Individual Freedom through Individual Restraint

Looking around the world at the various cultures and the educational systems they spawn, I feel that my educational journey has been blessed to occur at or near the pinnacle of higher education. In a world where many struggle for clean water, I have high speed internet, the most advanced libraries in history, and free delivery ten dollar pizza. When measured against the standard of a global community, nothing short of complete success in every way would do justice to my privileged position. While I am not rich by any standard, compared to the struggles of my ancestors and the poorest people of the world, I have had an easy journey. This wide view of my college experience can be depressing; having been given so much it seems that I have accomplished very little, especially when compared with the Darrell Bazzells of the world.

The highly competitive nature of upper level education only serves to fuel the feelings of inadequacy. Comparisons between myself and my graduating peers can be depressing. Those majoring in readily applicable fields such as medicine or engineering may not have succeeded in every way possible, but at least after graduation they are prepared to make significant contributions to society. For many of my fellow liberal arts majors, success lays waiting in graduate school. But for those of us who never figured out exactly what they want to do with our lives, graduation seems hollow. With so many unanswered questions the story of how I reached my final semester becomes a story of transformation. Beginning my freshman year I was focused on global and social comparisons for happiness and success. I was concerned with doing better than others and with doing as much as possible. Now, as I prepare to leave Madison, my educational experience has transformed my definition of success, and happiness, to an internal comparison between my actual self and my ideal self; a transition that has many consequences for my social integration. Clearly my goal after graduation will be to realize my ideal self. But it is first necessary to understand how that self came into existence through many years of education.

The son of a teacher and a writer there was never any question about my life path. Even before high school I knew my life was heading directly for college. My mother once told me that it didn’t matter what I did after college as long as I got my degree. My parents were the first in their families to go to college, and they did so at a time when their diploma’s guaranteed them rewarding and well paid jobs. With my goal of college, my first 12 years of education were directed towards those pursuits that would make me competitive for college; outperforming my peers and extreme extracurricular involvement. These goals lead to great successes: class president, captain of the chess and tennis teams, musical and speaking awards. I also developed strong abilities in all academic areas, particularly writing and critical analysis. At times I was worried that despite my success I wasn’t doing the things I truly enjoyed, I was simply doing the things that would make me competitive. But with college calling my name, there was little reason to doubt I was making the right choices.

Finally, after completing 12 years of college preparation (and one year of remedial pre-school for the developmentally disabled), it was time for the big show. The only hang up was that I didn’t know what I wanted to major in. I had spent so much time diversifying that I had never developed a serious passion for anything besides chess. At SOAR there was no major for chess; I decided to major in Psychology on a whim. The high school mindset that had driven me to stay ahead of my peers dictated that I not waste anytime finding myself. I could always decide what I wanted to be in graduate school or while I completed a major. Within just two years I had completed the degree requirements for my major and was left searching for a second major within the College of Letters and Science to fill my remaining 60 credits. Communication arts seemed to fit well; if I didn’t know what I wanted to do I might as well take the easiest second major I could find while developing my writing skills.

And so my freshman and sophomore years were very similar to my high school experience. I succeeded at everything I did, receiving good grades and landing a fantastic job as a counselor at a mental hospital. Everyone I worked with already had a college degree! None of my peers in Psychology could match the hands on experience and training I was receiving while still staying on track to graduate in four years. But that was when I made two realizations that quickly shifted me out of high school mode. If the people I was working with already had degrees, what was the point of being in college? At the same time I realized that I couldn’t possibly go to graduate school without figuring out what I wanted to do. My junior year I realized I had to make a change.

It was clear that if I didn't decide what I wanted to do after college my traditional education journey was going to end. I found myself in the same position as Benjamin in The Graduate when Mr. Braddock asks him about his plans.

Mr. Braddock: Ben, what are you doing?
Benjamin: Well, I would say that I’m just drifting. Here in the pool.
Mr. Braddock: Why?
Benjamin: Well, it’s very comfortable just to drift here.
Mr. Braddock: Have you thought about graduate school?
Benjamin: No.
Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?
Benjamin: You got me.

