Freedom Does Not Exist in a Vacuum

Towards a Broader Moral Libertarian Project

I have always been a great supporter of freedom, and I have long been concerned that the West is losing its freedom. My concerns began in the aftermath of 9/11, when the Bush administration severely curtailed civil liberties in the name of stopping terrorism, violating long-standing guarantees of freedom and privacy in the process, and other governments around the Western world also followed suit. Soon after, the 2003 Iraq War was also justified as part of a wider 'war on terror', and opponents of the war were decried as unpatriotic or worse. The infamous Dixie Chicks incident proved how cancel culture was in full force back then, even though we didn't have that term yet. The next year saw a big moral panic wave over gay marriage driven by the religious right. In the 2004 US Elections, the victory of President Bush and the passage of anti-gay marriage constitutional amendments in many states were explained by the media as due to the rise of 'values voters', which further emboldened the religious right. By 2005, there were attempts to make schools teach 'intelligent design' in biology classes, and this campaign even spread outside America. Meanwhile, while libertarian ideas also gained popularity as a reaction to these instances of authoritarian overreach, they weren't gaining ground quickly enough to push back against the much larger wave of authoritarianism. A big reason was that libertarianism itself was often not very practical. The strict application of the 'non-aggression principle' (NAP) in real life was a tall order indeed. It just couldn't compete with the simple messaging of the authoritarians, which was rooted in the primal emotion of fear.

It was in this context that I first developed the foundational idea for Moral Libertarianism: that every individual should have equal and maximum moral agency. In practice, it would mean every individual having the right to their own moral decisions, as long as it does not compromise another individual's right to the same. Every individual would be guaranteed their own free speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, because these rights do not affect others' expression of the same rights. Every individual would also have freedom of action as long as it did not impinge on the same right for another individual, i.e. your right to swing your fist stops at my face. I think this is very fair, and much better than the religious right trying to shove their beliefs down people's throats, or politicians trying to get people to vote for them by fearmongering and scapegoating minorities and promising to impose authoritarian measures targeting those minorities.

Later on, I would also apply Moral Libertarian thinking to argue against the postmodern-critical theory left, which sees society and culture as an oppressor vs. oppressed landscape defined by groups based on immutable characteristics. I was in fact surprised that the left was equally able to curtail free speech and other individual liberties at first, but that is exactly what started to happen in the mid-2010s. For some time the threat to freedom was coming much more from the left than the right, which was why my writing in that era mainly targeted the left. More recently, the illiberal right has been making a strong comeback, which means that the fight for freedom has effectively become a war on both sides for the first time in my lifetime. All throughout these developments, the Moral Libertarian idea of championing Equal Moral Agency for every individual, and associated ideas developed from this core idea, have been immensely helpful in anchoring my own thinking to a commitment to freedom, even as many others I once respected have strayed to either the authoritarian left or the authoritarian right along the way.

What I also learned in these two decades is that freedom does not exist in a vacuum. As I said before, I have observed many previously pro-freedom individuals stray towards authoritarianism, of both the left-wing and right-wing variety. Some progressives who fought for free speech on the Iraq War in 2003 and against the religious right's anti-gay marriage push in 2004 somehow managed to support de-platforming and cancel culture in the late 2010s. Some self-identified classical liberals who opposed cancel culture and the illiberal left in the 2010s somehow flipped to support the populist reactionary culture warriors in the present, rationalizing Don't Say Gay, drag bans, draconian abortion bans and potential IVF restrictions as somehow necessary to 'fight wokeness'. In each case, I was deeply disappointed, but was also driven to find out what went wrong. What I learned was that freedom does not exist in a vacuum. As those who have been following me for some time would have heard me argue over the past two years, certain things are very bad for freedom, including tribalism, echo chambers, a lack of compassion, moral panics, all-or-none thinking, and an over-commitment to abstract philosophy and theory. Freedom cannot exist in a vacuum, because it needs the opposite of these things to thrive, i.e. true diversity of opinion, an open and fair marketplace of ideas, a culture that encourages compassion, rationality and compromise, and prioritizing the practical resolution of problems over philosophical concerns. Absent a strong commitment to these things, any talk of freedom would soon turn into its opposite.

