Your Freedom is Actually My Freedom

Hey fellow readers, I finally remembered my account password. For real though, college application has placed quite the workload on me, but now I finally have time to write. Sorry for the wait, enjoy!

“Your freedom is actually my freedom,” I said to my subjects in Crusader Kings III. In my defense, it is hard not extorting people when you lack the funds to fend off Genghis Khan as the Despot of Armenia.

The statement is meant as irony, and it would be hard to imagine someone actually saying this seriously… Or so you thought.

Isaiah Berlin, in his speech “Two Concepts of Liberty,” claimed that some people actually did argue this. He differentiated between two types of liberty:

• negative liberty — the liberty to act unobstructed by others, and

• positive liberty — the liberty to act solely based on my own agency (for me to be my own master).

  
  

Berlin thinks there is nothing inherently wrong with the first, but he argues that the second—positive liberty—inherently leads to the statement: “your freedom is ACTUALLY my freedom.”

He argues that positive liberty involves two opposing selves: one autonomous “real self” that is free, and an empirical self that is dominated by bounded ideologies, desires, illusions—whatever actually makes decisions for me. The problem lies exactly in this gap between the selves: the real self can be conceived as something wider than the empirical self—a church, a nation, a party. This makes the “real self” open to definition by others. Someone could define your real self as anything he wants, and it would still be permitted under the conception of positive liberty. Then any leader could define your real self in ways that contradict your real interests—real salvation is extreme abstinence, authentic self-control is pure ethnic cleansing, real freedom comes from real oppression.

Think of fascism: the “real self” for fascists is envisioned as a race, a party, or a nation, embodied in a specific leader (Hitler as savior of the German race, for example), producing tyrannical rule.

Under the framework of positive liberty, a charismatic despot can easily declare your freedom to be x, and if he is charismatic enough, he can just as easily declare your freedom to be his freedom. It’s just like personality cults: only if Stalin is able to exercise the party’s power freely can we truly be free from capitalists/Nazis.

Therefore, Berlin argues, we should prefer negative freedom, for it does not permit such things to happen: it is defined in strict, real interests and thus cannot be redefined by charismatic despots. More importantly, its definition concerns actions—framing freedom purely in “what is permitted”—which opens the way for us to pinpoint more material hindrances, real political structures, to freedom itself (systematic discrimination, for example).

However, I see Berlin’s alternative—negative freedom—as just as dangerous as positive freedom for the same reason: any despot could come and redefine it for their own goals.

Take an example: it was quite intuitive for people to interpret Berlin as arguing for libertarianism—even his colleagues accused him of being against his previous position, liberalism—which is far from the case! Berlin’s actual intent was to defend liberalism, which he and others clarified in another later paper.

Funny thing how the “specifically material” criteria for freedom led to confusion. Indeed, to frame freedom purely in “what is permitted” makes it equally open to definition by others. Once you talk about what is permitted, you inevitably have to accuse someone or something of hindering people’s actions—and this is very much up for grabs. The libertarian can say it is the government and its regulation; the liberal can say it is economic inequality; the Marxist can say it is the capitalists; the fascist can say it is a certain race of people.

Now the stage for the charismatic despot is set: by accusing x of preventing the people from enjoying negative liberty, they can rally people behind them and claim power. A “libertarian” despot might accuse the government of taking permissible liberties (such as taxes) away from the people to hide his true intentions—bringing power to his big corporations and ushering in a kleptocracy.

Since both forms of liberty contain easy paths toward despotism, it seems the problem is less with the definition of liberty and more with something else. What’s really at play here is a monopoly of voice: to spoil both positive and negative liberty, you need a charismatic villain who can convince people to rally behind their ideas. So what Berlin has shown us is not the danger of definitions, but the danger of an imbalance of voices.