Freedom and Liberty
The words freedom and liberty are often used synonymously. This has historically been the case, and has been especially true within anarchist, liberal, and libertarian discourse. Indeed, I have also used them as synonyms, though I would now like to make a distinction between them. While this work is intended to make a strict and real delineation in concepts, the historical use of these terms—freedom and liberty— as synonyms relegates my argument to the context of this paper, and the definitions here used should not be projected back onto historical works retroactively, including my own (unless updated to suit these definitions), as if my distinction has been perennially pointed out and adhered to. Importantly, there has been no consistent distinction in this regard within the traditions from which I come, and this is not intended to serve as critique or criticism of others’ use of terms from within my tradition, but instead to address a different sense or condition of these terms, which may be found valuable for future discourse.
At some point, liberty came to take on the meaning of “taking license,” license here being understood as permission to transgress and indeed infringe upon the law. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this occurred by the 1550s, with the meaning of liberty being “unrestrained action, conduct, or expression,” and then “go beyond the bounds of propriety,” “privileges by grant,” and “a person's private land.” [1], [2] Freedom too, originally meaning “power of self-determination […] emancipation from slavery, deliverance” and “exemption from arbitrary or despotic control, civil liberty,” would come to mean “possession of particular privileges” around the same time.[3] This reflects a generalized attack on both concepts by Sophist means, a rhetorical change away from the original conception. Of course, long before these distinctions, the original meaning was not adhered to strongly anyway (as the prior existence of the state shows, its nature soon to be demonstrated), though we can see that there was an original meaning.
If we are to describe a situation in which one is free from hindrance by others, it would seem easy to describe this as either “freedom” or “liberty,” but only so far as we divorce the situation from the context in which it occurs and do not distinguish between the two as I will be doing. What is the nature of the hindrance? Hindrance from what? If one is being hindered from eating, this is much different from being hindered from poisoning another. So the content of the hindrance is of great importance if we are to define our terms objectively.
My own distinction, which prefers to here give the rhetoric of liberty up to the Sophists rather than freedom, functions to distinguish the older sense of both of these terms from their newer sense. That is, I will refer to the older, preferred sense of both liberty and freedom simply as freedom, the capacity to go about all benevolent things in an unhindered fashion, and will use liberty to refer to their newer sense, which corresponds to licentiousness, or “decadence.”
Freedom
I will herein refer to the word freedom as the ability to act without hindrance while performing lawful activities, those which adhere to the derived natural law. The derived natural law is the takeaway important to humanity after its learning of the natural laws or their consequences in aggregate, and can be summed up as “Do No Harm,” or “Harm None.”
The derived natural law reflects the Natural Order.
The Natural Order is one of Being and Becoming, Nature being Eternal with nonbeing having no substance within it. That which is, is, but that which is not, is not. Inherent to the Natural Order is the sempiternal flux of the clashing natural laws anchored in the twin tendencies of entropy and syntropy, the futile tendency to nothing and the inevitable one toward Something. In our Universe, there is Something instead of nothing.[4] Life’s uniqueness is the stuff of syntropy, the tendency toward Something rather than nothing, toward Being rather than nonbeing (the tendency to nonbeing and nothing is the opposite of life, that toward death and dying). Life is the process of Becoming within the greater Being, its evolution, so-called, being gradations of it; as such, its own nature is to will to continue its own existence and the existence of that which contributes to its being (its own longevity and fecundity). It can do so through predation or parasitism, through commensalism and muckrucking, or through mutualism and cooperation.
Mutualism is the most successful in contributing to flourishing, because it is win-win, and it has behind it the potential for concerted effort, or cooperation. Concerted effort must be organized by the meeting of the minds around a shared principle that serves the universal interests of the membership group organized around it. This has taken the form of the perennial statement of causing no harm to others, its perennial and universal nature discerning it as a derived natural law, that is, as customary recognition of the law as it arises from common sense of the conscience, and put into customary law.