While I have talked a lot about the necessary conditions for freedom, up until now I have not yet re-integrated them with my Moral Libertarian model. For a long time, I have identified being overly abstract and impractical as the major weakness of classical libertarianism, and in developing Moral Libertarnism, I wished to develop a more practical model of libertarianism. However, in the early years, I was still narrowly focused on how to apply the principle of Equal Moral Agency. While this would be much more practical than trying to apply the NAP, what I have realized is that it still narrowed the scope of freedom too much to be a strong enough practical safeguard for freedom. This is why, going forward, I believe Moral Libertarianism should be broadened to encompass the conditions that appear to be required for freedom to thrive. In this Moral Libertarianism 2.0, the principle of Equal Moral Agency will still be an important reference point to help us decide on moral questions and solutions, but more attention needs to be paid to the overall context too, to ensure that the conditions for freedom are truly met, and maintained in a ongoing sense. This would be well justified, because if the conditions for freedom aren't there, abstract talk about the principle of Equal Moral Agency would be effectively useless too.

The Fault in the Right: Why Worthy Ideals Lead to Bad Politics

The devil is in the detail, or more accurately, in the incentive structure

Welcome to The Fault in the Right, a new series where I will examine where I think the faults lie within the contemporary Western political right, from the perspective of someone who agrees with the arguments of the right, or at least the premise of some of those arguments, at least some of the time. I think this kind of perspective is sorely needed in the media: while there is plenty of criticism of the left from people who are themselves liberals or leftists, most of the criticism of the right out there is from people who vehemently disagree with the worldview of the right, in a fundamental way. A lot of it is therefore either ideological disagreement, or bad faith attacks. Also, while there are some 'Never Trump conservatives' who critique Trump and the MAGA movement, their focus is on the particular differences between Trumpism and the previous iteration of the Republican Party, and they never seem to critique long-standing problems within the right that have also plagued the old establishment. In summary, the left critiques the right as a whole, but in a 'burn it all down' way, while Never Trumpers critique only Trumpism, but avoid talking about problems that plague the rest of the right too. There is a clear gap here that needs to be filled, with something akin to liberal anti-wokeism, but for the right.

On the surface, different iterations of the right have championed different ideals, that I could get on board with on the surface. The right of the 1990s and the 2000s, when I was growing up, championed family values, a healthier media and culture, and a culture of personal responsibility. I could certainly get behind these ideals. However, in practice, it was all about government control and authoritarian measures, which I just couldn't accept. By the time I was in college, the right had descended into championing the Iraq War, the wider 'War on Terror', restricting civil liberties, and banning gay marriage everywhere. Their authoritarian tendencies were on full display. Later on, during the Tea Party era, libertarian ideas became more popular, which I found very encouraging, but then, they had to share a platform with conspiracy theories, which I found very frustrating. Still later on, Trump, for all his faults, did appear to move the right away from both religious authoritarianism and the forever wars, thus resolving the two biggest issues I had with the right a decade earlier. However, the religious right came back with a vengeance soon after, and nowadays Trump himself is saying that we need a religious revival, while all the LGBT outreach that characterized his previous two campaigns seem to have disappeared quietly. It appears that the religious right has won out again under Trump's leadership, and they are even openly demanding that he embrace a national abortion ban. Even in the UK, where under the leadership of former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron it looked like there was a chance that a new, forward-looking conservatism could take hold, things rapidly turned reactionary after Brexit, and now there are concerns that Nigel Farage and his far-right Reform Party could outperform the Tories and effectively become the biggest opposition to the new Labour government. In short, the right has championed many worthy ideals that the left just won't talk about, but it all seems to end with reactionism and authoritarianism.

