From the White-PillBox: Part 19
The liberty movement has something even physics does not yet have: a Unified Theory, or at least, a clear unifying principle.
When anarchists and libertarians discuss what they hope to achieve, they often appear to be all over the map. To some this is discouraging because the movement seems disjointed. Everyone is doing what they personally want to do, based on what they consider to be priority.
They worry the movement cannot make headway because it is not unified 1.
We have to look under the surface for a unifying principle
True, as freedom advocates we have a host of individualized strategies. But it turns out these are aspects of a common fundamental principle. They are like facets of a diamond; each is a perspective of the same underlying object.
This principle is often overshadowed, but understandably so. Conversations are typically focused on the details: how we direct our particular efforts (strategies) to achieve desired outcomes (goals). But it is easy to uncover a unifying principle when we properly examine our efforts.
Strategies
Strategies to advance liberty are chosen individually, and are highly varied: promoting home schooling; working to repeal drug laws; seeking to have the State disengage from foreign wars; producing social media content that consistently delegitimizes the State; and so on. Some of us are less issue-oriented, more high-level: leveraging politics to spread the philosophical ideas of liberty, or conversely, encouraging others to shun politics altogether; promoting competing alternatives to State or corporate media functions; and so on.
We would not expect all our strategies to be identical, and therefore to appear unified.
To find the common thread among strategies, we ask why the strategy is employed at all…what is its goal?
The Goal
At least for anarchists, there is a simple and straightforward goal: a stateless society 2. That is, a culture free of all State intrusion and influence. Even many libertarians who may not identify as anarchists share this goal as an ideal 3.
So the first part of our White Pill is the fact that we share a goal expressed as a relatively simple concept: a free society. Such a culture sees as illegitimate any person or group that violates the Non-Aggression Principle (it is wrong to initiate aggression against the person or property of others). A culture that has no place for the State.
But why is that the goal?
In a world dominated by statist thinking, it is wise to have a good answer to the question “why favor a free society?”. The answer of course is to maximize peaceful human interactions and human prosperity.
It is here we uncover a close relationship between:
The philosophy/economics of liberty, and
Their real-world results: human peace and material well-being.
Something binds these important ideas, making our goal realizable. They are bound by the unifying principle prized by virtually all freedom lovers:
The primacy of the consent of each person over their body and property
Consent
This is the most elegant of our principles; it is not only simple to grasp, but lies at the root of libertarian thinking.
For a person to be considered free, they must have freedom over their ability to consent.
But coupled with consent are property rights, which define the scope of consent.
Private property rights
A person’s consent is both defined and delimited by ownership.
A person owns their body, and therefore only they (and no one else) may give consent for its use. Similarly, only the owner of property (and no one else) may give consent for its use4.
The real White Pill
Consent and property rights are essentially the North Stars of libertarianism. Examine almost any forum that promotes libertarian thinking (essays, books, podcasts, private discussions, etc.) and you can find the unifying threads of consent and property as the touchstones.
Regardless of what strategies we employ, our unifying principle elegantly grounds them. Whatever the immediate goal may be, it ties seamlessly to the consent of each person over their body and property.
An especially potent White Pill when viewed from the perspective of the uninitiated.
Most encouraging of all: the unifying principle of consent over one’s property perfectly describes the natural intuition of virtually everyone, at least as it pertains to their day-to-day lives.
It is not only a unifying principle for freedom lovers: it unifies almost everyone.
The common person highly values the importance of consent and property: as lessons taught to children from the earliest of ages, and as values they live by (and expect others to live by) each and every day.
The very words “consent” and “consensual” are sensed as a positive, through and through. That which is consensual appeals to our deep moral sensibilities. And its opposite, non-consensual, is sensed as deeply negative: it conveys moral offense.
And it is a White Pill we can dispense
In our attempts to persuade others, we rarely think to leverage our unifying principle. This is an unfortunate waste of a powerful tool.
No matter how detailed or issue-oriented our topic, there is almost always an opportunity to draw our audience’s attention to its connection to consent. As we well know, they are not often fully persuaded by our detailed arguments. But when we show how our position honors consent (and the opposing position is non-consensual), we give our audience something to ponder.
We recruit their own inner moral sense to help persuade them, generally long after the discussion has ended.
It is truly a solid White Pill, that a philosophy can have a simple unifying fundamental principle, which at the same time serves as an indisputable moral selling point.
Of course, in one sense there is consistency: advocates of liberty practice what they preach. They value freedom of choice. To that end, their particular form of activism is an individual choice. And they respect the freedom of others to choose their own methods to support liberty.
Often milestones are represented as goals. But this is accurate only insofar as they represent “steps in the right direction”. Replacing public schools with voluntary alternatives, for example, may be expressed as a goal. But if that was achieved, it is unlikely its advocate would consider the work of liberty as completed. The same could be said of abolishing the IRS, the Fed, drug laws and so on.
Such steps are only a few of all the State functions that would need to end. The overarching goal of a stateless society is achieved once all State functions are eliminated, and the culture would not hold as legitimate any person or group that violates the NAP.
Some advocate a watered-down version of this. They believe a stateless society is either not achievable, or not achievable in a reasonable time frame. Therefore, they want a State whose powers are microscopic compared to today. And they would wish for a high number of such States, so as to disburse power and influence. They expect that having many minimal States would lead to differences that would attract populations based on preference.
However, the issue is slowly becoming stark and clear: the ideas of anarchism are slowly spreading into the culture, even as the State grows larger and more centralized. Half-measures (such as widespread minarchist States) seem less and less likely to happen. Indeed, it is disingenuous to label anarchism as unachievable while advocating solutions that are highly implausible.
The issue is comparable to the slavery-abolition discussions of the early 1800’s. They often included incremental “solutions” to slavery (partial abolition; moving former slaves to other countries, etc.). The pure immorality of slavery needed to work its way into mainstream debates. Eventually half-measures were dispensed with, and outright abolition was the only morally acceptable position.
Sometimes we are challenged by arguments regarding the ability to consent. Children, as well as people with severe mental limitations or illnesses, cannot give meaningful consent. But this challenge does not undermine libertarian thinking. First, because virtually all libertarians already agree that people who cannot give meaningful consent would typically have a mature adult, such as a parent, acting in a guardianship capacity. Secondly, because any healthy culture, libertarian or not, will recognize this limitation on the scope of consent, and make allowances for it.