During the past decade or so, liberty-lovers have picked up the fight for legalization of prostitution and drugs. This has often involved a good deal of context dropping and evasion of other issues.
When Stephen Harper lost the Canadian elections in 2015, some well-known libertarians celebrated, for they now anticipated complete legalization. But the biggest competency of the new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is his looks and the dynasty he represents. He was voted into power primarily by those who lack self-responsibly and self-control and who want either a neverending hedonistic slugfest or mere free stuff, in what otherwise is one of the world’s so-called most educated and supposedly rational countries.
Trudeau lost no photo-ops when he greeted immigrants from Syria with open arms. Those for freedom of movement rejoiced, sometimes in nearly incredible terms. “The more [Syrian migrants] the better,” wrote one of the best known pro-liberty authors. Some antiwar libertarians, who want the US to end all entanglements in the Middle East, were also full of praise — and on this occasion, unconcerned about collateral civilian deaths — when Russia in a matter of days indiscriminately bombed parts of Syria to destroy rebel groups, including ISIS.
In a true, anti-statist, free society, prostitution and drug addiction would be tolerated, but very hesitatingly.
Some libertarians have taken it upon themselves to rebel against everything that Christianity, and in some cases other religions, stand for. Some encourage promiscuity and drunkenness — libertine behavior and trash-talk being the fast way for some women to rise in today’s “liberty” circles. If a woman works as a call-girl to pay for her education, this is a smart move, according to some in the liberty camp.
All of the above, particularly the pursuit of single-issue goals without thought of the larger ecology, is not a fight against the state and its tyranny but a fight against civilization and reason. Consequently it is, ironically, a fight against freedom and liberty, and must increase the size of the state.
In the past, such fights were the domain of the shallow, non-thinking, materialistic cult of the left, which plays on people’s unexamined emotions, particularly those related to the biological instincts of survival and procreation. But now cultural Marxism — and its mind-ossifying methodology of “argumentation” — has become so infused in society that many libertarians, especially anarchocapitalists, have come to see emotionally provocative, unexamined, single-issue goals as their own.
Prostitution and drugs
In a true, anti-statist, free society, prostitution and drug addiction would be tolerated, but very hesitatingly, because they present an inherent contradiction. Civilizations know that freedom comes from self-control and self-responsibility — not from giving in to impulses — and that certain conventions have evolved in societies around the world because they lead to an increase in human happiness and freedom. A free society would appreciate the fact that gluttonous sensuality is not a sign of freedom but an assertion of the anti-libertarian forces of unreason.
Liberty by its very construct must be founded on discipline, respect, self-control, and self-responsibility. Any society that lacks these virtues cannot be a free society, because its citizens will labor under a mental debility. Irrespective of the kind of written laws they have, their lack of necessary virtues will create a tyrannical state.
I dislike living in places where prostitution and drugs are rife. I have nothing personal against those who indulge in them. I have my own inner journey, and they have theirs. But I have nothing in common with them. I see virtually no channel of communication — nothing that connects us in values — open between us. Mostly we talk through each other, wasting everyone’s time.
Liberty by its very construct must be founded on discipline, respect, self-control, and self-responsibility. Any society that lacks these virtues cannot be a free society.
Those who watch too many James Bond movies, the adventures of Kim Kardashian, etc. — and even those who don’t — believe that promiscuity is a Western product and export. Quite to the contrary, it was European missionaries who found themselves horrified by the unrestrained promiscuity of most non-Western societies. This was one of the reasons they deemed the non-western societies uncivilized. Hence the widely used term “Victorian morality” — although people hardly imagine the historical implications of how this term came to exist, tending to use it only when they want to blame the English for sexual repression.
Contrary to popular belief, non-Western societies are very materialistic and impulsive, mostly because the concept of reason never got traction there. Women in vast parts of the world — in Africa, Latin America, tribal parts of India, and so on — are available merely for the asking. You see glimpses of this in the rest of Asia and Eastern Europe, too. Alas, in such sexually liberated places, women have a very low status and are treated like commodities. Also contrary to popular belief, such sexually liberated societies are no less prone to sexual crimes, for desire, when given a free rein, is a bottomless pit, offering the ever illusory elixir of happiness.
In the same vein, middle class children in India — particularly boys — are much indulged up to a certain age, precluding them from developing self-discipline in later years. Because they fail to develop inner faculties of self-control and self-responsibility, when they gain adulthood the only way to make them a productive part of the society and keep them out of crime is fear, abuse, and punishment. Such adults just cannot be an ingredient of a free society.
A libertine society is an oxymoron, for you can either have liberty or be a slave to your desires.
Even when the satisfaction of impulses does no direct harm, hedonism is eventually not satisfying. Any sophisticated society that has evolved culturally knows this instinctively. Any thinking person comes to the same conclusion. But today, hedonism (a supposed product of Western civilization) is being promoted as liberty in vast parts of the developing world. The consumption of bad, sugary food and every other kind of gluttony is increasing exponentially. Every year I return to a developing country, and it seems that waistlines there are increasing by an inch a year. Lifestyle diseases such as heart disorders and several kinds of cancer are placing forms of medicine that deal with their symptoms among the biggest growth sectors. Not too long in the future, these diseases may become the biggest crisis for humanity. Promiscuity — even where it was more restrained — is also rising exponentially.
The two religions of the desert — Christianity and Islam — train their citizens to control their desires, although the latter, having failed to underpin its beliefs with reason, still does it mostly through repression and indoctrination, leading to many other horrendous problems. But the point remains: in general, giving free reign to impulses and desires, and a culture of high time-preference, produces a lack of civilization and hence of liberty.
