The Price of Liberty

7/27/2018

By Insula Qui

A common libertarian myth involves the notion that liberty is the base condition of mankind. Libertarians tend to assume that freedom is accomplished by people just giving up the use of force, but this disregards human psychology. Most people are predisposed to seeing generally accepted authority as a sufficient justification for the use of force. Furthermore, all individuals have a different disposition when it comes to the use of violence, thus there are two steps that need to be taken to “buy” liberty.

The first important step is to convince people that their liberty is worth the cost it has. That is, it is important to convince people that they need to pay for their own liberty by going against authority. If no one is willing to make the purchase, then there can be no purchase. The second step is the need to pay off those who have the greatest capacity for violence or institute a sufficient threat against them. Liberty can only exist if those who would be violent are incentivized to not be violent or see the costs of violence as being too high.

Thus, liberty is not a good with no cost. But with the introduction of the state into this equation, it gets even more complicated. In a complete base human condition in which the use of violence is sporadic and pragmatic, the situation is different. However, when the state is introduced, there is an institutional entity that goes against liberty by the means of violence. The only way to defeat the state is to use extreme amounts of violence, which is a massive cost. And this is the prime matter of this article, we need to figure out if the human loss in a revolution is worth the benefit we get from liberty.

We can view the state as keeping all of us half-dead all of the time. Through taxation, various statutes, and other statist measures, living the fullest life is restricted. So the logical conclusion would be that if we can be fully alive without the state, the cost of half the population would be a justified sacrifice for achieving that goal. But here we have to make some more nuanced considerations. This is because value is not cardinal, but rather ordinal, things have value insofar as they are judged in accordance with their relative importance to other things. And thus we need to judge different forms of life as ordinal values and compare those forms of life.

We can create the following value scale, this is not an ordinary value scale used in Austrian economics, as it does not differentiate between goods, rather, it is a value scale that differentiates between different options, cratic or not:

Life
Half-Death
Death

But this is not the only scale that life is judged on, we can consider splitting life into different units, as life is divisible by the amount of time in that life, so the following ordinal scale would be:

5 years of life
2 years of life
6 months of life

Combining those two, we can create such a value scale:

10,000,000$ (To be deposited to one’s family following death.)
Life
Smoking
10 years of life

Now, we have to account for the fact that the people fighting in wars tend to be males no older than 30. This means that not only do people die in war, they give up around 50 years of their life. So now that we know this, we are left with two possible value scales. One that justifies creating a revolution for the sake of liberty, the other that would make sure that revolution is unjustified.
Scale A:

50 years of life
10% chance of death
50 years of half-life

Scale B:

50 years of life
50 years of half-life
10% chance of death

But this is not yet all, we need to factor in the possibility that the revolution will be unsuccessful. There is a very real possibility that those who fight in a revolution will not find themselves in a new and better order. Provided that the war is courteous, they will have decent lives even if they fail. However, modern wars never tend to be like that, this means that the only way we can justify revolution is if the value scale is thusly:

An unknown chance of 50 years of life
10% chance of death and an unknown chance of unknown persecution provided you fail
50 years of half-life

Thus, people en masse will have to accept uncertainty in achieving their aims and set aside their desire for half-life for the unknown possibility of success. The only thing one can hope for is that their appeal to heaven succeeds. But if the revolutionary finds this lacking, there can be no revolution. There is a very real tradeoff to revolution the same way that there is a very real tradeoff to any other war.

This leads us to two strategies we can take, passivism and activism. Activism is the pursuit of changing the value scales of others. The activist has to convince people that half-life is less valuable than an unknown chance of a full life and potential loss of life. Passivism is somewhat related to pacifism, but not fully. Pacifism rejects the use of violence, while passivism rejects action where unknown variables would make resistance futile. Passivism is not lacking in hope or in opposition to revolution but rather demands a guaranteed revolution before there is a revolution. Passivists will not attempt to change the value scales of others to prompt revolution, but will rather strike only when the iron is hot. In the middle of turmoil, economic or political, the passivist will arm himself and use his connections for the sake of change, until then, action is not justified.

But passivism does not give up on changing people’s minds. Passivism aims to grow his movement as much as possible. The passivist does not aim to make these people ready for revolution. The passivist is only concerned with the ideals of those people who he changes. And when it comes a time where a drastic change is justified, the passivist can then capitalize on his efforts.

In this sense, the activist functions within an ideal while the passivist functions in reality. The activist wants to rile people to undertake change by their own action, but the passivist wants certainty before he wants action. The passivist needs people to know what risks they are taking and refuses to take responsibility for unnecessary death. But this is completely at odds with the activist. When the activist sees turmoil, he sees that as the preliminary for his cause. He sees turmoil as a place to spread his ideology. But once he has done that, there is no way for him to utilize that ideology. He can begin a steady march through institutions, but this will still only work insofar as it is a passivist march.

And passivism must be the libertarian strategy. The libertarian cannot support death and violence where it is not necessary. The libertarian must support inaction insofar as action will cause further grievances against liberty. Furthermore, if a revolution is attempted during an inadvantageous time, that revolution will only thin the numbers of the activist. Those incarcerated and dead will never again be involved in another revolution and the rest of the movement will only be further dejected unless those who died were martyred in the most courageous manner.

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