Perspective  

Twenty Observations on Liberty and Society

by Jayant Bhandari

He who would have his country be free must first address the statism in the hearts of its people.

---

Who thought that getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan, or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, would put these societies on the path towards peace and prosperity?

Who thinks that when Bin Laden is finally captured or killed, the world will be a safer place?

Who thinks that without Mugabe, Zimbabwe will choose the right path? That tinkering with the state in Palestine and Saudi Arabia will set those peoples free? That Nepal will swiftly progress, now that “democracy” has subdued “monarchy”?

Those who did or do live in a fools’ paradise.

1. There is a Hindu parable in which Lord Shiva was asked to kill a devil who had been on a rampage. Shiva went and beheaded him. But to his surprise, Shiva found that each drop of the devil’s blood falling upon the earth gave birth to a devil clone. Shiva went around killing all the new devils; to his dismay, this only made his problem worse.

You cannot kill evil just by addressing its symptoms. In fact, removing the symptoms without addressing the underlying issues makes the problem worse, because symptoms provide an essential sensory feedback. Symptoms show what is wrong.

The state is usually just a symptom.

2. Our mental constructs create our personal environment. Our collective mental constructs create our heroes and leaders, our culture and religions and other institutions, including the state.

The state is certainly the single biggest evil, but it is merely an expression of the collective statism and barbarism in minds of the individuals in society.

3. In September 1991, I left India for the first time, to study in the UK. When I arrived, I had to take a train from the airport to Manchester. A line of people waited in front of the ticket counter at the train station. The ticket seller gave me sufficient time to explain my route. Those standing behind me were patient enough to let him finish his business with me. No one pushed me, spoke behind me, or hurried me. When the train arrived, people waited to let the passengers get off before they themselves went in.

This was all grossly alien to me.

The train was surprisingly comfortable and clean, or at least that is what I thought then. What I saw outside the train window disturbed me. My eyes had never seen with the clarity they had now — there was no pollution compared to what existed where I came from. My nose felt different.

I woke up very early the next day and walked out into Manchester. I had a big map of the city in my hands and I was peering at it when a well-dressed person crossed the street, came up to me, and asked if he could help. When I went to the bank to open my account, not only was the process quick, but more importantly the people were patient and treated me nicely. The university accommodation office was just as helpful. I had financial problems and had no difficulty meeting the director of the school. He was supportive, treated me as his equal, and did not expect me to grovel at his feet. He talked straight without creating complexities, without showing what a favor he was doing for me, and I was out of his office within a few minutes.

I achieved in a single morning what would have taken me weeks, or months, or even forever in India, and would have required dehumanizations, dramas, posturings, manipulations, and lies. And each time I was treated neither as an animal nor as a child. Not only this; I also saw that people treated animals and children respectfully.

I no longer take much notice of things like this. But that morning, as a young man of 24, I went to my room and cried. I had never experienced generosity and openness.

I lived in a poor area in Manchester. I used to work at the university until late at night. I could not afford a taxi, so I walked back home. On several occasions, the police followed me with their car lights switched off, as they probably suspected me; but because they had no evidence, they had no right to stop me for questioning. Not once in my years of visiting the UK was I asked for my ID card. I could check into and out of hotels without it. No one ever asked me for an ID card when I took internal flights or entered nightclubs. I treasured the feeling of personal liberty. The state kept its hands off me. The society mostly trusted me.

I have been to the UK scores of times, and usually found the immigration people acting courteously. Not that they always had pleasant thoughts about me, more that they had limited options to hassle me; the code of social conduct ensured that they showed respect toward me as an individual.

During the first few days after my arrival in Manchester, I started to feel depressed and lonely for the first time in my life. I was experiencing life without hassles or complexities. There were no assaults on my senses, or on my emotions. I did not know how to deal with such quietness. I did not know how to concentrate, since there was nothing to distract me. I was addicted to adrenaline, and I was hyperactive. I did not know what peace was, besides catharsis. That was what I experienced when I drank or smoked too much. The next two years were going to teach me to start living for the first time.