The infringement of the natural law is a mala in se crime—a crime of malice— as all aggressions are. Acts of aggression can be objectively identified. They have often been mistakenly understood to be limited to physical actions, particularly actions such as assault and theft, robbery, burglary, etc., but must also be understood to include threats, extortion, exploitation, fraud, usury, slander, derogation, adultery, and deception. Any action which is done purposefully to cause harm to another—an initiatory act of violence—, or with disregard of harm to others, is an act of aggression and, by extension, a natural crime. Thus, one has freedom to eat, but not freedom to poison. This is the derived natural law.
Its presence as law separates it from mere custom or folkway by allowing for the legitimate exercise of violence against those who transgress upon and infringe it, thereby distinguishing defense from aggression. Custom more simply becomes customary law, that is, when violence becomes a legitimate means of enforcement, a recognized and sanctioned act of defense. Customary law typically converges across cultures on outlawing acts of violent aggression, showcasing it as a— however inconsistent and transgressed upon— naturally-emerging consensus. All societies outlaw murder.
Causing harm is causing entropy, the tendency to nonbeing and nothing. In restricting harm, the derived natural law reflects the tendency to being which motivates and animates life, and the greater Natural Order, Being itself, as preserved through defense against invasion.
“Do No Harm” is not a “natural law” in the way that the directly-discerned laws—those described strictly in their observed operations— of physics and biology are (which actually add complications to the derived natural law). Discerned laws are descriptive laws describing the interactions of the elements within the cycles of sempiternity, such as the laws of gravity or supply and demand, which detail by calculable method what the outcomes of certain actions may be. Derived natural laws are principles therefrom taken, and inferred directly from the operations of conscience, which suggest the best course of action to take in light of these consequences, and in light of one's moral concerns, thereby being objectively conducive to human flourishing. The difference of discerned and derived laws is as that of science and engineering. Engineering is natural, but has its own laws, which exist within the realm of engineering as applicable only to engineering processes, perhaps especially laws regarding the functioning of computers, which do not apply elsewhere and exist at times merely to provide instruction so as to reach preferred ends. These are not unnatural, but exist within Nature, though they result from physical laws put to use by the human conscience. The natural law, as law dictating human behavior, likewise serves the moral ends of humans, and is likewise derived from the interaction of discerned laws as they are given human purpose.
A derived natural law is an objective moral-ethical principle founded upon self-evidence and extrapolated lessons from the observations of nature with regard to the pursuit of human wellbeing. That is, the derived natural law is self-evident in the fact that, if the goal in mind is the preservation of life, that one should not harm life. “If you don’t want to harm life, don’t harm life” is self-evident in the very existence of the goal. That this comes natural to, and can be derived from, the naturally-occurring goal and the natural fact of conscience determines this law to be natural. It is, further, the result of accumulated moral wisdom, that of the consequences of causing or not causing harm to others. In other words, the derived law is a directive, a rule to follow, a moral imperative, compulsion, or popular taboo, the infringement of which being anathema, profane, obscene, and offensive, and likely to be reciprocated in escalation of violence (thereby establishing the matter as a social concern) if not inhibited. The derived law is, in fact, the prime directive, the most important or foundational of directives, and one upkept collectively for common benefit. It is recognition of a metaphysical reciprocity that dictates however loosely that “What goes around, comes around,” the Law of Reciprocity.
Common sense is subject to natural selection, and social norms of this sort are subject to memetic evolution, such that those norms that carry with them a net benefit will tend to proliferate as a matter of succession. By evolutionary standards, those societies that have the intelligence to adhere to norms that protect their members will tend to pass those memes along with their own success, such that both the memetic and genetic content—the valuable lesson and the capacity to adhere to it— will be favored together. Just the inkling of the notion is enough, if acted upon, to put the meme to the test, in this case a notion arising from the pursuit of self-preservation and the fellow-feeling of sympathy that comes natural to social creatures that allows for them to resonate around this notion. To the memory of the society which has benefited from such a meme, its origin will seem as mystical as it is preternatural in its immateriality, because arising from the common sense of its wielders, and so leaving no artifacts to derive its origin from directly beyond self-evidence, though nonetheless perennially being derived from the societal intuition’s meeting with experience.
