Freedom and Mutualism

[openspace4life]

"The man explained to Max that . . . both he and the man who had saved Max from the kidnappers belonged to an ancient and secret society of men known as the League of the Golden Key. Such men roamed the world acting, always anonymously, to procure the freedom of others, whether physical or metaphysical, emotional or economic. In this work they were tirelessly checked by the agents of the Iron Chain, whose goals were opposite and sinister. It was operatives of the Iron Chain who had kidnapped Max years before.

- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, p. 133

I would like to suggest that the operative word in this fanciful quote, from the backstory of an imaginary comic book series called "The Escapist," is "from." If your opponent wishes to keep people in chains, whether literal or metaphorical, then your goal is to free people from those chains, i.e. from negative impositions by other people or society more generally--anything from debt slavery to overly high taxes on investment income. The corresonding freedom to is much more ill-defined, but clearly centered on the affected individual's abilities, with little direct reference to any positive interaction with society at large.

About four and a half years ago, I posted this screed about the limitations of an ideology whose only tenet is that "freedom is good." I didn't offer much of an alternative, other than an inchoate plea for people to make choices with greater consideration for the survival-of-the-species problem. Here's a better idea, which has a nice yin-yang symmetry to it: rather than viewing society as necessarily opposed to individual freedom, why not accept that humans are social creatures who gain from the formation of friendships, teams, and communities? The best single word I could think of to express this concept is "mutualism," a term from ecology that simply means an arrangement where both or all parties benefit. If you prefer, "mutuality" could also work to describe the general principle. Rather than working against each other, freedom and mutualism can reinforce one another, as each member of a group contributes most when he/she is free to choose how to contribute.

Of course this is all very well for small groups, perhaps up to a few hundred. Large-group mutualism is a basically unsolved problem, as I discussed in my previous entry as well as this post from last year.

My current best stab at a solution in the realm of politics would be something along the general outlines of a soviet democracy, that is, a hierarchical series of councils with each level's representatives chosen from the ones below it. Obviously, I would put in extensive checks to ensure that the power of the highest councils remains limited. I also think it might be better to choose representatives to the next higher council by simply rotating through the lower council's members--send a different pair every few years, not going back to the first pair until everyone else has served (two is better than one because one can serve as a check on the other). That way the council doesn't just select whoever is best at persuading them that he/she will do a good job when given broader authority, since as Douglas Adams observed, "those who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it." This probably holds even if you replace the word "rule" with "govern" or even "coordinate."

In fact, if there are councils down to neighborhood level, the whole idea of voting could be removed altogether in favor of a simple aptitude test on the basic workings of government--if you pass, you get to be on the council. Would this still count as democracy? Certainly, in the sense of "a philosophy that insists on the right and the capacity of a people, acting either directly or through representatives, to control their institutions for their own purposes" (from the first entry on Dictionary.com). Except in my system, we would be working together in the open to achieve this, rather than casting anonymous ballots in a basically statistical exercise that we hope will manage to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.