Drugs do destroy the mind and create chemical dependency. They make people lethargic and subliminally dependent on others. When unable to finance their habit, they take to theft, to public welfare, or, if they still retain some brains, to fraud. All these create enough cultural poison to bring in the police. A libertine society is an oxymoron, for you can either have liberty or be a slave to your desires.
Prostitution and drugs are not mere victimless crimes, as they are commonly — and rather simplistically — depicted by people who want to legalize them. For the sake of intellectual honesty, those who favor legalization (as I do) should recognize that when one increases the demand through legalization, the supply will also increase. And there is strong evidence that legalization of prostitution worsens the exploitation of women, through increased trafficking and inducements offered to gullible girls. These girls are then controlled through fear — a problem that those who grew up in happy families fail to recognize. The situation with drugs is not too dissimilar.
Immigration and religion
Then there are those who hinge their concept of a free society on unfettered immigration. They forget that while they constantly argue with people to convert them to free-thinking individuals, hoping to end up with legal structures in which liberties are respected as they were in the glorious past of the West, they also, in effect, are advocating the admission of millions of traumatized refugees, deeply indoctrinated in uncivilized and violent behavior. For such liberty-fighters with simplistic goals, culture is a blank slate on which anything can be written. But culture, alas, is virtually impossible to change, as those who want to impose institutional changes on the backward parts of the world have consistently discovered.
The compassion shown by Europeans and North Americans to recent migrants from Syria is heartwarming, and virtually unique on our planet. I have nothing against migrants. But an awareness of the fuller reality would provide some guidance about the extent to which they should be accommodated.
The evil of religion is another, single-goal target of certain libertarians. Here again, cultural context is lacking. Religions and traditions are the repository, in concentrated form, of thousands of years of our tacit knowledge and wisdom. Without the subliminal transmission of virtues and knowledge through customs and traditions, schooling — which is mostly devoid of the complexity of real life and can at best provide theoretical underpinnings — would take too long to educate people. The individual lifespan is too short. Formal education, by itself, is an extremely inefficient tool of real education. It almost completely fails to impart wisdom and sophisticated thinking. What the USSR and China created by partially destroying their cultures were minds that lacked frameworks to absorb understanding and wisdom. We need raw math and science — to provide theoretical underpinnings, a sort of objective glue — but they cannot by themselves impart wisdom. Tacit knowledge is much complex and fundamental.
Culture, alas, is virtually impossible to change, as those who want to impose institutional changes on the backward parts of the world have consistently discovered.
Contrary to their claims, many of the vociferous atheists I have known are actually devout believers in scientism — in the idea that anything that cannot be scientifically explained is not real. They believe they have perfect answers or they are very close to them. They fail to realize that despite 500 years of scientific progress our understanding of the world is miniscule in comparison to what is there to be explained. Then these believers in scientism think they are believers in reason, but reason is not final knowledge; it is a chisel, a tool to continue exploration for better and better knowledge, in full understanding that a perfect answer might, very possibly, never come. Indeed, reason has had to work continuously to chisel religions into shape. Most religions failed and became ossified. Christianity, as major religions stand today, is perhaps the only one that carries some capacity to evolve.
Most evolved people — and every such person I have known personally — had deep religious or spiritual experiences growing up, even if they became atheists later on. As an atheist, I do want religions to come out of their tribal instincts, but the reality is that the vast majority of humanity does not think, would not think, and would rather die than think. They need something to believe in. It had better be Jesus Christ or Buddha than Obama, the stupid-box, or Miss Universe. Those in the liberty movement who want religion to end — as I do — must ask themselves whether fighting against it would not result in worse problems. Destroying religions without offering something in return would produce a very bland, passionless, immoral world.
Many people, on both the Left and the Right, who have not examined what they want to fight for see an enemy and want to liquidate it. But if they don’t understand the ecology, the complex historical, social, and intellectual surroundings, they only create space for a more resistant and harmful enemy.
Several people I know voted for Trudeau in Canada because they were against what they regarded as Harper’s attempt to create a police state. Having voted that enemy out, they now realize that not only will Trudeau retain — except for some lip-service — most of the police-state elements of Harper’s regime, but he will greatly “assist” Canada in its degeneration to a socialistic, irrational, values-lacking society. Had my acquaintances understood the ecology, they might have more sensibly voted for Harper. I myself would have suggested abstention, to avoid legitimizing the state.
Fighting legitimizes the state
Would I want prostitution and drugs to be legalized? Yes. I certainly would not fight to keep prostitution and drug consumption illegal, because I do not want to interfere in other people’s lives. Moreover, the only way self-responsibility can be developed is by letting people experience the consequences of their actions. Those who are gullible will eventually be fooled by someone else anyway. But I see no reason to fight for legalization of prostitution and drugs, because I understand that my fight for liberty has many other issues to confront, and if those are not adequately dealt with, any legalization and resulting liberties will be transitory, fleeting, and illusory.
Destroying religions without offering something in return would produce a very bland, passionless, immoral world.
Similarly I would like complete freedom of travel and I won’t resist if this is enabled tomorrow, but given the many other issues involved, I abstain from a single-minded focus on fighting for free immigration. Most importantly, any fight for legalization validates the idea of the state, the most criminal of human institutions.
My fight is for self-responsibility and self-control, which are cornerstones of civilization and liberty. My fight belongs in the space of reason. In the real world, issues are much entangled with one another. In societies that lack inherent moral impulses (which is the case with virtually every society outside the West), my fight is to shake people’s souls to infuse in them the concept of reason. Even in the West, my fight is not just to end the welfare-warfare system but to stop the hemorrhaging of the concept of reason. Unless this is done, any single-goal fight will have illusory results. Most likely, indeed, it will make the situation worse.
