The ethical norms around the concept of individual freedom were perhaps best articulated by the liberal German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, who argued that
Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.
Despite the gendered language of his day, von Humboldt’s critique of autocracy remains true of the free choice of all individuals. Freedom, he might have argued further, is the critical precondition for personal growth and self-actualisation–developing our own independent value systems through reflection, introspection, and the resolution of past conflicts into insight to empower us moving forward.
The problem for those of us looking to remedy the pernicious ills of autocracy, of course, have always been the desire of some, on the one hand, to remove the rough edges of autocracy in the name of saving the principle, or, on the other, to make autocracy the core of the strategy to transcending itself. It should go without both strategies have proved remarkable failures.
Not least of the problems for those in pursuit of either of these strategies, arguably, is, in the first place, the fact that the liberal critique of political autocracy also extends into the economic sphere–not least in these days of transnational corporations and investment fund monoliths like Vanguard and Blackrock. Underwriting the economic autocracy of transnational corporations is the economic autocracy of class hierarchy.
In the political sphere, autocracy is an evil because it constitutes a illegitimate monopoly over power, one based on birthright. Under ‘equal personhood’ laws, for which no formal legal judgment was ever made, corporations enjoy immortal power on the basis of birthright: as legal persons, they can never die. The patently monopolistic tendencies of transnational corporations cannot be questioned or challenged, however, the more completely national governments are reduced to wholly-owned subsidiaries. This presents something of a quandry for those assuming national governments responsive to reformist political agendas.
In the second, political economy tells us that autocratic social relations of production are also autocratic social relations of reproduction. Advocates of autocracy as the solution to itself generally fail to note this fact in embodying it instead. In trying to be clever and weaponise ruling class monopolies over the means of violence in defense of class monopolies as the solution to class monopolies, they reproduce even more terrible versions of the problem.
We can see this well enough in the way deflecting responsibility for misrule follows the same performative logic of the ‘false dilemma.’ In the market capitalist sphere, the deflecting mentality can be summed up as, ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win.’ In the state capitalist sphere, the same turns up as ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win.’ In either case, the individual who dares think for themselves is sacrificed to the cause of autocrats reinventing themselves as solutions to problems of their own making by conflating doubt with aggression. Domestic abusers are notorious for about the same.
It is a notable feature of the economic autocracy of social and class hierarchies that they fall within the spectrum of the normal within a social order nominally opposed to constraints on the freedom of the individual. We live in a democracy, and yet speaking of social and class hierarchies is so taboo that even raising the topic for discussion triggers all of our authoritarian conditioning even against speaking its own name. Social and class hierarchies are positively sacred, personal boundaries not so much.
By contrast, defending the cause of the individual arguably requires acknowledging individual responsibilities to go with individual rights. This points to our first responsibility being arguably to reflect on and resolve our understanding of our collective past, as each of us must do as individuials, and so rise above the past instead of acting out on, and reproducing it, instead. If our past is dominated by a habit of trying to reconstruct autocratic harms as beneficial to its victims, we might start by rising above the mythology of altrustic outcomes from selfish means. Trickle-down economics is no more able to resolve the problems it creates than domestic abuse.
The difference between freedom and license, or privilege, after all, is the difference between doing what you want as long as you respect the equal rights of others, and doing whatever the fuck you feel like regardless of the consequences for others. We can’t try to diversity-wash racial autocracies with people from a wider demographic than the supremacists who founded them. We can’t make leopards change their spots. We can only really declare personal boundaries of the individual sacred, social and political hierarchies not so much, and make a choice not to become what we claim to oppose as an ongoing exercise in due diligence, if not becoming the living facts of a survivable future.