Grade school had led to middle school, then high school, then college, but now what? I didn’t know what I wanted to do at graduate school and going back to my counseling job would have meant college was a waste of time. What was the point in maintaining a high grade point and participating in committees and clubs I didn't care about if there was no next step? I began to shift away from doing the things I felt I had to in order to compete and started to concentrate on doing the things I enjoyed. I figured if there was no next step I might as well stop working towards nothing and enjoy myself.

Surprisingly my grades only got better as I gave up on pleasing professors and started using my class time to think about my own life. I began writing hilarious letters to the school newspaper that took fantasy and science fiction movies and pretended they were real. The editors thought some of them were so funny they ran them and eventually offered me a position writing full time comedy. This was when I realized I might be able to create my own definition of success. Society could no longer furnish the next step that would make me feel like I was keeping pace. I began to think about what I had learned, what I was enjoying, and thinking seriously about how I would live my life.

This type of thinking led me away from social comparison and towards individualism. Contrary to the idea that college makes students more liberal, I found myself turning conservative. I was unhappy with what was supposed to make me happy; it seemed that other people didn't know what was best for me. All the pressure I was receiving pointed me towards pointless competition, graduate school, and finally a job with more useless competition. Looking down that path was terrifying because it seemed that there would be no way to spend time doing what I wanted to do until retirement at age 72. Looking inward I found that I could only list a few things that I enjoyed. I enjoyed driving, hunting and fishing, rock climbing, debate, chess, and writing (Interestingly this is when I started enjoying country music much to my friends dismay, but that is another paper). I began to focus on these areas, neglecting my school work, and trying to forget about society’s ultimate definition of success, cash money.

Towards the end of my junior year and in the beginning of my senior year it was clear I had to define and continually improve my viewpoints and desires and turn this philosophy into a lifestyle. I truly began to examine my life in the manner prescribed in Chapter 3 of Charles W. Anderson’s A Deeper Freedom. In that chapter he states, “The unexamined life can indeed be worth living. The only problem is that it will not be your own (24).” It seemed to me that I had indeed been living a valuable life, but it was not my own. Rather it was one that had been prescribed to me. In an attempt to find my own life I took hunters safety, played more chess, and began writing for myself. My career at the newspaper took off and I applied for a position as an opinion columnist. I stopped buying text books and starting checking out only the library books that interested me. It was clear that college was pointless if there was no connection between what I was learning and the way I lived my life. Anderson points out how we must find a way of living that applies bother to our institutions, such as college, and our personal lives.

“We are looking for an idea of individuality and freedom that could serve as the basis of our political order and that we would also be proud to teach as a personal philosophy, a way of living (22).”

I used my class time to try and integrate new ideas into my life. I thought about older classes I had taken and what they might mean for me as an individual rather than as pawn of society.

I remembered my first economics class where my professor explained dead weight losses. Through the use of a simple graph he explained that when companies are prevented from producing at the optimal level or selling at the price dictated by the market, there is a loss suffered by both consumers and producers that is not recovered anywhere in the market. When I had memorized this concept my freshman year for a test, I hadn’t bothered to think about it. But now, it seemed very important. It seemed that artificial constraints on the free market, usually imposed by the government, were a real problem. I wondered what could have been accomplished had that dead weight loss not occurred.

As I was rethinking this economics lesson I was also taking ILS 371, Classical Thinkers Grapple with Contemporary Issues. The thinking of Adam Smith seemed to shed light on my concerns over interventions. In his book The Wealth of Nations, Smith outlines the benefit of having each individual pursue their own interests.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

Smith goes on to outline how little good can come of interventions into the natural process of having every person work for their own betterment. My understanding of dead weight losses led me to believe that by allowing all members of the marketplace to compete and produce with as little intervention as possible, we could create the greatest good for all members of society.

The individualism required for a free market which regulates itself with an invisible hand seemed to mesh well with my own search for an internal definition of success. I felt as if individualism could provide a coherent unification of my personal, social, and economic viewpoints that would enable me to approach life without a contradiction in my mental schemas. I began to feel a very deep connection to the literal interpretations of our nations founding documents which promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Only when I was free from external constraints on my liberty would I be able to pursue my life in a way which would bring me the greatest happiness while, through the power of the free market, bringing an overall benefit to the rest of society.