My body, my eyes had started to change. My mind could think more clearly. I could start to understand what enjoyment and peace meant. Fifteen years later, I still very often meet people in the West whose honesty, morality, spirituality, and strength of character amaze me.

4. Society in India, as in a lot of the non-western world, instinctively likes to have perpetual problems, as if life would be lonely and time difficult to pass, were there no problems to occupy it.

Cultures persist. You can install the best of the capitalist system, but if the people have a totalitarian culture, their polity will soon follow. Even if they individually do not like the state, their collective conduct will be such that a powerful state will emerge. They want freedom for themselves, but they also want to enslave others. The constitution and laws will be reinterpreted to suit their convenience. Judges and politicians will happily wag their tails. As Hayek would say, you cannot force institutions on a society.

5. A distant relative of mine in India habitually bribes the traffic police, so that when he passes them on the road the police salute him. When I worked in India, one of my biggest customers kept his clients waiting outside his office for days before giving them a few minutes. He once told me that he enjoyed life only when his whiskey was of better quality than other people’s.

I grew up in a characterless society. So deeply imbued with dishonesty is India that people are usually not even aware of it. During the more than ten years that I worked there, I met hundreds of very senior politicians and bureaucrats. I never met one honest, responsible, proud public servant. In this respect, the political culture differed little from the rest of society. In the society, I saw very little respect for life, children, women, or the poor. Lack of a civil sense was palpable. Chaos ruled.

6. My earliest memory as a child is not of playing with toys or with my friends, but of the tyranny and authoritarian behavior I faced from my teachers and society. Everyone told me what to do. I had to smile when authority wanted me to. I had to stop crying when I was instructed to. My teachers never encouraged questions. Playing and talking with other children was looked down upon. I was asked to be nice to everyone. I was supposed to look good to society. The welfare of the nation was to be my top priority. I grew up as a stiff man, unemotional and unexpressive, socially incompetent — and I was among the privileged. We could not work with others. We had problems with relationships.

This is how collectivist society indoctrinates from the very beginning. And this is where collectivism fails in its declared primary tenet of equality. Everyone thinks he knows how everyone else should live. Everyone abuses others and rationalizes it by saying he is doing good to them. From childhood, this mindset permeates every life. There is no equality; there are only hierarchies. And of course subconsciously we know what is happening, so no one trusts anyone else.

We lived by rules. When we got into a dilemma, we looked in the rulebook. We did not know how to connect with our consciences. I did not know what I wanted. Not that everyone in a free society knows that kind of thing, but our desires were buried deep in concrete. We were taught to disengage from our consciousness. If we enjoyed studying or helping others, our teachers and the other elements of society ensured that we did not continue to enjoy it. How could anything be worthwhile if we enjoyed it? And how could the society control me if it did not control my happiness?

As a teenager, while my counterparts in the West were dating and partying, I was listening to patriotic songs, and was deeply religious. I loved India and was ready to die for it, though silently I hated Indians. For me, and most others, India was the seat of civilization. After independence, it made long strides in material progress. We were proud to be one of the very few countries that had the capability to send rockets into space. In the mid-1980s, when India and Pakistan were close to war, I considered joining the army as a volunteer.

7. I went to a university in a Vancouver-sized city called Indore. Not very far from my place of residence was a police station. The policemen regularly tied the hands of the people they arrested to a strong branch of a tree, in such a way that the prisoners either had to keep standing on their toes or let the string painfully pull their wrists. Hundreds of cars, including those of judges and intellectuals, passed by every day; but no one complained. The educated among us told me that this is how criminals should be treated.

8. I received a five-year engineering degree. The first two years were about general engineering; after that, the university decided who did civil, who did mechanical, and who did electrical engineering. We were clay that the authorities could mold into any structure they wanted. Everyone had grown to accept this as normal.

