Let Freedom Reign

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YOU CAN’T TRANSPLANT A FACULTY

The preceding chapter makes the claim that “all forms of authoritarianism are pompous nonsense.” This seems self-evident to anyone who grasps the unimaginable content of the over-all luminosity and the infinitesimal part any discrete individual has or can have in its composition. There is, however, another way to demonstrate the utter fallacy of authoritarianism in the absence of which freedom reigns.

While technicians may, sooner or later, successfully transplant hearts, eyes, and other human organs, no one will ever succeed in transplanting such innate faculties as conditioned reflexes, intuitions, insights, volitional actions, and the like. These native aptitudes are exclusively private, personal, individualistic, and can no more be transplanted than can a dream or a vision.

This claim will arouse no dissent when expressed in theoretical terms; but many people have a yen for back-seat driving, and I think it can be shown that a back-seat driver foolishly or unwittingly attempts to transplant a faculty. Millions of people are afflicted with the back-seat driver syndrome, and this is freedom’s widespread and persistent enemy.

Thus, if freedom be our destination, then the prevalent itch to do back-seat driving ought to be restrained. But this bad habit isn’t curable until we recognize that a driver, regardless of competence, can drive better when left to his own resources than when confused by instructions from behind.

In automobiles, back-seat drivers range all the way from a kindly advisor to a thug with a gun in your back.

In society, back-seat drivers range all the way from “friendly,” unsolicited instructors, to associational resolutions, to edicts by both private and public bodies backed by force, some legal and some not.

Of Automobiles and Society

We are inclined to view with disfavor the person who tries to direct a driver from the back seat, or the parent who tells his offspring whom to marry, or the neighbor who is always telling us what to wear, eat, drink, think. These intimate busybodies or back-seat drivers are more often shunned than sought. Yet, we who frown on these intimate, personal intruders are likely to find upon careful self-inspection that we ourselves are remote, impersonal intruders, distinguished only by being further removed from those we would instruct than are the more intimate busybodies. What I wish to explain is that back-seat driving in society is strikingly analogous to back-seat driving in automobiles.

Two recent questions impressed upon me how widespread is the impulse for back-seat driving in matters of social import. The first: “Can you suggest a man big enough to head a citizens’ committee that could cope with campus strife and other breakdowns in law and order?” My answer: “He doesn’t exist.” The second: “Should we not insist that economics be taught in all high schools?” My answer: “No.”

How gentle these questions, and how seemingly far removed from the authoritarian mentality! Yet, this way of looking at problems other than our own reveals a lack of understanding of the driver-training process, whether it be driving a car or working out one’s own destiny. This way of looking at social problems, however innocently, is the genesis of authoritarianism. It reveals an unawareness of how freedom works.

As for driving a car, suppose you had to mentally formulate and word the message before each move of the wheel, each touch of the brake or the accelerator. Messages from the eye to the brain to the hands and feet are far too slow; you couldn’t drive. If you are a competent driver, all of these movements have been relegated to the conditioned reflexes. Your thinking is reserved for the unexpected on the road, how to avoid hitting or getting hit by other drivers, and where it is you want to go.

Now, suppose that instructions from a back-seat driver are substituted for both your thinking and your conditioned reflexes, that you are downgraded to an automaton. The thinking, more than likely, will be inferior to your own. But even more serious, conditioned reflexes would not be in operation at all. In view of the fact that conditioned reflexes cannot be transplanted, split-second actions and reactions are out of the question; car driving becomes an utter impossibility.1 However, up to this point, I am only pointing out the obvious.

Not so obvious is what happens in the case of social back-seat drivers. We who would play that role are unable to imagine a good and flourishing society except as others are guided by our lights. We insist on minding the business of others which, were they to heed us, would make them less competent than they are now, whatever that level. We fail to grasp this point only because we do not understand how freedom works.

Parenthetically, I concede that it is correct in principle, as well as necessary, to formalize and enforce the taboos against destructive activities: fraud, violence, and so on. Invoking a common justice and keeping the peace is what government is for. And this is as far as any of us should ever go in interfering with the actions of others. This is another way of saying that, when it comes to creative activities, let us be done with contriving what others should do and how they shall act. Leave them alone except, of course, when our counsel or tutorship is sought. And have faith that their behavior will be superior to their performance under our intrusive prescriptions.

Upon what is such a faith founded? It rests upon the fact that numerous complex faculties are singularly and exclusively manifested in each person who lives on this earth. These include not only the power to think and the conditioned reflexes employed as when driving a car, but also inventiveness, intuition, the ability to will, choose, decide; in a word, volition. Every iota of human creativity stems from these discrete, unique sources, these individual wellsprings—dynamos, so to speak, varying in power from very low to very high. Nor has the make-up or combination of faculties in any one of these power sources ever been duplicated in any other. Each person is unique.

Each of us is the possessor and protagonist of his own nontransferable life.2 I may never do very much with my own possessions but I will do more with what I have if left to my own resources and on my own responsibility than if others interfere with the free employment of my faculties. To the extent that others do not interfere with my creative potentialities, I am free. Only when I am free can the best that is in me show forth. If you interfere, even as a “friendly” busybody, then you confuse, frustrate, and stifle such generative capacity as lies within my power: you turn me off! Remember that I am as unique and as complex as are you. And it is easily demonstrable that you know very little about yourself, far less about me.

