The Free-World isn't Especially Free

Why I think capitalism's freedom is fake, and why, sadly, socialism's isn't much better.

[I try to appeal to non-Stalinists people who don’t share my ideology, let me know if you get that “outgroup member pushing their agenda dishonestly or stupidly” angry feeling at any point, and I’ll edit that part, if I think it’s fair, or link to your comment for balance.]

The Queen’s Christmas Message was a message the Queen used to broadcast on British TV on Christmas Day (following so far?). It was a pre-recorded speech mainly about national events and social trends etc., often putting a hopeful spin on them, last year’s was mostly about covid for example.

I hope it’s not treasonous to suggest the late Her Majesty wasn’t one of the leading social theorists of our time (top 100 certainly).

In style, the messages were more head-teacher’s-end-of-year-speech than Chomsky-vs-Foucault.

She was also expected to stay politically impartial; so most of her comments were fairly bland, non-divisive remarks about “coming together” and “changing times”, or celebrating nurses, sometimes promoting a toothless kind of environmentalism, occasionally a tentative remark about Jesus.

Maybe Mencius Moldbug cries himself to sleep every Christmas Eve at the thought of an impotent, de-sanctified monarch, but you’d need to be an exceptionally bitter person to get upset at anything so deliberately anodyne.

Anyway, I was really triggered when the Queen used the term “the Free World” to refer to the West back in 2019.

Whoever combs over her majesty’s scripts looking for anything with the slightest chance of offending Gerard from Woking enough that he complains to Ofcom, apparently didn’t think anybody would object to the term “the Free World”.

Well, I objected. And three years later I’m here to complain about it on the internet. Mainly though, I want to talk about how my view on “freedom” has changed since then.

The West isn’t especially free. “The Free World” was just a slogan Cold-Warriors thought up so they didn’t have to call themselves ”the Protects-Private-Property Land” or “the Most-Dominant-Military-Power-in-World-History World”. It’s an Orwellianism.

Real freedom is [insert some Marxism here]. Mount the barricades and let’s liberate ourselves from the yoke of bourgeois oppression, comrades! ….Is what I thought at the time.

Since then, I’ve thought twice about smouldering over an offhand remark by a, now-deceased, elderly lady that I didn’t know personally, from three years ago I’ve come to think that socialism doesn’t offer much freedom, possibly even less than capitalism does.

Neither side offers much freedom.

That’s all I wanted to say really, hope to see you in the next post. Having achieved enlightened centrism, I’ll just float off in my brain-balloon over to the effective altruism forums.

Ok, not really. I still live in the ostensibly free capitalist world, but really don’t feel very free, and I’d like to know why…

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There’s a lot of conflict over how to define “freedom”, different definitions suit different ideological interests.

 Leftists want to introduce concepts like “positive” and “negative” freedom, and other ideas that tie freedom to something like having-access-to-things or just general wellbeing, in a way that makes more re-distributive schemes look freer and less re-distributive ones less free. That’s roughly the view I held in 2019, and why I thought it was disingenuous to emphasise the West’s supposed freedom.

Those kinds of word games are a bit pointless though, you can define “freedom” to mean anything, and play endless Mott-and-Bailey games defending inconsistent definitions if you want, but it won’t illuminate anything.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

The kind of freedom I’m interested in is the “being free to do what you want without anyone else interfering” kind, which I think is the most common use of the word, it’s what most people mean when they say “freedom”.

I’m less interested in the “absence of natural barriers preventing you from doing things” type of freedom.

So if someone throws you in prison, or threatens to, that’s a reduction in your freedom. If you happen to fall into a natural cave and get stuck, that’s not a reduction in your freedom (it’s still bad, obviously, we should keep rescuing people from caves, but I don’t count it as a lack of freedom), you just lack the natural ability to escape (leave).

Robinson Crusoe was maximally free, because there wasn’t anyone else around that could constrain his actions, even though he was trapped on an island.

You can ask philosophical questions about “what counts as natural barriers and natural abilities?” or “is it un-free to prevent someone from interfering in another person’s freedom to do things?” I haven’t delved that far into the philosophy, but, if you do ask those questions, I get the impression you find that there’s no good definition of “freedom” that’s coherent and roughly corresponds to common usage. I think this is an area where you just have to rely on intuition (or just stop discussing it at all).