In Indian universities, there is a tradition of “ragging,” or abusing, new students. When you enter the university, you become the personal property of the senior students for the first year. They emotionally and sexually abuse you. The junior students are asked to masturbate in front of others, or to urinate on live electric wires. This is believed to create social cohesion and remove inhibitions. The junior students hate it. Some try suicide. Some lose their hearing from the beatings they get.

I thought that those who were abused would not perpetuate the custom. But that’s not how it works. To accept such torture, you have to switch off your humanity. When the next year came, those who were the most abused the year before were exactly the people who abused the most.

9. During my last year at the university, some men I knew decided they wanted to pay a woman to entertain them. So they negotiated a price with a prostitute and took her to a hotel. Unfortunately, in the “spiritual” country of India, prostitution is a crime. The police came and arrested everyone. The men paid a hefty bribe and went home. The girl stayed at the police station for the night. My friends told me that the otherwise healthy girl could not walk straight the next morning. The judge conveniently ignored her state. Men and women of so-called decent background have no interest in such women. In their opinion, these women are loose and deserve what they get.

One year, I had to renew my passport, and as is the custom, an intelligence officer came to visit me. I refused to offer him a bribe, something considered very normal. So he did not process my application. I was adamant. I went to meet the top intelligence officer in that part of Delhi. In a quick minute, he told me that I was rude, that he was not going to process my application, and he pretty much threw me out of his office. I wrote to the top officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to report the matter. Nothing happened.

A relative had an accident and was taken to a government hospital. He had a bad leg injury. The doctor wanted a bribe to help him decide whether he would fix the leg or amputate it.

I worked for a British company for five years and for a Swiss company for about two years in India. When the company officials visited me there, it was a horrifying time. In various ways, I faced blatant racism from people my own color. Several times we held formal negotiations at the head office of a public-sector company. While we sat at the conference table, the servants would bring us tea. Of course, they could not see from our backs which of us were white or Indian. So they would lean forward to look at each person’s face. If he was white, he would be offered tea in china cups; if not, in plastic cups. I can tell you many variations of this kind of racism.

Here is a recent story. On June 6, 2005, a married Muslim woman, Imrana, was allegedly raped by her father-in-law. The mindless Muslim clerics decided to separate her from her husband and insisted that she marry the rapist. Mulayam Prasad Yadav, the former defense minister of India, and now the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, where this incident took place, declared: “The decision taken by Muslim religious leaders in the Imrana case must have been taken after a lot of thought. . . . The leaders after all are very learned.”

10. At one time, it was my hobby to spend plane flights thinking about why India was so pathetically poor, so miserable. I often wondered if we were an inherently inferior people, something that a lot of people from poor countries are convinced of.

I loved to travel and went to different parts of the world, both for business and for time to contemplate this question. I saw repeatedly that many East Europeans, particularly Russians, behaved badly. Those from the Gulf countries and from most parts of Africa behaved much worse than Indians did. Again and again, I have seen only one thing that differentiates people. It is not where they come from, what their race is, or what their history is. What differentiates people is the level of coercion in their societies.

11. I presented a different version of these thoughts in October 2005 at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, in March 2006 at the Mises Institute in Auburn, and in June 2006 at the Libertarian Party of British Columbia in Vancouver. I must confess that in my first paper, I called the state “the fountainhead of all ills.” Having spent months thinking about it, I no longer think that is true. Our polity reinforces our culture and vice versa. When the state fails in a totalitarian society, we can rejoice that statism has come to an end. Such an “end” of statism, however, never lasts — just look around in Africa and Asia. A new and more corrupt state usually emerges. By the same token, you can make Saddam Hussein the prime minister of Canada, and be assured that he won’t last an hour.

12. If your experience tells you that people from the collectivist countries, in general, lack conscience and integrity, do not think for themselves, are either rude or servile (depending on how they were collectivized), and are unhappy, you are right. They live a life burdened by moral and psychological debts — by karmas. These are the karmas that western youth are slowly building up.

Western libertarians think that the state is the root of all our problems. The state is indeed the icon of evil, but it is not its root. The totalitarians — better known as liberals in North America — know better what the roots are and have therefore done a marvelous job of achieving their ends.

