Freedom Without Commitment To The Common Good is Just Half-Witted Anarchy

This common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all. — Frederic Bastiat-

In her seminal essay Anarchism: What It Really Stands For, Emma Goldman defines the social philosophy as:

“The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.” (2)

In this essay, Goldman goes on to lay out a truly existential argument about how once the individual concludes that the concepts of God, the State, and society are figments of man’s petulant need to create an authority figure for comfort from the forces of nature beyond our control, she establishes the individual as the heart of what she calls, “The essence of social life.”

Government, she argues, “Is necessary ONLY to maintain or protect property and monopoly. It has proven efficient in that function only.” She quotes Emerson, who wrote:

“‘All government in essence is tyranny.‘ It matters not whether it is government by divine right or majority rule. In every instance its aim is the absolute subordination of the individual.” (5)

Up to this point, Goldman embodies the very best of American rugged individualism, but it is this next statement that undoes the argument when applied to the middle of a global pandemic that requires a communal response:

“Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only ‘order’ that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests.”(7)

Full stop.

What happens when that solidarity of interest involves a community coming together to refrain from all activity that involves human beings congregating together in common space? The needs of the individual supersede the laws of man in the case of a global pandemic because they threaten the social foundation upon which those laws were established, but their relationship is circular.

Individual citizens taking steps to safely distance and wear protective equipment when near each other in public space is both a measure of individual liberty and the common good. This is what Goldman refers to as this solidarity of interests, applied in every form of social religion from Communism, through Democracy, to Totalitarianism, all the way to Anarchism. And like the beginning and end of tracing a circle, though distanced in drawing time, they are very close to one another in the arc. One extreme is very close to another in nature and position.

But it’s the Common Good we’re discussing here, the true common good, meaning that which we hold common together regardless of who we are, where we come from, or how many we represent, one or ten billion. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines the Common Good as:

“Those facilities — whether material, cultural or institutional — that the members of a community provide to all members in order to fulfill a relational obligation they all have to care for certain interests that they have in common.”

And make no mistake about this, we each and all hold the need to stay alive in common; it is quite literally the prime directive of the purpose of human civilization, coming even before the language which allows our generational knowledge to transcend the illicit death of mortal lifetimes.

COVID-19, from what we know of it as of this writing, is spread from human to human when close to one another, hanging in the air after we breathe like an invisible web of plague. This situation is compounded in complexity because some humans become infected but do not suffer while becoming unknowing disease carriers. They breathe and someone susceptible walks through it and it might be game over. Human beings are infecting each other with our very presence and we must minimize interactions with one another until the virus has run its course.

And on The Real tip here, isn’t it time we all just gave each other a little fucking space for a while? A little dignity in time? Just to catch our breath for a bit? But I digress.

To mitigate the worst scenario from this virus, Americans do not need to act to do something, but rather refrain from acting and this is not a muscle our culture flexes very easily, if ever. But forcing refrain from behavior is the function of the law when it’s in balance with justice. Preventing citizens from murdering, robbing, raping, and assaulting one another, and punishing them with equal measures, is the essence of justice when it’s working properly.

Consider the following argument from Frederic Bastiat’s short masterpiece The Law: The Classic Blueprint For A Just Society, while excusing the masculine pronouns; this was written for a different reading audience, but also for we who read it now.

If every person has the right to defend — even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — it’s reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups. Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise.” (Bastiat, 2)

Preventing people from killing one another is a primary tenet of lawful justice and when we apply this standard to a State government choosing to forbid gathering in business and public spaces without proper distancing measures and fashion protections so they might lower the rate of infection, the standard of civic order holds firm. This is justice measured to the effect of the Common Good.

Consider that when civic leaders wanted to close the bathhouses during the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis (because they had been identified as a key hotspot of viral transmission), many in the Gay community reacted with a similar response of outrage and protest, sans carrying high powered assault weapons into government buildings.

Being outraged is not the primary problem. We should all be outraged and how egregiously our government has become corrupted, unbalanced, and is by every measure ceasing to operate for the common good of anyone but the few heaviest holders of wealth, many of them lacking the empathy or historical foresight of their own duty to the Common Good. All many of them seem to understand is the naked obsession of the squirrel paired the lust of the lion, a scenario that has become cancerous and deadly.

Goldman wrote her essays long before the atomic bomb was dropped on a city and before thermonuclear weapons were developed that will wipe out all life on the planet in one exchange. Anarchy isn’t viable any longer because all humans are under threats that are outside our individual and small group choices to impact. But the commitment to the Common Good that Goldman’s view of Anarchy also includes is still viable.

In my interpretation of Goldman’s view, anarchy argues that no law is just because all governments are tyrannical by nature and as Kanye rapped, “Well, that’s a hell of a way to start a conversation.” When it comes to the truly deluded amongst starry-eyed armchair philosophers, the anarchists are the elite of the Unarguables, meaning you’ll never win until you take their point of view. They start from a philosophical assumption that is so counterintuitive and so counterproductive that it essentially eliminates them from the conversation about social justice altogether. But at least within the principle of Anarchy, there is a small redeeming element of What’s best for all of us … Consider the almost elegant argument that Goldman makes in the same text, so perfectly summarized in the quote that a young Jackson Teller finds written on a concrete wall when he follows directions in his father’s memoirs during season 1 of Sons of Anarchy:

Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations. (8)

The first necessity of life is to stay alive. Home Sapiens Sapiens has managed to stay alive as a species through thousands of years of population growth and harsh environmental challenges because we have banded together under a common purpose, common good, common goals. Now, more than ever, we must rely on clear language to define that common good and claiming freedom without being committed to that purpose is just flying blind into a brick wall.