Even though it has fuzzy boundaries, I like the “being free to do what you want without anyone else interfering” definition because it’s the sort of freedom that makes you feel free when you have it, and makes you distinctly unfree when it’s taken away. I don’t think any government program that “reduces barriers to entry, for excluded minorities, in the tech-industry” ever gave anyone the liberated feeling you’d get trekking through an uninhabited wilderness, even if, in a technical sense, it was providing people more agency by removing obstacles.

If you allow arguments about negative freedom, in my view, the whole discussion just devolves into how to maximise welfare (which might be fine, since it should be our goal anyway).

So even if socialism would improve welfare, it also entails the state telling people what to do all the time, so socialism can only ever reduce freedom.

If scaling back the state increases freedom, ideologies like libertarianism, which favour small states, must provide a lot of freedom then, right?

Well….

Imagine someone who had lived their whole life in a maximally free environment, a Robinson Crusoe who was born on his island, or a hunter-gatherer from anarchist pre-history. Imagine them visiting the most capitalist society possible, somewhere that had taken “economic freedoms” to the maximum extremes, absent any regard for human welfare or anything else. Modern Britain will do if you’re struggling to envision that.

If you were their tour guide, and they behaved as uninhibitedly as they naturally would in their liberated homeland, you’d constantly be telling them:

“Oh no, don’t touch that, it belongs to someone else.” “Don’t go in there, it’s private property.” “That’s also private land.” “You can’t go around burning things!” “Sleeping outside Greg’s is generally frowned on.” “You probably can’t sleep in the chip shop either.” “You need to pay for that.” “You have to compensate people if you smash their windows”. “More police will come if you fight these ones.” “Maybe just avoid assault in general.” “You only get paid if you actually stay at work.” “Just sit at this desk quietly.” “Actually doing the work is also required.”

I’ll stop before it gets too autobiographical, but you get the idea.

Yes, occasionally you might need to tell them: “Fill out these forms.” “Obey environmental regulations.” “You need to pay at least minimum wage.” “And taxes.” “That requires a licence.” “Don’t just bribe the regulators! … Oh, discretely? Well ok then.”

But most of the time they wouldn’t feel very constrained by the kinds of rules libertarians complain about, but they’d feel very constrained by all the rules libertarians never mention.

The main way they would need to modulate their behaviour would be by respecting other people’s things.

 And the police would force them to if they didn’t do it willingly.

In most civilised societies, property rights are the biggest infringement on individual freedom. To own something means to exclude everybody else from using it, i.e. to remove their freedom to use it.

The property regime is everywhere, there’s virtually nowhere you can go to escape it; it covers almost all the land, buildings and objects around you, it prevents you from doing most of the things you want to do, and it’s almost impossible to feed or clothe yourself or keep a roof over your head, outside of it, and you have to obey it on pain of imprisonment.

There are only two things completely outside the property regime: the atmosphere and public access land.

In the “Free World” you’re entirely free to breathe and walk down the street, but all other possible actions are regulated by the state, to some extent. For the US you can also add speech to the list of unregulated actions, for an impressive three unadulterated freedoms! (America Fuck Yeah plays in the background.)

Extending the thought experiment:

Imagine transporting an ancient hunter-gatherer, through time, into the present.

In his own time, he was free to go where he pleased and sustain himself on anything he could find. In the modern world, he finds himself surrounded by things he could use, but isn’t allowed to.

He’s surrounded everywhere by things that other people have already claimed, even his old hunting grounds are someone else’s property, he’s confined to the limited public spaces where he’s not allowed to take anything he might need.

Without the property regime, his life would probably be improved by the time travel, as there’s so much more wealth for the taking.

But since he doesn’t own anything, he’s fully constrained by the established property regime, even though it doesn’t benefit him in any way. It’s making his life much worse.

Perhaps he can sell the one thing he does own, his labour, to someone who has property claims and work for wages. He might be able to claim more things as his property, but he would never describe this as a “free world”. (Incidentally, I think this is why civilisation owes people a quality of life that’s as least as the one they would have without it, and why people who do benefit from property regimes ought to compensate everyone else, i.e. pay taxes.)