Over the course of a century, using the nice-sounding projects of egalitarianism — social welfare, affirmative action, free education, free health care, and sustainable development — they have been tweaking the root, which is the culture.

Their work is insidious and is slowly taking the West where the totalitarian societies of the East have gone. Really, it is no wonder that the liberals find the East so spiritual, an affinity they discover over nonstop tokes of weed on the banks of the Ganges.

There are others who have discovered a different kind of enlightenment while sitting on the banks of the Ganges: the enlightenment of accepting responsibility for their lives and actions, of respecting other people’s property, of not being bigoted towards black or white or rich or poor, of not camouflaging ill deeds in the name of religion law. Such people are not necessarily perfect, but when they steal, they call themselves thieves. Such people are not to be found shouting slogans on the streets of New York.

In the West, on many occasions, I have been asked why poor people and women in India have to be told that they own their bodies. I tell them that this is not very alien. They should ask themselves why the wealth generators in the West have to be told that they own their own wealth.

13. Each new socially coercive situation sets the stage for the development of the next level of totalitarianism.

In the West, I have hardly met anyone who does not say that our environment is getting worse and worse. I ask the aged if they remember what London or Newcastle or Manchester or New York was like 50 years back, and to compare it with what they see now. The answer is invariably that the environment is worse. I have seen the old pictures and films and they tell me a completely different story.

14. Many westerners tell me how sorry they feel for those in Africa who live off less than a dollar a day, and that western countries should do something about it. I argue that they should start by reducing their own lifestyles to a dollar a day, and send the rest of their money to Africa. I quickly lose their attention.

I have seen the hypocrisy of U2’s singer Bono, who wants Canada to give 0.7% of its GDP as international aid. I wonder why he and his supporters never consider reducing their household budgets to Canada’s per capita GDP, thus freeing themselves from all that unnecessary wealth.

Although it looks benign, a foundation for dishonesty, lack of integrity, and hypocrisy has been laid in the West. And perceived karmic debts have a natural tendency to build up in the human mind.

People in the West generally believe that it is all right to tax the rich heavily. For them robbing the rich is no longer an ethical issue. And those earning six-figure salaries in big companies have no moral scruples about using their shareholders’ money for all kinds of antishareholder activities, including financing antibusiness organizations.

I do not believe, as many western libertarians do, that the liberal activists of the West are warmhearted but misguided people. I see criminal and hypocritical minds behind the compassionate garb. Ask a conventional criminal why he does what he does; he too will likely give you a heartwarming story.

15. Common courtesies, those customs that have been the bedrock of western civilization, should have taught western society that what the modern liberals are doing is violent and wrong. Any human heart should cringe when they advocate violence, subtle or direct, to steal some people’s money in order to steal the independence of other people, meanwhile giving themselves arbitrary power.

Sixteen years ago, when I started to travel, I was impressed with the confidence I saw in westerners. I saw officials showing respect to travelers. I saw free-minded westerners objecting to infringements of their rights. I saw audiences rewarding them with encouraging nods. That is history. Now people are more than happy to strip off their clothes at the slightest raise of a finger from an uncivil staff member at an airport. If someone objects, his fellow travelers will likely see him as a troublemaker. What the officers do is now culturally acceptable.

16. A young Indian tennis star, Sania Mirza, a Muslim girl, was recently issued a fatwa by some clerics, because she wears short skirts. Just a decade back, the Indian government was honoring such fatwas “to maintain law and order.” Not too long ago, the police constantly harassed young couples. My parents’ generation had to carry marriage certificates with them when they went out late at night. No law has changed since then, just an interpretation.

In the mid-1980s, the Indian public outside the big cities started to see TV for the first time. They watched what was happening in the West. People’s expectations about their government and their lives started to change. Under pressure, the state of India started to interfere less in people’s personal lives.