All of this comes clear when we analyze the back-seat car driver—a personal, intimate situation—substituting his guidance for a relatively simple operation in which only a few faculties are employed. Consider, then, the far greater hazard of inflicting your views on people unknown to you, in an operation as big as the destiny of man, attempting to alter the conglomeration of faculties in each of millions of persons, faculties which you cannot even identify by name, much less understand. The social back-seat driver by his remote, impersonal intrusions is incalculably more absurd than is the back-seat driver in a car with his intimate, personal intrusions!

Creative Faculties Are Exclusive

Why does freedom work? Why is it that you, for instance, when left alone and free from intrusions, do better than when another attempts to make you into a carbon copy of himself? The answer, of course, relates to the free functioning of your creative faculties! Your faculties may be of low or high generative capacity, but they are exclusively yours. Your faculties are yours alone and nontransferable; and the same applies to every other individual. A faculty transplant is impossible and that is what social back-seat drivers do not apprehend. Try to transplant apprehension!

The social back-seat driver has at least two effects: (1) to the extent that one person imposes his will on another, he thwarts and stifles that other’s generative capacity, and (2) by casting his eye fruitlessly on others, the back-seat driver neglects his own much-needed upgrading. The fact that he is a back-seat driver is testimony enough that the need is his.

Freedom works its wonders simply because the generative capacity of countless millions has no external force standing against its release!

The aggregate of this creative human energy is so far beyond our power to imagine that, by and large, we have no faith in it and the wonders it works. How can I believe in something my mind cannot encompass! Yet, to have faith in freedom requires that I believe in this incomprehensible creative power. Summarizing, this is how my own belief is founded:

1. I observe how frustrating back-seat drivers are to me and how my best shows forth in their absence. Then I multiply this minus-to-plus shift by countless millions of others, arriving at an incomprehensible human creativity.

2. History reveals to me that civilizations form and rise when freedom is the mode and decline with back-seat driving authoritarianism.

3. It is clear that all progress stems from the nontransplantable faculties of unique individuals, generating at their best when free and unrestrained.

Macro Problems

Let us now return to those opening questions: “Can you suggest a man big enough to head a citizens’ committee that could cope with campus strife and other breakdowns in law and order?” and “Should we not insist that economics be taught in all high schools?”

These questions, typical of countless others heard daily, are so gentle that they seem unrelated to that political authoritarianism decried by the questioners. But observe what analysis reveals.

Implicit in the first question is the acknowledgment that campus strife and other breakdowns in law and order are too big for the questioner. So he’s looking for a man as big as the problem: a macro man to cope with a macro problem.3 And a Macro Man is what enough of this kind of searching will uncover: Der Fuehrer! For precisely the same reason that the questioner isn’t big enough to cope with the problem, a point he admits, neither is anyone else. No one else can transplant faculties either. In this respect, all are impotent.

Why such delegation in desperation? It is a common response to an insistence for order with no realization that this road must end in utter chaos.4 What’s going on in our homeland is strikingly similar to what went on in Germany prior to Hitler’s rise to power. They wanted a man “big enough” and they got him. But he was big only in ignorance and the capacity to slaughter.

If we go deeper for an explanation of this desperation thinking, I believe it lies in the tendency to mind other people’s business, nicely illustrated by “Should we not insist on the teaching of economics in all high schools?” This question has the same flavor as “What we ought to have in every high school and college in this country is a compulsory course in freedom.”

Economics in all high schools! Where are the teachers and the textbooks? Most of what’s being written and taught is of the macro brand. Better that there be none of it! And who among the millions of students have any desire to learn economics, or could learn if they tried? Maybe one in a thousand! Might as well insist on the teaching of paleo-ecology!

My point, however, has to do with this kind of back-seat driving—people forever concocting designs for the rest of us. If a few people insist that economics be taught in all high schools, economics will be a “required” discipline; government will be brought into the act. So many of these intrusive and nonsensical designs have been foisted upon us that today our society is overburdened with rubble, countless monkey wrenches in the machinery. Small wonder that we have a macro problem and that people are looking around for a man big enough to cope with it.

When Freedom Reigns

What is the remedy? It is to recognize the fallacy of back-seat driving, to quit these attempts at faculty transplants, to let people alone in their creative activities. Forswear designing what they should study, think, produce, exchange, where they should work, what their hours and wages should be, and so on. Relieve ourselves of this fruitless meddling and watch the rubble disappear. See how quickly individuals improve themselves!

Would a society free from this meddling conform to my present idea of the ideal? Indeed, it would not! It would be better than anything I can imagine, just as America excelled anything its founders had in mind.

We can have faith in freedom by simply acknowledging that we already know how the driver-training process really works: Instead of my telling you what to do, you seek tutorship if and when you want it. The process is that simple and that sensible.

That no one of us can ever figure out how this humpty-dumpty can be put back together again is conceded. But we don’t have to know. If we will merely quit our back-seat driving, stop trying to graft our own faculties onto others, it will put itself back together. God gave me only myself to control, not the world. The message I get is to let Creation work its wonders! This is possible only when freedom reigns.

In earlier times, macro economics had its equivalent in tribal custom, feudalism, mercantilism, and other variants of collectivism. Today, its top practitioners are to be found in Russia, Red China, Uruguay, Cuba.

• 1The Royal Bank of Canada Monthly Letter, February, 1969.
• 2Even prohibiting pollution in highly polluted areas may be no solution. Pollution is becoming a problem of the whole troposphere, that is, the troposphere assuredly has containment limitations. If this view be accepted, then pollution released atop Mt. Everest could eventually wreak its havoc on Americans.
• 3But to what avail are gas masks for human beings if plant and animal life succumb to pollution?
• 4This is not to overlook or minimize the polluting effect of a thousand and one other well-known governmental interventions.