Dancers in Green - Edgar Degas, 1878
What is freedom? How can we achieve it?
Freedom can be defined as living with no unchosen positive obligations. For example: “You must pay your taxes,” or “Honor thy father and mother.”
Some of these obligations are inescapable, at least in our lifetime – the construct of the state isn’t going anywhere for decades. Personal freedom, in contrast, is an achievable – but challenging – goal.
How Not to Achieve Freedom by Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio explores the most common approaches to accomplishing liberty in a rational manner and finds them all lacking – morally, logically and pragmatically. There’s never been a book like this one.
If you’re wondering why libertarianism has failed so consistently over the years to liberate humanity, despite brilliant scholarship, powerful arguments and great passion, this book provides powerful answers.
The Great Pine - Paul Cezanne, 1892-96
Molyneux explicates how the close relationship between libertarianism and Christianity renders the ideology ineffective. All religions are opposed to the scientific discipline of psychology, because they favor the denial of the self and of the existance of the unconscious.
The fundamental reason that libertarians have never asked the basic question – why do people reject the Taxation Equals Force argument? – is that the answer lies in the unconscious, and in deep knowledge of both the self and of other people – in other words, the answer lies in that which unravels religion. Since libertarianism relies on religion, and religion survives by opposing psychology, libertarianism has no choice but to oppose an increase in psychological understanding.
Because libertarianism is so opposed to psychology, it cannot ask any questions which involve the unconscious. As a result, it is stuck in a blind repetition of earlier mistakes, like anyone who resists self-knowledge. It cannot examine the resistance that society as a whole has towards libertarian arguments, because that resistance is unconscious, and so it has to make up empty-headed stories to explain away its endless failures.
This book is an MIRV nuclear missile targeted at the insular intellectual bunker of modern libertarianism. I expect it to cause great anxiety in libertarian circles, although I doubt that the arguments contained in the book will be addressed directly. At most, Molyneux will simply be subjected to crude personal attacks, be pointedly snubbed, and so on – while he continues to pull crowds of people away from political and academic libertarianism. His books Everyday Anarchy and Practical Anarchy were powerful blows against the moral pillars that support the state. How Not to Achieve Freedom exposes the fatal flaws of the conventional libertarian approach.
And political, academic and religious libertarianism stand in the way of real human freedom. Modern libertarianism is not a hard-to-open door that leads us to a higher mountain of human freedom, but a petty con game of simpleminded exploitation, a door to a cliff edge that only drops us onto the distant rocks below.
The book will be released for free in audiobook and PDF in the next several days.
3 Comments
October 2, 2008 at 2:23 pm
This review is excellent and leaves me stumped for words with which I can use to write my own. Your use of art really emphasizes what you are saying and expresses passion in ways rarely ever seen.
I think the unraveling of religion and the unconscious and tying it into the libertarian movement is a major ground breaker.
October 3, 2008 at 6:43 pm
[...] in a mass of confusing details, the only effect of which seems to be to spread FUD? If you read HNTAF, it makes more sense. My key point is that in the (relatively) open US economic system, failure is [...]
October 9, 2008 at 9:27 pm
[...] Achieving Freedom: Part One – How Not to Achieve Freedom Jump to Comments I wrote a brief preview of How Not to Achieve Freedom by Stefan Molyneux last week, if you’d like to read a summary [...]