Barely a few months back, couples in a park in Meerut, a city near Delhi, were publicly beaten by the police for holding hands and being together. On this occasion, the state invited TV cameras to shame them. Several Hindu fundamentalist organizations and political parties across the spectrum supported the actions of the state — but when society in general condemned what had happened, the state and the fundamentalist organizations beat a hasty retreat.

Enlightened parents in big cities are insisting that their children no longer be beaten in school. Teachers can now go to jail. The economy has progressed, but more importantly, so has morality, now that there is less oppression. The generosities that I experienced for the first time in the UK are no longer unknown in India. People are asserting their humanity. They are more creative and open-minded.

When Indians interacted with the world, amazing things started to happen. Indians lived in and visited the West, and went back to India feeling that they were misfits in a coercive system. (After a couple of beers, quite a few Indians — and people of other nationalities — agree with this.) They realized that the West was not just about James Bond, his guns, and his promiscuity, but about a culture that respected the individual.

Snobbish and authoritarian behavior started to be seen as less cool. Compassion and respect started to become appropriate behavior. A small bit of globalization arrived, brought in by people from the West who did not honor the collectivism of India. They shook hands with servants as often as they did with political bosses. When the managing director of my UK company visited us in Delhi, he shook hands with our office servant. It was a gesture the servant had never experienced. He perspired and was uncomfortable. During the next two years he worked for us, he gained confidence as a human being. For the first time, lower-caste people could enter restaurants (run by multinational companies) and expect a welcome, even if it was only superficial courtesy.

17. Let us not romanticize what is happening in India. My description of events exaggerates the changes that have taken place. In India, you are still harassed at every moment. But changing expectations from society have been a force for change in the conduct of the state. All this despite the fact that the general character of Indian politicians and bureaucrats is getting worse, not better.

Much the same might be said of the politicians of the West. But what about its culture?

18. During my education in the UK, I was constantly told that there were no good or bad cultures. What nonsense! The liberals of the West have an ideology that is making the West morally blind. The only way to stop it is to understand that involuntary collectivism, whatever form it may take, is not spiritual, either in ideals or in practice, but is evil in every way.

When I was a child, my spirit resisted when I was asked to control others; it rebelled when someone tried controlling me. The knowledge of freedom is a priori, and does not require any understanding of economics or public policy. The morality associated with this knowledge should destroy all forms of involuntary collectivism, and should never allow them to be restored — but that is what is now happening in the West.

19. People in the West increasingly think that they have rights over other people’s property. Bigotry against wealth-creators is increasingly acceptable. Companies bribe communities to be allowed to operate, something that psychologically corrupts everyone. In the name of social security, beggars demand alms as their birthright. The bigoted, once openly racist, now humanitarian, still regard Africans as subhuman; they cannot believe that Africans can survive without western help. They want the benign intervention of the West in “trouble spots” around the world.

Most of the people who shouted on New York streets for America to intervene in Darfur would now have a problem recalling what and where it is. They have already migrated to trendier affairs. But while hypocrisy is always available to provide an emotional release, it adds another layer to cultural and political corruption. Honoring the social mood, the American government, having performed some half-baked intervention, moves on, leaving things worse than they were at the start.

Once you give them the tools, politicians and bureaucrats will find more and more areas to control. But who should get the blame?

Environmentalism shows how clouded the thought processes of westerners have become. People are horrified if someone provides an alternative view; no rational discussion of the issue is possible. It provides a moral rationalization for envy, pessimism, and an inability to participate productively in society. But again, who or what should get the blame — bureaucrats and elected officials, or the culture that promotes them?

Only a few decades back, this state of affairs would have made westerners cringe. The cringing has stopped.

20. Every little bit of totalitarianism in our minds, however benign it may appear, helps to produce a complexly corrupt and coercive society, endlessly mirroring itself in the workings of the state. People should learn to see this connection. Libertarians should learn to see it. They should learn that the seedbed of oppression is not the state but the culture.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

Send editorial comments to letters@libertyunbound.com.
All letters to the editor are assumed to be for publication unless otherwise indicated.

Send web site comments to webmaster@libertyunbound.com.