In the Wealth of Nations it’s clear Adam Smith considers capitalist wage labour to be on the same spectrum of un-freedom as slavery, he argues that as labour’s bargaining position weakens wage labour seamlessly transitions into something more and more like slavery. Maybe he’d think of a well-compensated executive as towards the “free” end of the spectrum and someone like a sweat-shop worker at the “more slave-like” end, with ordinary First World workers somewhere in between.

Whereas the modern view regards slavery as abhorrent and wage labour as normal.

But if you don’t take the existence of a property regime for granted, it’s clear that both contain an element of coercion.

A wage labourer isn’t compelled to work directly, but he has been excluded from any of the other ways to survive, that would naturally be available to him, by the force of the state.

Describing capitalist society as free is like describing Sam Bankman-Fried as charitable. Yes, it offers many small freedoms/charitable donations, but it’s all built on one gigantic un-freedom/exploitative scam, i.e. the property regime/FTX’s trading practices. (Actually, that’s unfair, SBF has my full endorsement.)

[Interestingly, 17th and 18th-century pirate ships were run as collectively owned cooperatives, no one individual owned the ship and loot was divided equally(ish) among the crew. The reason for that egalitarianism, it seems obvious to me, is that there’s no state around to enforce private property out at sea.]

One of the most absurd conclusions you reach from the leftist “negative and positive freedoms” framework is that education can increase freedom because it grants people more agency in overcoming barriers.

Education! The thing Scott Alexander (rightly) called “child prison”.

Equally, as it takes property rights for granted, the classical liberal view on freedom might also consider education to potentially be liberating, or at least not coercive, as long as you attend “voluntarily”.

I’m really not sure what to say to anyone who’s attended a modern university and considers them anything but horrifyingly repressive, except please never interact with me in any way.

Of course, property regimes are necessary to prevent everything from collapsing, we’d be squabbling over crumbs in open sewers without them. I’m also not suggesting liberal democracies are as unfree as North Korea, obviously North Korea has additional restrictions on freedom on top of the property regime.

I’m suggesting that civilisation is inherently unfree.

Capitalism might arguably be freer than socialism, but it’s still a version of civilisation, it still requires property regimes, the same way socialism does. It might be an extra 50% freer than socialism, but if socialism is only 1% free in the first place, that’s still only 1.5% total freedom. The disparity between the West and North Korea, in my view, isn’t large, they’re essentially similar, and both very unfree.

If you followed around the average capitalist citizen and the average socialist citizen as they went about an ordinary day (and controlled for income etc.), would you be able to tell which was which?

They’d both live in a designated house or apartment, wake up at a scheduled time, commute on time-tabled public transport or as part of regulated traffic, work regimented hours, under instruction, at an office or factory, or sit at desks in a school, wait in line at the store, etc. etc.

Their lives would be very similar.

On the other hand, if you compared the life of a hunter-gatherer to a member of any industrialised society, the difference in freedom would be palpable.

Civilised people are socialised into accepting many constraints on their behaviour. I sometimes wonder if proclamations like “stay out of other people's houses” or “don’t steal or break stuff” have become so ingrained in people, that the idea of going where, and doing what, you please is almost unimaginable.

But that’s what real freedom is.

It’s the only explanation I have for why some free-market advocates are so passionate about personally owning a business, or reducing regulations, or the idea of “voluntary exchange” when every other aspect of their lives is so regimented, and they barely seem to notice.

Perhaps those really do look like important freedoms from a certain stunted perspective.

I get the sense that people vary in how much they value freedom, some people seem happy collaborating with schools, employers or the law, and have no trouble suppressing the urge to trespass, smash windows or commit arson.

Personally, I fucking love freedom (cue eagle screech), if I could alter one aspect of the existing social order, I’d want a lot more freedom, even if, to some degree, it crippled the basic capabilities of a functioning society, like producing wealth and maintaining order.

I’d even consider moving to the US just for the open space, despite feeling horrified by every other aspect of life there.

Despite those recklessly anarchic liberal sympathies, the paper-thin veneer of freedom that capitalism offers really doesn’t do anything for me, and I wish the Western world would stop constantly virtue signalling about the minuscule amount of extra freedom it has over anybody else.

Liberal propagandists, you really need to find a new selling point.

[Stay posted for more recklessly anarchic policy proposals that threaten to cripple the basic capabilities of a functioning society.]