In the fall of this year I read John Stewart Mill’s book On Liberty for the first time in ILS 371, Literature and Political Thought in Great Britain. It seemed I had found an individualist ally who had clearly defined the principles I had only begun to explore. He states, “That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” Mill’s harm principle seemed like an effective way to define the limits of my new ideology. So long as my actions, or the actions of others operating in my imagined libertarian paradise, did not harm others they should be allowed. But my study of Mill brought about several road blocks to me putting my ideas into practice. The first followed from Mill’s idea that our common goal should be to do the most good for the greatest number of people. It seemed that everyone could agree on this goal, but everyone thought they knew better than everyone else how to bring about this good.

I quickly realized that Socrates had already provided an answer to the problem of disagreement about the best way forward. In his dialogues, Plato outlined Socrates’ conclusion that the man who says he knows the best course of action is the fool, whereas those who admit they don’t know what is best are the most correct. I felt as if my entire life politicians, school administrators, and the media had been telling me they knew the best method for achieving the most good for the greatest number of people. When I had rejected the assumption that society knew what was best for me I had actually been taking sides with Socrates. But this meant that I must admit I also couldn’t know what was best for others. This realization became my strongest support for the free market and individualism. If no one knows what is best, we must each come up with our own definition of success.

This led me to think about how the harm principle should be applied. What constitutes harm? I thought about those who decide to do nothing as well as those who harm themselves and must be cared for by society. It was easy to see how the desire to pursue life, liberty, and happiness could easily come at the expense of someone else. This would make it necessary for the government to step in and prevent one person from trampling on the rights of others. But this simple step taken by the government quickly grows out of hand. In my lifetime I have witnessed laws that dictate how much water can be used in a toilet. I have had friends who fight in our wars be ticketed for having a beer. I have seen taxes on cigarettes increase many fold and a ban imposed on cigar bars. I have been forced to wear a seat belt. All of these incursions on liberty have been made in the name of the harm principle; they attempt to capture the externalities created by our freedom of choice. It seemed there was no way to have both liberty and a harm principle until I read a quote by John Adams. In a letter to a company of soldiers he writes,

“Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I don’t remember where I first read this quote, but it enabled me to unify my personal values. The liberty provided by our constitution and the free market will not work for a population that does not have an internally regulated set of God given moral principles that prevent them from trampling on others in their pursuit of happiness. As our adherence to a set of religious principles and values deteriorates, so too must our liberty if we are to avoid anarchy. A civilization with complete freedom and no morals would self destruct.

When I reached this conclusion I found an explanation for the dramatic increase in government that has occurred in my life time. As we become incapable of regulating our own behavior, the government must do so for us. We begin to trade our liberty for safety because we do not trust each other to make good choices. As I look back on my experience in Madison I do not have to stretch to find examples of freedom that is used in excess and is subsequently lost. While current examples of immorality and subsequent anarchy followed by a loss of freedom abound, Adam Nelson’s description of the morals and anarchy at the Experimental College drive the point home. In his book Education and Democracy, he describes how, when left to their own devices, the students of the College destroyed property, had food fights, ignored their studies, and finally voted to live in a state of “communistic anarchy” rather than enact a system of rules (173-174). A board which was convened to investigate the destruction concluded that as a group “we are more than ever restricted by ourselves because of the very absence of external compulsion (174).” Given great freedom it was expected that the men of the College would use their internal morals to regulate their behavior. But absent those morals Adams hall degenerated into anarchy and eventually the College was closed.

It does not necessarily follow that the morals which allow a self constraining of our freedom must be Christian in nature, but it is very convenient. Christian morality opposes excess, promotes charity, devalues money, and encourages love of neighbor. These are values that would work very well in a free market society with very little government intervention. People would help each other not because they are taxed but because they want to. Working hard and competing would be highly valued, but not at the cost of other people. Government intervention into business, the cause of the dreaded dead weight loss, would not be necessary if corporations were unwilling to violate their own values and held themselves to a high moral standard. The recent collapse of the banking industry coming on the heels of the Enron scandal might seem to indicate big business is incapable of following any morality except that of profits. Many have used this as a justification for further Government control and oversight. But I see this as a chance to let the immoral fail while those that value the security of others, prudence, and temperance thrive.
Earlier this year I had finally sketched the outline of my beliefs about my place in the world and best way to live.