As such, “Harm None” does not describe the consequences of infringement, as a discerned law may, but instead serves as a guiding principle so that those consequences, whatever their specifics may be, may be forgone. However, that things exist, and that it is in the nature of living things to will to persist is an observable fact of nature. That, with moral impulses that are natural to the individual, actions can be judged according to whether consequences suit those impulses or not also inheres in the fabric of Nature.
Other derived principles, such as the Cost Principle and the Law of Equal Freedom, for comparison, which caution us to set prices at cost and to limit social relations to those forms that preserve the freedom of others in order to preserve the more fundamental derived law, are likewise derived from discerned laws of economy and sociology, and likewise function to preserve human beings, in reflection of the Natural Order and the nature of human beings to preserve themselves. The Principle of Non-Aggression, however, often placed alongside these other principles, is a restatement of the derived law, which makes more clear the one-way nature of the Harm Principle; that it does not protect the aggressor, but allows for equivalent harm against those who would do harm.
Freedom is the unhindered capacity to do anything that does not cause harm, which does not infringe upon the derived natural law, “Harm None.”
Liberty
Liberty, on the other hand— and unlike freedom—, I will refer to as the ability to act without hindrance while performing unlawful, aggressive activities, to transgress upon the derived natural law in accordance with the discerned natural laws of pathology (the study of disease and degeneration). Whereas the derived natural law grants permission to engage in all non-aggressive activities, license is the blessing to do that which is otherwise unlawful, making the unlawful legal, and allowing for the utmost liberty. Legality regards the decrees of license and liberty. That which is legal is that which is given license by statute and so which follows state decree, while the illegal infringes state decree, such as by being unlicensed. Thus, one may naturally have the freedom to eat, but one must have license to poison, in which case it can be done legally, however unlawfully.
A state, the association establishing legalities, is defined, following the sociologist Max Weber, as a “monopoly on the legitimate use of force.” This means that it is an entity that uses legitimate force while others are disallowed. Legitimate— if considered naturally and objectively, rather than subjectively according to tradition, charisma, or legality, as Weber originally defined it, and for the sake of our own purpose— means “lawful.” That which is lawful is that which obeys the natural law, put into the derived principle “Harm None.” The unlawful infringes natural law. Because a state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, others may not utilize legitimate force against it (lest its monopoly status be broken). Its illegitimate uses of force, then, cannot be sustainably challenged by legitimate wielders of force outside of itself while it maintains it status as state. If the state engages in unlawful activity— aggression— lawful use of force must be unsuccessful and can be made illegal. Because the state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, it is by extension a monopoly on the illegitimate use of force, a monopoly on aggression, and is given license to aggress. By further extension, it can declare lawful things-- like the legitimate use of force by others-- to be illegal, and unlawful things-- like usury-- to be legal. The existence of a state is a scenario where acts of aggression may be committed by authorities, they having a monopoly on aggression.
Where the state finds its greatest legitimacy is where that which is legal corresponds to that which is natural, and finds— in general ignorance only— the color of legitimacy in legalisms that punish natural activities or reward natural crimes. Unlike limits on mala in se crime—crime according to nature, “malice in and of itself”—, which protect the freedoms to engage in all non-aggressive activities, mala prohibita prohibitions are a legal reflection of the whims of those who have been given license by the ignorance of the multitude and have the liberty to govern, these liberties themselves being mala in se pathogens.
