As you all are probably familiar with, a lot of real unsavory types like to claim that some version of "maximizing personal freedom" is one of their core values, even if the things they actually support seem to contradict that.
Is personal liberty a good thing to have as a core value, and it's their interpretation that's wrong? Or is it something about the concept itself, where it sounds good but actually pursuing it leads to negative outcomes?
Alternatively, is it just a big empty signifier that can be used to support basically anything, i.e. it's impossible to meaningfully distinguish between correct and incorrect applications of the concept?
I like talking about liberty--i am an anarchist after all--. There's clearly something fundamentally different between the life of a slave and the life of a wage laborer. I'm happy to call that thing liberty.
But here's the thing, one of the main differences is that wage laborers are allowed to keep their consensual relationships--friends, family, even union membership.
The problem with libertarian and liberal politics is that they don't define liberty as something to do with relationships. To them, a person can be free on a deserted island. In fact, in some formations, the lonely yeoman is the peak of freedom.
So when they say they're maximizing liberty, they mean something very different than we (anarchists) do when we say the same words.
I swear they say liberty when they mean "alienation from any social obligations or duties".
If their idea of maximizing personal liberty doesn't begin with ending capitalism, stateless classless blah blah blah, post scarcity etc, you can just ignore them.
Personal liberty to do what? That's always the question not being asked. What exactly do you want the freedom to do?
I have a similar skepticism towards the idea of free speech. What ideas are you so desperate to promote? Some of us might not enjoy living with the consequences.
Personal liberty doesn't (shouldn't) exist. We live in a society and everything we do affects others, conceptualizing "liberty" as something personal is actively (and intentionally on the part of the people marketing it) harmful.
maxing personal liberty for oneself (in opposition to everyone else or discreet subsets) :geordi-no:
maxing personal liberty for all (in understanding everyone's social and material connections and dependencies) :geordi-yes:
if it is unqualified and the person talking is not An/Com, very likely means the first
very much a mindset of the 'one day I'll own this boot that is currently stomping my face' set
The term itself is poisoned by liberal guardrails and the resulting contradictions. The obvious socialist line is that it maximizes capital's freedom and conflates it with your own, so that you start thinking that it's liberty to work 70 hours a week or starve or die from exposure.
Anarchism arose from a more authentic exploration of the freedom of the individual and is consequently anticapitalist. I recommend reading widely in academic literature to get a good one-two punch of liberation logic and anticapitalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster
But a liberty monster.
:scared:
The liberty monster would be someone who uses their freedom to absorb all the freedom and prevent anyone else from having any - I'm thinking a landlord that owns all of the land and extracts rent for eternity.
All liberty is in tension with some other liberty, thus I think that as a concept it is incomplete to think of it in abstract terms - you have to quantify which liberty you're talking about, and conceptualize the entire system that it interacts with.
So an easy one for most people here is the freedom to own a house. Everyone should be able to have a house - but if a group of people have more houses than they can use and leverage that to extract rent from another group (and freeze a third group out of having housing altogether), that's bad. So restrict the liberty of people to have more houses than they need and extract rent, and then you end up with everyone being able to enjoy being housed.
But even if you give everyone a house there's still more questions to answer - what do you do when everyone wants the same house? What do you do if people want houses in fragile ecosystems? What do you do if they want houses far enough away from societal services that providing those to them is much more expensive than for everyone else? What do you do if people start using their houses in unintended ways, causing problems with no clear guilty party?
Every time society answers one of these questions it is putting restrictions on the liberty of home ownership, and if you make your moral position "maximizing personal liberty" then you really restrain your ability to account for these things.
Freedom is merely privilege extended, unless enjoyed by one and all.
Liberty is pure ideology unless you want to argue that the freedom to do something does not include freedom from the consequences of that action (in which case we already have complete personal liberty e.g the freedom to starve rather than work). If we try to argue that personal liberty includes not having to bear the consequences of our actions then it fundamentally does not work IRL because action begets reaction. For instance, if I take your wallet from you, you probably wouldn't like it and might retaliate somehow. Why do I not have the personal liberty to take things from you as I please?
Any interaction requires two distinct forces which effect eachother. Between people (in society) we invent laws and social norms to mediate this interaction and make it amenable to both parties. Adhering to these laws and social norms requires a degree of subordination in which one's personal liberty is lost to the collective interest. Private property is one such relation since it restricts our ability to take as we please. Market relations are another.
Maximising personal liberty, to them, means maximising the rights of property owners to do whatever. Hypothetically, if we were to say it, it would be an admission that property rights doesn't give people more freedom, but in fact restricts a lot of people's freedom.
But in terms of rhetoric they've kinda got that one and no one really talks like that.
To expand on that last point, one of the less-gross libertarians might say that capitalism is great because it maximizes personal liberty, and then I might say "no, that's ridiculous, it's completely destructive to personal liberty, and is therefore bad." My conclusion is right, but is there any way to prove the intermediate statement, "capitalism is destructive to personal liberty," to someone who doesn't already accept the conclusion?
Uhh. Depends, how receptive are they to acknowledging that all personal property in the present day started with someone murdering someone else and taking their land, and all personal property derives from those acts of coercive violence?
Cause if they accept that all personal property is taken and held by violence they might accept the basic premise of "property is theft" and that people who don't own property are being deprived of the opportunities that come from not have to do wage labor to not die.
