Freedom in One Lesson

97.

To Abdicate or Not

Leonard Read admired and promoted wisdom, wherever it could be found, throughout his long history of fighting for liberty. You see it in the many quotes sprinkled throughout his writing. He wanted to build on that wisdom—that insight into truth—to show how it would buttress the case for individual freedom. That is a major reason why Read admired Ludwig von Mises, whom he saw as an exemplar of a wise man in many things.

Read’s “ To Abdicate or Not” (Read 1971b), from Toward Liberty, a 1971 collection of essays honoring Mises, illustrates this well. Consider his discussion of Mises’s understanding of what to abdicate and what never to abdicate. “Life is a process of selection and rejection; knowing what to renounce in life and what to embrace are distinguishing marks of a wise man. My theme is Mises and his exemplary achievements in this respect.”

He then tells a story in which someone asks Mises a question at the end of a long night of discussion: “Professor Mises . . . suppose you were the dictator of these United States. What would you do?” Mises responds, “I would abdicate.”

Here we have the renunciation side of wisdom: man knowing he should not lord it over his fellows and rejecting even the thought.

Few among us are wise enough to know how little we know. . . . The wise man, on the other hand . . . measures his knowledge against what might be known and confesses to knowing nearly nothing. Such a rare individual weighs his finite knowledge on the scale of infinite truth, and his awareness of his limitations tells him never to lord it over others. Such a person would renounce any position of authoritarian rulership. . . . He would abdicate—forthwith!

If abdication is the appropriate response to the potential for dictatorial power, what logical role does that leave for government, now grown to gargantuan proportions and ruling over every citizen’s life?

Really, no one ever rules another. The most that is achieved . . . is to keep others from being themselves. True, there is a role for a societal agency to play in keeping others from being themselves if it be their nature to commit theft, murder, deception, violence, and the like. I am not alluding, however, to the retarding of wrongdoing but, rather, to a person’s freedom to be himself creatively. The authoritarian mentality is concerned not with inhibiting destructive actions but with the control and direction of creative actions. This no dictator can do; he can only suppress, deaden, destroy such actions. Creative actions can never be ruled but only ruled out!

The wise man . . . realizes that his knowledge is but infinitesimal . . . but a wee candle in the overall luminosity. . . .

The overall luminosity that makes possible . . . things by which we live and thrive . . . is a storehouse of unimaginable enormity; no individual can perceive a trillionth of it!

The wisdom in knowing that we know not is sometimes glimpsed in relation to things. For instance, it is easily demonstrable that no single person has the knowledge to make a simple pencil, let alone a jet plane. . . . Even so, the realm of things is pestered with know-it-alls, persons who seem unable to relate their tiny glimmers to the overall luminosity and cannot therefore keep themselves in their place.

However, it is when we move from the realm of things to the realm of humanity—man and society—that authoritarians proliferate. Even many who would confess to an ignorance of how to make a dynamo will, with no hesitancy whatsoever, boast of knowing how man and society should be made to perform. Failing to discern that men and their relationships are vastly more complex than any thing or things, they entertain no doubts about their competency to rule mankind.

I cannot but be struck here by how strongly Read’s words echo those of another wise man, Adam Smith, in his chessboard analogy from The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

The man of system . . . is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. . . .

He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chessboard of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. . . . If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. (Smith 2002)

What can we do with the luminosity, or wisdom, we inherit? As Read so often expresses, we can reform ourselves by acquiring more wisdom, which adds to our society’s overall luminosity, but an effort to coercively reform others will reduce it.

In the realm of humanity . . . overall luminosity presides or rules. . . . It is a body of underlying assumptions, of ideas taken for granted and held more or less in common; is the residual legatee of mankind’s history of, as James Coolidge Carter phrased it, “the imperishable record of the wisdom of the illimitable past reaching back to the infancy of the race.” It is what is handed down to us plus what we, who live on its growing edge, put into it.

Professor Mises knows that he does not or cannot rule; thus, he abdicates from even the idea of rulership. Knowing what phase of life to renounce is one side of wisdom.

But knowing what phase of life to embrace—to get ever deeper into, from which never to abdicate—is the other side of wisdom. And in this phase, as in the former, we have no exemplar who excels Mises.

. . . The ruling consensus . . . is what is handed down to us, plus what we put into it.

What we put into it is the key. The improvement of the ruling consensus by you or me requires that our own thoughts and actions be, at the very least, a confirmation of the best that has been handed down to us or, hopefully, an improvement on what the consensus already contains.

We who live on its growing edge can put nothing into the consensus that is not within ourselves. It follows, if we would put anything into it, that life must be devoted to the improvement of what is within us, rather than wasted on the futile attempt to reform others.

I am unaware of any individual who is less the reformer or propagandist than Mises. To the contrary, his life is and always has been distinguished by a search for truth. His remarkable and unmatched economic works are testimony to many virtues but especially to his two-sided wisdom: knowing what phase of life to renounce and what phase of life to embrace.