The state’s liberties have been granted by the ignorance of the multitude in their acceptance of religious claims to Providence and Divine Right and of secular claims to election by the majority, both being, as exceptions to it, infringements of the otherwise absolute, derived law of nature, for to deceive others is to do harm, as is to threaten the violence of the majority if its whim goes unaccepted. These are cleromancies of deified fictions and deified majorities that serve to give original license to the government, those who steer the state. The license of the government is itself a farce. An individual who extends to another the empowerment to exercise rights on their behalf is the principal, from which the rights originate. A principal cannot give another license to do something which they themselves are forbidden from doing, cannot empower another with rights they themselves do not have. Thus, the claim that individuals can justly extend license to the state, in their conditions of ignorance and stupefaction, to do things they cannot themselves do—such as aggress upon and harm others— is farcical, and the idea that they cannot terminate their subscription to the services of the state, but that they must remain associates of the state, is absurd.
The state's monopoly status is contingent upon its being exclusionary, and, in particular, its having a ruling class, a class of people distinguished from others—government—, by claim to divine right or election or some other such hysteria, who establish rules others follow. In a contemporary oligarchic republic, this is the upper class at-large, composed of landlords, creditors, employers, and politicians (who serve their interests). Absent a ruling class-- whether by minority or majority--, a state cannot exist, anarchy then existing in its place.[5] Without license, granted by popular ignorance or by popular threat, the assaults, thefts, compulsions, etc. of governments would be widely known— much as the mafia— as mala in se crime, but governments instead serve to develop mala prohibita controls and to give license to others—privilege— by extension of their own, and this extends the realm of social domination to economic exploitation, the usuries of the economy—interest, rent, and profit—resting upon the aggressions of government.
In contrast to the natural law, which is fundamentally good in its pursuit of guarding the universal values of human flourishing, the state, anchored in licentiousness but claiming to bring justice, is fundamentally bad, or, to say the same, of a nominal essence. It is of nominal essence because we already have words for the real, licentious activities of the state, summed up by malice, aggression, license, and privilege, thus relegating the state’s idealized essence as a fiction. The state is bad because infringing on natural law, and because a lie, the stuff of nonbeing and nothing. The state, as such, does not really exist.
The common retort to this is that it must exist because if one infringes a legality and gets caught one faces the consequences. It is true one may face consequences, but this is no proof of the state being a natural fact. One can imagine a scenario in which one is forced to declare the material existence of a comic book hero like Spiderman. One may be surrounded by hysteria declaring the truth of Spiderman, such that it becomes insensible to declare otherwise, perhaps even dangerous, as if life were one big comic convention. But even if you declared under duress of threat that Spiderman was real, Spiderman would still not exist, being entirely nominal still. Thus, popularity and duress are not sound indicators of epistemological truth. Likewise, elections and claims to divine rights do not alchemize the criminal or absolve natural, mala in se criminality. Divine right and majority election does not change the real qualities of a criminal organization. Those who control others are aggressors and aggressors are naturally criminal.
The state, commonly understood, as justice-bringer, is a fiction. Entities called states do, in their legitimate use of lawful force, bring justice, but this is not their defining or essential characteristic, because justice can also be served by non-state actors. Thus, it is not in their capacity as states that they bring justice, but in their capacity as members of civil society, to the degree this exists. Again, the state is not defined by its legitimate use of force—which is capable of being wielded by non-states—, but by its monopoly, its aggression, which is its essential characteristic. The material reality is that the state is the criminal who goes unchecked due to the terror the crimes instill and the weight of the passions of its advocates. To repeat, the state, commonly understood, is a fiction, while the reality is that the state is a nominality that refers to what is in reality a mala in se criminal association, something that really does exist. The state is really a criminal association holding a monopoly on aggression, and is only nominally a justice-bringer in its capacity as state, any justice-bringing it does being in its capacity as a civil servant, independent of its capacity as state. A state is in fact the monopoly status of the most successful criminal organization, and in this respect is very real.
