Freedom in One Lesson

57.

Violence, Liberty, and Love

Virtue is widely preached and admired. Most people consider themselves virtuous. Yet in our society, virtue is being increasingly crowded out by violent coercion. This suggests a need to consider the differences between social coordination based on virtue, which is voluntary, and that based on coerced virtue, which actually degrades what we consider good and lets the muscles of virtue atrophy from lack of use.

Leonard Read thinks hard about this distinction throughout his long writing career. But perhaps his most insightful discussion is in his 1950 book Students of Liberty (Read 1950), which frames the discussion in terms of violence versus love.

The principle of violence finds widespread application. . . .

. . . A citizen is compelled to give of the fruits of his labor to meet the . . . “needs” of others. Freedom of choice as to what he does with his own capital and income (property) is denied him. Freedom of choice gives way to the dictation of an authority, a dictate backed by brute force— violence! . . . Suppose that he decides not to pay his share of the cost because . . . [it] is not a proper function of government. . . . What would happen?

. . . The government’s claim becomes the first lien on everything a citizen owns. . . .

The reason that most of us do not think of government coercion as meaning obedience under penalty of death is because we almost always pay our part of the cost . . . before the shooting begins. Usually we acquiesce before the ultimate meaning of compulsion is realized. . . .

. . . Violence was merely less exercised here than previously in other countries. This meant that government was strictly limited; that there was a minimum of organized violence. . . .

Many Americans understood this agent, government . . . could be used to suppress, restrain, restrict, destroy. Restriction and destruction by government, to be useful, must be confined to that which is bad: fraud, private violence, conspiracy, and theft or other predatory practices. But police force—violence by government . . . —is, patently, not a direct, creative force. Thus, in the original plan, all creative functions were to be carried on by such voluntary, cooperative, and competitive elements as the population contained. Government was to be confined to the protection of personal liberty. . . .

It was because this practice of the principle of violence was on a lesser scale than ever before attempted that accounted for the mighty surge that was America’s. Here, in this country, was a greater release of free human energy than history reveals in any other instance.

. . . I am opposed to the initiation of violence in any form, by anybody, or by any agency, government or otherwise. I cannot make inspired violence square with ethical concepts. Aggressive coercion . . . is at odds with principles which seem right. How this brute force can be used and be considered moral, except to restrain violence otherwise initiated, is beyond my capacities to reason. . . .

. . . As a private citizen, the predatory person is only one among millions. As an agent of government he becomes one over millions. . . .

. . . I have no faith, whatever, in any “good” that can come from these measures based on violence. . . .

Resorts to the political means . . . [are] plunderbund . . . another term for communalization by force, or legal thievery. It is simply the political device by which citizens pool their votes to extort the fruits of the labor of others for the purpose of satisfying the desires of themselves, their group, their community, or their industry. . . . Plunderbunds [arrange] life by violence. . . .

As a tree can stand a small bunch of mistletoe, so can a healthy economy stand instances of socialism. But as mistletoe could spread and destroy the tree on which it feeds, so can communalization by violence expand and destroy the society from which it derives its parasitical existence. . . .

. . . The cause of our ills is a reliance on the principle of violence. Violence breeds violence. The more of it we practice, the more of it will we rationalize as justified—even “needed.” . . .

. . . Most of these governmental activities can be maintained only under violence. . . .

. . . Responsibility and authority go hand in hand. . . . When we as citizens turn over to the state an item in the responsibility for our welfare, the state assumes a proportionate authority over our lives. Thus, as we turn over to the state item after item of our own welfare responsibilities, we eventually arrive at the all responsible state. When we reach this point we will have over us, ipso facto, the all-authoritarian state. At the head of this state will be a gangster, a craftsman in violence, by reason of the nature of the job to be done: administering violence. . . .

The alternative to violence is love . . . the application of the kindly virtues in human relations such as tolerance, charity, good sportsmanship, the right of another to his views, integrity, the practice of not doing to others what you would not have them do to you, and other attributes which result in mutual trust, voluntary cooperation, and justice. . . .

. . . The principle of love. Most persons will contend that it is the principle we ought to practice but that it is impractical. But try to find the individual who believes it impractical so far as he is concerned. He doesn’t exist. Each person thinks only that it is others who are incapable of decency. . . . Simply ask of yourself these questions: “ Would I initiate offense on those who would not offend me? Am I unjust, naturally, to the point where violence is required to restrain me? Am I unable and unwilling to deal honestly with those who would deal honestly with me?” Your answer, as mine . . . is: “No!”

. . . Everyone thinks himself essentially good, and capable of the high performances which interdependence requires in accordance with the principles of love. Why, then, don’t we be done with violence? Primarily, the reason is because of an all-too-common inhibiting fallacy: . . . “No one else is quite as good and dependable, if left to his own resources, as I am.” . . .

Reason will not support the idea of the principle of love as impractical. . . . We practice the principle of love in most of the aspects of our daily lives without recognizing it as such. . . . But where violence once takes the place of love, most of us seem to consider the matter settled, and conclude that love has forever been ruled out as possible of application. . . . Aid on a voluntary basis has been all but forgotten as a possibility. Violence has so far superseded love in actual application that people are referring to this act of violence as charity! It is as if they insisted on doing good even though they had to kill someone in the process!

. . . Where violence is taking us is apparent. . . . This would be a better world if a trend away from violence could be begun and a trend toward love initiated.

. . . What are the conditions essential for this needed reversal in form?

Love prospers only in liberty. It generates and grows among free men; only with difficulty among men ruled by the principles of violence. As violence begets violence so does one personal act of kindness beget another. . . .

. . . The natural aptness of man, acting as a self-controlling, self-responsible person, is good. The restraint of this aptness is evil. It is, then, in liberty that man’s natural aptness evolves toward its potentiality and its goodness. . . .

Responsibility and authority always go hand in hand. . . . Authority over one’s own actions is lost precisely in the degree that responsibility is shifted to someone else. . . .

. . . Self-improvement [is] the only practical course that there is to a greater liberty.

. . . In short, understanding liberty is knowing how to live in a condition where voluntary efforts will be at the maximum, and the use of force against persons at the minimum.

. . . History, for the most part, is a record of violence. Present-day talk and writing . . . for the most part is an argument for the rearrangement of the rules of violence. An appreciation that progress is possible only when human energy is freed of restraint has been gained by but few men. . . .

. . . Liberty . . . is the absence of its opposite—restraint or coercion. . . .

Once the reliance on self is removed, once the responsibility for a portion of our being has been assumed by another . . . we cease to think about or apply our ingenuity to the activities thus transferred. . . . Creative thought is abandoned by man as a free and thus a creative agent, and assumed by man as an agent of coercion. . . . Understanding liberty requires that we think in these lost areas . . . of replacing violence with voluntary action.

In Students of Liberty, Read demonstrates the superiority of a society whose organizing principle is virtue over one whose organizing principle is coercion backed by the threat of violence. Our society is heading down the wrong path, but Read’s insights can help us reverse course. And to do so is crucial because, as he concludes, the alternative is not appealing.

The principle of love prospers in a condition of liberty; . . . the principle of violence thrives in the absence of the principle of love; . . . the principle of violence is destructive of ourselves, of civilization, and of mankind.