Not only is right-wing politics like this, right-wing influencers and public figures also bring this kind of disappointment about in the cultural sphere, because politics is downstream from culture, and they desperately want to influence the culture. I have previously talked a lot about the hijacking of the anti-woke discourse by a small number of well organized and very well-paid influencers. (Judging by their employment in right-wing think tanks and media organizations and/or their Patreon earnings, all of them are definitely much richer than myself). Their coordinated promotion of one-sided, biased narratives have taken anti-wokeism from a very libertarian initial position (most anti-wokeists were free speech activists and/or atheists in the beginning) to a much more reactionary and authoritarian place, over the short space of a few years. This was basically the reason why the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), which showed so much promise initially, ultimately fell apart within less than three years.

The point is, I don't disagree with what the right is saying, overall, on a broad ideals basis. I do believe that society needs more individual freedom, that a free market economy is the best model for the West, that families are the fundamental building blocks of society, that radical change based on abstract ideas is not a good idea, and that an ordered liberty is the best guarantee of freedom, because when order breaks down, nobody actually has any freedom. However, the devil is in the detail, and in the execution, many right-wing policies are unfair, ineffective, or even downright harmful, in that they make people less happy unnecessarily, or that they lead to deleterious consequences down the road (particularly in the case of climate change). This is not caused by incompetence, but rather by the structural incentives built into the right's composition. For example, with the religious right accounting for such a big part of the right, in terms of voters, politicians and money alike, there is very little room to treat LGBT issues fairly, or to respect the pro-choice argument from a genuine pro-freedom point of view. Also, with the fossil fuel lobby being such a vested interest within the right, there is no room for pro-climate policies. The disconnect between the right's stated ideals and its actual policies give rise to the need for bad faith arguments, like how most LGBT people are 'woke activists' and thus the right's enemy (clearly untrue and unfair), or how climate change is a hoax or at least scientifically unproven (even more untrue). This is why there is a whole industry of right-aligned spin doctors out there. It is also why Millennials, my generation, have grown up with a strong distrust of the right generally, and are not moving right at the same rate as previous generations in our 30s and 40s. Those who want to believe it's only about home ownership are just not willing to face the truth.

I believe the aforementioned problem can only be exposed by someone who is sort of sympathetic to the right's stated aims in many areas, but see through the mismatch between those stated aims and the actual policies embraced by the right. In particular, we need to pick apart the words of the spin doctors who attempt to paper over this mismatch, in the service of vested interests. Just like the anti-woke movement exposed the left's unsound ideological obsessions, we need to expose the right's distorted incentive structure, and the distorted results it produces. And just like with wokeness, only those who actually share some common ground with the right in the first place would be well positioned to expose its faults.

Why Allowing More Freedom is Generally the Morally Better Choice

Individual liberty is justified because morality can be improved

Over the years, I have illustrated why values like free speech, free expression and freedom of conscience are important in multiple ways. However, what I call the 'competitive morality' case for freedom might yet be the most important reason why freedom is important to maintain. Given both the left and the right have become increasingly disrespectful towards long-standing norms that safeguard freedom in recent years, I think this is a message people across the Western world really need to hear right now.

Basically, history has shown us that things can be done better. The way we do things today is much improved compared with back in the middle ages, or even during the industrial revolution, for example. While improvements in material conditions, methods of production and technology are most often celebrated, morality has also been improving over the generations. While things are still far from perfect, morality has overall been objectively improving over the centuries. We don't allow slavery, the torture of prisoners, and duels to the death anymore, for example. Given this history, there is every reason to believe that morality can continue to improve into the future.