But the picture was not pretty. I find myself in a world that is increasingly shifting towards subjective morality and is constantly taking away liberty so that the individual disappears. He is replaced by a social droid that is unaware of the slow erosion of personal freedom that allows what was once a free and industrious nation to slide into totalitarianism. I did not like the radical nature of my views because they dictate radical action. I much prefer the slow experimental response suggested by Edmund Burke. He preferred a nation that followed its customs while slowly making experimental changes. But radical action and radical change is upon me whether I would have it or not. Medicine is becoming socialized, the economy is in shambles, federalism is dying, we fail to elect effective leaders, and the national debt will soon overwhelm us. The nation that once was is on the verge of collapse. Had we lost our Christian values and sense of individualism in the slow manner prescribed by Burke, perhaps we would not face the slew of social problems we do today. But because America is so vastly different today from the more and individualist America of the 1920’s, nothing short of a revolution will set us right.

My initial response to finding the situation was not only incongruent with my personal beliefs, but actually openly hostile was to withdraw. My plan was to tell society where it was headed and then build myself an ark to ride out the storm. I figured it was better to let the system crash and then attempt to rebuild than to start a revolution. But then one night in a bar, as I was telling a friend of my plan to get lost in the Canadian Rockies, she asked me if that was just a little bit selfish. Think back to all of the gifts I have been given I was forced to rethink my forsaking of society as hopelessly immoral and socialist. I had always been greatly influenced by George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four. I had begun to see myself as a member of a society hopelessly headed for a future with no liberty. My friends question made me rethink this position. I wondered if I was becoming one of the people who allowed “The Party” to gain complete control. Wouldn’t it be a shame if I didn’t do everything I could to prevent their total control? In the words of Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” It now seems that I cannot simply retire to my ranch and listen to country music while the world burns. Instead I must take the internal standards that I have developed and apply them to my life while simultaneously trying to show others another way.

I have already begun this process through my work as an opinion columnist. Every week I argue for less government intervention and a return to individual morality. And every week I am opposed. I have received personal threats, had my views attacked as racist, been told I will never have a career because of my opinions, witnessed calls for my censure, been personally insulted in front of hundreds, and been fired from one newspaper (only to be hired by another the same day- some editors appreciate free speech and controversy). The world is extremely hostile to my views, and for many reasons I can understand why. Less government means people have to do more for themselves. There is great risk in personal freedom and many would rather concentrate power in a bureaucracy than see it spread across a population they do not trust. It is very hard to oppose a smoking ban if you do not smoke; restricting others rights can be helpful. But to this type of thinking I always reply with a poem attributed to a German Pastor named Martin Niemöller.

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

My goal is to get Americans to accept the risk that comes from defending the rights of others because if we don’t, our rights will be next. But to convince people is an uphill battle. It will begin with electing politicians who promise to do less, not more. They must stop spending our money, pay down our debt, and force us to take care of ourselves. For this to happen there must be a return to personal morals and close knit communities. In a disconnected society individuals can feel helpless to work with and support their neighbors or to make decisions for their community. It seems much easier to pay more money and to trust a top down agency to provide things such as health insurance and food relief. But it has already been established that we do not know what is best for other people; certainly large governments can have very little idea about the needs and desires of individual citizens. Only when we reconnect with our neighbors and communities to such a degree that we can utilize public discourse to share our own needs will we be able to move forward with liberty and justice for all.

My part will be to continue to challenge and refine my personal philosophy while simultaneously applying it. Rather than retreat from a world gone wrong, I will work to reconnect the communities in which I live and to campaign for smaller government intervention into the private sector and our personal lives. We must regain our trust of one another and remove our trust from the government. To do this we must return to a nation of moralists, free to make bad choices but constrained by our religiously based values. The individual, moral and with a self given rather than socially derived definition of success, has always been the best protection against totalitarianism. Working towards the goal of the individual will mean enable me to realize my ideal self and bring value to my post graduate life.