From the earliest gathering of people in communities, people built walls as defense against enemies. These walls also produced a cohesion within their boundaries. Within the walls, all the elements necessary for a city to function, like butchers, bakers, garbagemen, carpenters, farmers, men and women producing children, repairmen, governors, etc., emerged to fill the needs of the community.
Unbeknownst to these city dwellers, their structure and organization were analogous to the microscopic plant cell, the smallest most basic life form that can reproduce. The plant cell has a wall and contained within this wall are all the elements needed for it to survive and reproduce itself. It is filled with a fluid cytoplasm which holds the nucleus and its hereditary characteristics and various particles which produce nutrients, carry waste from the cell, repair the cell, defend the cell against enemy toxins and bacteria. If the cell wall is breached or bursts from excess fluid, the cell dies immediately.
The cell also communicates with the rest of the cells within the organism to relay needs of its various cells. Thus it is vital that the cell maintain its sovereignty and individuality and at the same time communicate with other parts of the organism to survive and reproduce. The cell’s functions and structure could provide a model for the proper balance between the sovereign individual and the community in which he lives or sovereign nations to participate in the global community, that is vital for societies to function, to survive and to thrive.
America has been a successful society to this point because of the right of individuals to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our founding fathers spent many hours of debate on how powerful the central government should be and how much power states should have. They got it wrong the first time and had to go back to the drawing board to strengthen the federal government. But they also knew they must protect the rights of the individual from the power of the government. Thus we have the amendments to the Constitution that assure many individual rights like freedom of speech, religion, freedom of the press, freedom to peacefully protest, the right to vote, to bear arms, etc. The founding fathers looked for a viable balance between the power of the individual and the institutions that govern him.
If institutions are or become more and more controlling and invasive, the people begin to feel they are losing their ability to control their lives. This leads to feelings of impotence and an anger grows from that loss of control. I think we are beginning to see that in our current political atmosphere.
Politicians arguing for return of power to the states and local communities is an effort to return control to individuals. Politicians arguing for more central government think a few people in power will know better how to operate a society than the people. But that control will sublimate the sovereignty of individuals even more and eventually there will be a straw that breaks their backs and they will rebel. The idea that people in their local communities should have a voice in their governing requires that governments and bureaucracies actually trust people to make good decisions. All people will not always make good decisions but in the aggregate, society will move in the right direction. If bureaucracies make wrong decisions for the whole society, the results could be catastrophic.
Many people have this sense of impotence and attendant anger when they must deal with bureaucracies like the telephone company, the government, home owners associations, cable companies, healthcare agencies. People do not feel they have control over their daily lives and they feel impotent and then angry.
This argument not only applies to political structures but to economic structures as well. Free market capitalism relies on individuals making free choices that promote their own best interests. The essence of the argument is that 300 million people making hundreds of choices a day about what is best for them will produce better and more efficient results than a few elite bureaucrats in the central government can make for all the people.
For example, everyday people make economic choices. They buy a Big Mac, a Toyota, Cheerios, poetry books, home repair, etc. Many of these choices immediately are recorded in some inventory of what people are buying and not buying. Companies then adjust their products and services to reflect customer preferences in real time. Free enterprise tends to keep up with the changing needs of individual consumers. A central government, on the other hand, must plan for several years out on facts perhaps no longer relevant. They almost always will be behind the curve and less responsive to people’s needs. In fact, sometimes the government makes decisions in the face of information known, by putting pressure on electric vehicles, for example, when evidence suggests many consumers have other preferences.
In nature, the plant doesn’t make decisions about the needs of the cell, but individual cells convey signals about what other cells in the plant need from signals from other cells. Nature begins at the bottom, influencing up and out. Individual trees in the forest can detect when a certain insect is attacking it and the involved cells send signals to other cells to produce a toxin for that insect and also can warn other trees nearby of the danger. But in the end it is about balance. The tree must defend itself from dangers, but it must also care about its neighbors in the forest because they are interdependent for such things as water, light, nutrients, shelter, etc. Individuals can be helped by living in a community and a community is better if its individual citizens are free to pursue their ambitions as long as they respect the boundaries of others pursuing their goals or not infringing on their freedoms.