The main drivers of improvement are innovation and competition. This is clear to see when we are talking about technology. However, it also applies to matters of morality. If everyone just accepted slavery as part of life, it would never have been abolished. This demonstrates the importance of allowing enough freedom for innovation. On the other hand, if the anti-slavery message wasn't able to compete with those arguing for the then-status quo on an equal footing, it might not have won out, despite being objectively more sound. This demonstrates the importance of maintaining a fair playing field in the marketplace of ideas. Both of the aforementioned objectives would require free speech, free expression and freedom of conscience. It is freedom that both allows innovation, and allows fair competition in the marketplace of ideas. Therefore, ultimately it is freedom that allows morality to improve over time.

Looking at history would confirm this theory. Societies that were more free and open generated more improvements in morality. Even though the freedom to experiment might sometimes lead to errors too, overall speaking, allowing this freedom is worthwhile in the end, especially in light of the resulting improvements being able to benefit many generations to come. This is why, looking at it from a broad picture scale, allowing more freedom is objectively more moral. It is proven by both history and logic. I think we should take this into account when assessing political options, for example when voting. I believe that, generally speaking, supporting choices that are overall orientated towards more freedom, as well as punishing politicians that actively advocate for less freedom, is generally correct as a principle.

We Need to Talk About the Red Pill Fallacy

It is driving political extremism in both directions

If you have been paying attention to the political discourse in the past ten years, chances are that you would have heard of the 'red pill' metaphor at some point. This metaphor came from the 1990s movie The Matrix, where the main character Neo is given the choice of swallowing a red pill or a blue pill. Take the red pill, and he would find out the truth about the world he was living in. Take the blue pill, and he would remain blissfully ignorant. Of course, Neo took the red pill, as you would expect. Simply speaking, being 'red pilled' has become a metaphor for learning about 'truths' about society and politics that most people are blissfully unaware of. While this metaphor has been particularly prevalent in men's rights circles, it has also been used in other, unrelated contexts too.

The problem with the 'red pill' metaphor is that it is designed to shut down critical thinking, because the 'choice' has been put in a way that makes it basically unrejectable. If the red pill, or whatever is presented as the 'red pill' as a metaphor, represents the truth, and rejecting it represents choosing to be blissfully ignorant, then it becomes very difficult to reject the red pill, or whatever it represents. This is because nobody would choose to remain ignorant when they can know the truth. However, if we put our critical thinking back on, we would question what exactly is in the red pill being presented to us. Does it really lead us to the truth or not? What if, instead, it contains a mind virus that would infect us if we take it? After all, being deceptive is a large part of how viruses and other malware can spread on the internet. If somebody wanted to spread a mind virus among the population, we would expect them to use deceptive means to get as many minds infected as possible, just like people who design computer viruses. Real life observations do point to the 'red pill' meme being used to spread what I would consider to be mind viruses. The concept of red pilling has been a gateway towards conspiracy theories, and even far-right politics in some cases.

While explicit use of the 'red pill' meme is mostly restricted to the political right, the left also does something very similar, even if they do not use the same language. I would argue that the basic premise of postmodernism and critical theory is very similar to red pill thinking. Just like the red pill, postmodern critical theory presents its model of intersecting and interlocking systems of oppression as unfalsifiable and unrejectable. It is unfalsifiable because it rejects challenge by objective evidence, justified on the postmodern view that discourse is about power struggles rather than about the truth. It is unrejectable because those who reject this model are painted as anti-social justice supporters of oppression. This allows those who believe in the model to reject, with a broad brush, any criticisms of the model. They, and they alone, are always right about the way society is, and what is required for social justice, even if objective evidence can be presented to demonstrate otherwise.

As many people have pointed out, theories that are basically unfalsifiable should be met with skepticism. This is more so the case if the theory is also presented in a way that makes it difficult to reject. Faced with such a theory, we are well justified to be wary of an agenda behind the push. We need to seriously ask, who is pushing these 'red pills', and what their ultimate agenda is. In most cases, what we uncover isn't going to be pretty. I can only hope that more people begin to realize this.