The Republican, the Pirate, and the Statist
Freedom is the way of the (small “r”) republican, a point of balance, liberty that disequilibrium common to the pirate and the governor.
The republican asks for a social order in which the law is applied across the board, without exception, a situation known as the Rule of Law, and, if serious in their dedication to Freedom, adheres to the philosophy of federalism, that government is limited in its sphere of actions by the spheres of the people. If even more enlightened, the republican asks that the people leave no vacuum to be filled by government at all, and instead to develop a republicanism of industry, the result being anarchy, the absence of government and rule by the natural Law of Equilibrium. In absence of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, all aggressions may instead be dealt with by the legitimate force of any or all. The absence of a monopoly on aggression—a condition known as anarchy— entails that no aggression is found successful in cornering the market of its activities, such that no criminal organization can claim a monopoly on aggression.[6] Still, the republican accepts that there are grades of Being, and that part of Becoming is accepting that the lower stages of societal development include the existence of government, something Proudhon, the father of anarchism, himself recognized under his Federative Principle.
Classical anarchists, such as Proudhon, were squarely in the republican camp, being adherents of the derived natural law, but neo-anarchists—namestealers of anarchism— have shifted more and more toward piracy and licentiousness, much as is at the heart of government, thereby distorting the good name of anarchism. Whereas the classical anarchists agreed that freedom objectively demands access to natural resources or the value thereof and the lack of hindrance in performing one’s non-aggressive activities, the neo-anarchists, whether capitalist or communist, have convened in their demands for special privileges, whether those be the privilege of private property or administered public welfare to preferred identity groups. Liberty is what unites the libertarian communist and the capitalist— each wishing to transgress upon Equal Freedom and the Law of Equilibrium in their own way, one in the name of equality and the other in the name of individual autonomy— and statists of all varieties, differing materially only in the success they have seen in the same pursuits. In the revised name of “anarchy,” pirates profess the absolutism of private property, the piety of the libertine identarian, and the demands of ochlocracy. Piracy allows each to go about their preferred transgressions on reciprocity, and for the rule of majoritarian mediocrity or minoritarian nobility, even if limited in their impact by wider recognition of natural laws. Should they find enough success, however, they would become the state themselves.
Disequilibrium on all sides is a drag upon the operation and inevitable fulfillment of the Law of Equilibrium, its absurdity resulting in the myriad forms of human suffering, causing both dearth and glut, each being divorced from natural abundance. Contrary to the idea that anarchism, in its opposition to state and government, must stand in opposition to the law, and must stand for licentiousness, anarchists have always appealed to the discerned and derived natural laws for their arguments, and might be said to best represent the classical republican position of favoring the Rule of Law and individual and collective freedom, being the staunchest upholders of genuine propriety. In contradistinction, the state is founded upon the licentiousness of piracy, the liberty of infringing the law and of violently enforcing statutes and legalisms including private property and public welfare so as to allow for usury and welfare traps. Those varieties of “anarchism” which attempt to divorce themselves from mutualism are licentious, libertine, deceivers, much as the government is, and, as such, transgressors upon the derived natural law, and real anarchists should not be squeamish in their application of the law to them. Likewise, all manners of statism must be treated as the crimes they are.
References
[1]See Online Etymology Dictionary entry for liberty
[2] Indeed, that that which is private is privileged, private property being a privation of others’ access to the commons without occupancy and use to justify their exclusion unless they pay tribute
[3]See Online Etymology Dictionary entry for freedom
[4]Cold, darkness, and emptiness do not exist, but suggest a degree of absence of existence
[5]However, natural criminal activity-- aggression-- may still be undertaken, though not sustained, by non-state actors. While anarchy entails that all fall under the Rule of Law—natural law—, it does not entail that aggressions cease to maintain their phenomenal presence in the world.
[6]Anarchy exists when none rule over others. If there is rule of others, there is a state, a monopoly on aggression.