The forest also needs a variety of trees because different trees provide different needs of the forest and its creatures, just as there are different kinds of cells in organisms serving specific functions. Some trees produce acorns or nuts, some provide protection, some supply water or sugar, but variety also protects the survival of the forest. Should one species succumb to disease, there will be other species to maintain the forest. It is vital to the health of the forest to have diversity so one species doesn’t dominate.
In a recent article in the New York Times (November 18,2018) a panel discussed genes and robotics. One robotic engineer, Catherine Mohr, told about a study that looked at the characteristics of people who withstood tragedy. “And what seemed to be most important were meaning, mastery, and autonomy—feeling that there is some kind of meaning associated with things you do, working toward acquisition of new skills and the ability to make choices for yourself.” These are things that are often lacking in societies that are ruled from the top down with a strong government or dictator.
The thesis of the book The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel is that true innovation comes from the individual being free to explore all avenues of discovery. Controlling bodies actually stifle innovation. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison were just individuals tinkering in their garages or dorm rooms.
When the communist leaders in the Soviet Union attempted their five-year plans by a central government, they had rows and rows of work boots left on shelves and bread lines around the block. The central government had subsumed individual choice in personal and economic matters. The directives by the central government were not constructive for the people or for the economy. Eventually the Soviets allowed people to grow some of their own food for themselves and people’s lives improved.
In cults, also, the sovereignty of the individual is sublimated to the group. A most publicized example of this was the Jim Jones cult, a communist cult in which the individual was to sublimate his individual desires to that of the community. When the cult came under scrutiny from the U.S. government, many members willingly and knowingly drank a mixture of Flavor-aid, cyanide and valium. Over 900 men, women and children died at the direction of their cult leader, Jim Jones. From this tragedy comes the phrase “Drinking the Kool-aid,” referencing those who follow blindly leaders who have convinced them of a cause worth the sacrifice of their own individuality and lives.
On a larger scale, ideologies such as Nazism and ISIS also ask their adherents to forego their individual sovereignty for the vision of society put forth usually by some charismatic or ruthless leader who does not give up his rights or power as an individual. Many dictatorships are led by ruthless and charismatic men whose goals would be at risk if individuals had influence or the ability to act in their own self interest. Leaders of cults and dictatorships must have complete control.
Our recent wars in Viet Nam, Iraq, Korea and the uprisings in Hungary and Poland and other countries are at their core about the submission of the individual to the community or the government. All wars have not been won yet for the individual, but we must see it as our vision that all innocent people should be free to pursue their objectives, respecting those boundaries of other individuals pursuing their goals. We must not allow our own balance of individual rights and liberties succumb to an over-powerful central government. it is better to have ideas come from many sources and compete for acceptance, instead of having some authoritarian’s ideas forced on a whole populace or a whole world.
Our policies toward authoritarian, despotic countries should be directed at education, individual rights and individual freedom. It is a war of ideas. We must encourage a better balance between individual rights and freedoms and the organizing structure of governing bodies. Instead of aiming guns at people to kill them, we should direct our ideas at people to persuade them.
Societies that work have a balance between individual liberty and the power of the governing bodies of the society. This balance of individual and community also applies to countries. On our globe, individual countries are defined by borders. They are sovereign nations but they cannot flourish unless they communicate and interact with other countries for their mutual interests. We see countries agreeing to mutual trade and protection because one country wants another country’s products or feels safer with agreements for mutual protection, often against a common threat. Free trade is similar to cells sending signals to other cells about what its needs are and cells have the infrastructure to transport water, hormones, nutrients, insulin and other vital substances to cells in other parts of the plant. All countries cannot produce all the products they want or need. A simple example of a mutual trade agreement is the United States buys coffee and bananas from South America because we don’t have a good climate for these crops and they buy our auto parts and chemicals. A free exchange of goods among countries can help every country flourish.
The role of good government is to protect the rights and liberties of individuals with laws that protect the individual, a system of justice that applies the laws to all individuals equally without bias, and to provide an infrastructure for commerce and communication to serve the needs of commerce and residents. It must provide security for its people because freedom is diminished if people are not safe. Cells serve these needs for its organism, but the cell must retain its integrity, its sovereignty in order to fulfill its purpose to make its plant survive and flourish, just as individuals and nations must be sovereign yet interact with their communities or other sovereign nations to achieve mutual goals to survive and flourish.
Commenti