The “Libertarian” battle cry of “liberty” and “freedom” through “personal responsibility” sounds wonderful on the surface, but we have to ask ourselves as individuals and as a nation, what do they really mean by and what are the costs of this alleged “liberty” and “freedom”?
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“There is a binary issue here: Collectivism versus Individualism. They are as different as black and white, right and wrong, moral and immoral.” Lee Fox, Ayn Rand and Education Facebook page, uploaded 3/30/2014
The human brain, through millennia of its evolutionally process, has developed a capacity to categorize reality into easily digestible morsels in its attempt to absorb and make sense of a complex world. We have seen the perennial theme, for example, of Good versus Evil surface throughout the human condition as far back as over 3000 years in Zoroastrianism as valued by Zarathustra, and the theme has reappeared in literary and religious discourses ever since. In some monotheistic religions, within the overarching theme of dualism, for example, the “right” side is seen as good, while the “left” is considered bad.
Though you might not think your friend, mother, classmate, or the other approximately ten present of each society are bad because they prefer their left hands, such tolerance or support has not always been the case. In fact, for centuries, left-handed people were viewed with scorn and even, at times, with fear.
People often justified this scorn with references to religious texts such as the Bibles, both the Jewish Bible and Christian Testaments, though primarily the Christian Testaments, which consider “the left” as the domain of the Devil, whereas “the right” as the domain of God. For this reason, Jesus told his followers to “not let they left hand know what they right hand doeth” (Matthew 6:3). Jesus also describes God’s process for separating good from evil in the Last Judgment: “…the King [shall] say unto them on His right hand, ‘Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world….’ Then shall He say unto them on the left hand, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels….’” (Matthew 25:32-41).
Early Christians applied these categories so strictly that they even held that the saints, while still infants, were so holy that they only suckled from the right breasts of their mothers!
The ancient Greeks and Romans also condemned left-handedness. For example, the philosopher Pythagoras argued that left-handedness was synonymous with “dissolution” and evil, and Aristotle described good as “what is on the right, above, and in front, and bad what is on the left, below, and behind.” Later, in the Middle Ages, left-handed people were sometimes accused of being witches or sorcerers.
Though I can at times view some cases as presenting clearly dualist categories of right and wrong, good and bad, in most other instances, however, I do not understand or view the world, with its multiple components and structures, in these simplistic binary terms: as two opposing poles. In most cases, I understand reality as comprising a continuum with nuance, shades, and degrees. I also do not see the beginnings and ends of the continua as representing good or bad, just and evil, but rather as representing differences.
I contend that the socially constructed binary and hierarchical view within a U.S. context represent THE connecting factors within the varying forms of oppression. The socially constructed “races” of “white” is seen as good, “people of color” as bad, and “light” as good or adroit (whose root comes from droit, in French meaning “right”) and “dark” as bad and sinister (sinister comes from Latin for “left”); “male” depicted as leader and good, “female” as subservient and bad; “heterosexual” as good, “homosexual” as bad,” and “heterosexual” perceived as love and “homosexual” as sex; “Christian” considered” good, “non-Christian” judged bad; “rich” as good and virtuous, “poor” as bad and lazy; people of, say, 18 to about 50 as good and in their “prime” versus under 18 as irresponsible and untrustworthy and elders as “over the hill” and “no longer sexual”; “able bodied” as good, “people with disabilities” as unfortunate, once also seen as punished by the Devil for past transgressions, possibly in a former life; and I could go on in this vein virtually forever.
I bring up this discussion focusing on what I believe as the false constructions of binaries because as I have engaged in discussions with a person named Lee Fox on the philosophy of “Objectivism” as articulated by its primary founder, Ayn Rand, Mr. Fox throughout our dialogue has referred to me as a “Collectivist.” I asked him how he meant the term.
Lee. Can we get on the same page in terms of how you are defining ‘collectivism,’ since I see it as points on a continuum. You seem to be employing it as a binary: Collectivism on one pole and Individualism at the other. No society that I know of has ever fit into either pole.
He responded with the opening quote of this commentary. Though I had never defined myself as a “Collectivist,” and I see no particular negative denotation, Mr. Fox, on the other hand, throws the terms at me as an epithet.
In this cosmology, “Individualism” equals the good, correct, righteous, rational, objective, as opposed to “Collectivism,” equaling the bad, misguided, irrational, subjective. He went on to quote Ayn Rand, who described anyone who did not view issues upon a binary frame, but who, rather perceived a continuum with its nuance, as “evil.”
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit….
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So, let’s look at the implications, the inevitable extensions, of Rand’s alleged analysis. The following could be constructed as “evil”: people of mixed or multiple so-called “races”; intersex people; trans* people; bisexual and pansexual people; people who do not have a hand preference (“ambidextrous” literally means “having two or multiple right hands); people beholden to no religious faiths, which, by the way, includes Ayn Rand herself; people on a continuum of financial resources between “rich” and “poor”; people on the lower and upper ends of the “middle years”; people temporary “able bodied” who may have acquired a disability, and may then have gone back to being “able boded,” or not; and on and on.
Ayn Rand, who has become intellectual center for the economic/political/social philosophy of Libertarianism, constructs a bifurcated world of one-dimensional characters in her novels: the “noble and heroic” on one side and the “looters” on the other. Welfare she terms “unearned rewards,” while she argues for a system of laissey-faire Capitalism separating economics and state.
Ayn Rand bristles against the notion of collectivism, of shared sacrifice and shared rewards. Rather, she argues that individuals are not and should not be their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers; that one must only do unto oneself; that one must walk only in one’s own shoes and not attempt to know the other by metaphorically walking in another’s shoes; that personal happiness is paramount; and that one’s greatest good is what is good for oneself rather than for the greatest number of people.
In other words, Ayn Rand paints a world in which the evil and misguided takers wage war against the noble and heroic makers. We currently hear strong echoes of this within some political circles.
We have seen the severe consequence for those holding to these bifurcated views of the world, where compromise has been considered surrender, which in the real world has resulted in a freezing or even reversing of political, economic, and social advancement, where “my way or the highway” has set the stage for war and other human tragedies; where my belief system is right and your belief system is wrong, and, therefore, I have the “right” to impose my system on you and upon your country in the form of colonialism, slavery, forced religious conversion, territorial expulsion, and murder.
This so-called “libertarian,” “objectivist,” or “Individualistic” philosophy has been used to justify an code of neglect and abandonment of the most vulnerable members of our society. The “Libertarian” battle cry of “liberty” and “freedom” through “personal responsibility” sounds wonderful on the surface, but we have to ask ourselves as individuals and as a nation, what do they really mean by and what are the costs of this alleged “liberty” and “freedom”?
This brings to mind the poignant words of singer/songwriter Kris Kristofferson in his lyrics to “Bobby Mcgee”:
Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to loose.
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This post originally appeared at Warren Blumenfeld’s Blog. Reprinted with permission.
Photo: William Brawley/Flickr
As I understand it, real Libertarianism is about the Zero Aggression Principle, or ZAP. Basically it means you do not initiate force against anyone else unless it is in direct self defense of your own life or someone else’s. Collectivists are the ones who impose their will on others.
Wes: Your comments reflect my main thesis — the false construction of binaries. With your generalizing and universalizing statements depicting two opposing camps, you are reifying this false construction. I hope we as a society can see the nuance.
So not imposing your will on others is bad? Do you have an alternative?