Freedom in One Lesson

91.

Count Our Blessings, Not Miseries

It is a natural human tendency to focus on our problems, but the cost of doing so is to exaggerate their size relative to the blessings we benefit from. While those who advocate for liberty recognize the cornucopia of blessings it enables, they also see those liberties eroding and sometimes collapsing.

It is indeed disheartening to have less liberty than we should, but this has always been the case. The bright side is that liberty, through the many ways it gets around man-made limitations, has bequeathed us blessings beyond the wildest dreams of earlier generations. And there are great potential gains ahead through the expansion of liberty.

Leonard Read urges us to “Count Our Blessings, Not Miseries,” an essay from his 1981 book Thoughts Rule the World (Read 1981b).

There are ever so many freedom devotees who are afflicted with downheartedness. Their pessimism is due to the political skulduggery—“rascality; trickery”—that features our present decline into socialism.

. . . We need to see the evil but, at the same time, see the good: our blessings—thousands of times greater. . . .

Good and bad have existed together since the beginning of time, but no one needs to wallow in the bad! I do not listen to or read the bad . . . [and] I have that much more time to think about what’s right and to count my blessings. . . .

. . . Our blessings are so common that we forget to praise them, that is, to count them! . . .

The original source of the American miracle was our Declaration—unseating government as the source of human rights and placing the Creator there. The companion documents—the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—limited government more than ever before in history! Result? Americans looked to themselves rather than to government for welfare. Self-responsibility on an unprecedented scale! The millions enjoying blessings by the millions!

What happened after decades of countless blessings? The Source forgotten! And why? The blessings have become so abundant that today’s citizens take them for granted. . . .

There is, also, a very important reason for counting our blessings: it helps rid the soul of covetousness. To count one’s blessings is to accent what’s right. . . .

. . . Covetousness is as deadly as any of the other sins—indeed, it tends to induce the others.

Covetousness or envy generates a destructive radiation with ill effect on all it touches. . . .

. . . Consider the social implications, the effects of envy on others. At first blush, the rich man appears not to be harmed because another covets his wealth. Envy, however, is not a benign, dormant element of the psyche; it has the same intensive force as rage, and a great deal of wisdom is required to put it down. Where understanding and self-control are wholly lacking, the weakling will resort to thievery, embezzlement, piracy, even murder, to gratify his envy and “get his share.”

Though weakness of character afflicts all of us to some extent, only a few are so lacking in restraining forces as to personally employ naked force, such as thievery, to realize the objects of envy. Fear of apprehension and reprisal tends to hold such open-faced evil in check.

However, if the evil act can be screened, if the sense of personal guilt and responsibility can be sufficiently submerged, that is, if self-delusion can be effected, gratification of covetousness will be pursued by the “ best people.”

The way is no secret: achieve anonymity in a mob, committee, organization, society, or hide behind legality or majority vote.

With the fear of exposure removed, millions of Americans feather their own nests at the expense of others, and on a scale never imagined by thieves, pirates, or embezzlers. Our “best people” . . . gratify their envy with no qualms whatsoever. But their salved conscience in no way lessens the evil of covetousness; quite the contrary, it emphasizes to us how powerfully this evil operates at the politico-economic level. This subtle evil is indeed the genesis of more obvious sins.

We should also note the extent to which this “guiltless” taking of property by coercion is rationalized. Accomplices, bearing such titles as philosophers and economists, . . . explain how the popular depredations are good to everyone, even for those looted. Thus, we find that covetousness, unchecked in the individual, lies at the root of the decline and fall of nations and civilizations. . . .

As contrasted with the emulation of virtues, which takes nothing from but adds to the welfare of others, envy is nothing more than an avaricious greed to possess what exclusively belongs to others . . . [and is] opposed to an elevation of the spirit. . . . William Penn grasped this point: “Covetousness is the greatest of Monsters, as well as the root of all Evil.”

As a person cannot be in two places at the same time, so is it impossible for the eye to be cast covetously at the material possessions of others and cast aspiringly at one’s own creativity. Thus, envy leaves unattended the human being’s upgrading. . . . Envy leaves the soul, the spirit, the intellect, the psyche to rot, and there can be no greater evil than this.

. . . It surely behooves each of us to find a way to rid himself of this evil.

. . . Count your blessings!

Any person who is not aware of countless blessings, regardless of how low or high his estate, will be no more aware of his blessings should his envy be gratified. Awareness of blessings is a state of consciousness and is not necessarily related to abundance and affluence. He who is rich in worldly goods but unaware of his blessings is poor, and probably covetous; he who is poor in worldly goods but aware of his blessings is rich, and assuredly without envy.

. . . Count your blessings . . . for wisdom is awareness. . . .

As progress is made in an awareness of our blessings, we are struck by how greatly they outnumber our woes and troubles. In a state of unawareness, the woes loom enormous, and we tend to covetousness; in awareness the woes are but trifles, and the covetousness fades away.

This remarkable cure for covetousness also puts us on the road to social felicity; for we best serve ourselves and others through the exercise of self-responsibility and freedom!

Read’s recognition that we should count our blessings descends from centuries of wisdom and human experience. The advice is certainly no less true of adherents to liberty, whose arguments also rely on the wisdom of the ages (even if largely learned from liberty’s absence).