amygdalagf.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_amygdalagf_archive.html#107567816290438373">thinks</a> I&#8217;m making the same error I slammed John Perry<br />
Barlow for recently.  But there is a large difference. Barlow<br />
was being specifically paranoid about a short-term threat which he ties to<br />
specific people he thinks are evil and has (at the very least) grossly<br />
overestimated. I have a longer-term concern about structural tendencies<br />
that are built into the nature of government, and which don&#8217;t require<br />
specific evil people running things to take us to some very nasty places.</p>
<p>Or, to put it another way, Barlow has what is essentially a devil theory;<br />
Bush, or Cheney, or Ashcroft or someone like them is evil and wants to put us<br />
in camps next year.  This is silly.  I, on the other hand, don&#8217;t think it<br />
much matters for the long term whether &#8220;good&#8221; or &#8220;evil&#8221; people are running<br />
the government; the <em>premises</em> and the <em>process</em> of government,<br />
and the collectivist ethos that underlies them, have a momentum of their own<br />
that grinds away at our liberty regardless.  The founders of the U.S.<br />
understood this tendency and erected the Bill Of Rights as a firewall against<br />
it.  The fact that in many jurisdictions U.S. law now suppresses &#8220;hate speech&#8221; and<br />
bans the possession of firearms demonstrates their failure.</p>
<p>The erosion of liberty which I fear is a far more gradual process than<br />
the sudden collapse into totalitarianism that Barlow envisions.  But it<br />
is also more difficult to resist and counter.  Because the end stages,<br />
where <em>only</em> evil people can adapt themselves to politics, are<br />
probably many decades away, few people can summon the concern and the<br />
will to say &#8220;Stop now, before it&#8217;s too late!&#8221;.  There is always some<br />
short-term reason that seems good to accept the state&#8217;s poisonous candy<br />
&#8212; the new entitlement program, the next round of farm- or steel-mill<br />
subsidies, the airport metal detectors to make us &#8220;safe&#8221;.</p>
<p>Many (though not all) of the people who can summon that will are<br />
libertarians. Which is yet another good reason to listen to them carefully,<br />
even when they&#8217;re more doctrinaire than me.</p>
<p>(Exercise for the reader: Let&#8217;s stipulate that littering laws may not lead to 1984,<br />
but can you defend the proposition that laws banning speeech and weapons don&#8217;t? Discuss<br />
historical examples such as Nazi Germany and Tokugawa-period Japan.  Be specific.)</p>
