Liberty, Responsibility, and Spirituality: a Rumination

Why are Americans so spectacularly bad at regulating ourselves? This question has become particularly pointed in the COVID-19 era, when we’ve witnessed an eminently preventable disease sweep through our country, causing economic devastation and personal tragedy. The quintessential American definition of “freedom,” meaning personal autonomy as close to perfect as possible, requires a citizenry willing to regulate itself. Why do we seem unable to do that?

In my younger, more conservative days, I tried my hand at political Libertarianism. It didn’t take. For me, Libertarianism was intellectual hygiene: if government is bad, as conservatives believe, and there’s no clearly definable boundary between “enough government” and “too much government,” I reasoned, then the only conclusion is total abolition of government altogether. Let Americans regulate themselves! We have, I insisted, the wisdom that governments just don’t.

But Libertarianism failed for me because simple observation demonstrated that while Americans perhaps could regulate ourselves, we clearly don’t. As a people, we’re too often drunken, selfish, reckless with money, and heedless of safety. Even before COVID, I watched seemingly reasonable citizens drive at breakneck speeds on residential streets, and rewire their houses without tripping the breaker first. American behavior frequently crosses from inconsiderate, into downright destructive.

Admittedly, outside regulation does only incrementally better. I struggled to define the problem, until I read James C. Scott. He describes the tension between central governments and local communities to manage resources, including land and labor. Governments struggle without what Scott terms “local knowledge,” the intimate familiarity with conditions that comes from knowing and working closely with a place and community. Governments standardize; communities localize.

What knowledge, I realized, is more inherently local, than knowledge of oneself? Just as pre-modern communities regulate themselves by knowing their land and their people intimately, individuals could hypothetically know themselves intimately enough to regulate their responses to crime, economic insecurity, and pandemic. The reason we can’t regulate ourselves, I grasped with a jolt, is because too many Americans don’t know themselves intimately. We’re strangers to ourselves.

This demands two follow-up questions: why don’t we know ourselves better? And how can we fix it? The first is easy. We can’t see ourselves from outside; we need to outsource some knowledge of ourselves onto others because we’re limited and finite. Just as local communities must sometimes seek opinions from neighboring communities, or the federal government, to understand their conditions, we likewise need others’ input to understand ourselves better.

The repair becomes sticky, because it involves a word which makes many Americans squeamish today: spirituality. Let us stress, this doesn’t necessarily mean religion, though it could. Rather, historic spiritual practices, like Christian centering prayer or Buddhist meditation, involve pausing the rhythms the world enforces upon us externally, and hearing ourselves better. Only by pausing the world, and listening to ourselves, can we gain local knowledge to regulate ourselves.

I don’t mean this frivolously. The outside world demands we satisfy the economy, support the hierarchy, and abnegate ourselves. Though we have institutions rather than kings today, capitalism has centralized power more thoroughly than Louis XIV could’ve ever dreamed. This centralized order demands individuals set aside dreams, work for others, and pursue appetites—which spirituality demands we see and resist. Spiritually autonomous people make poor consumers and wage slaves.

Addiction specialist Gabor Maté describes addicts as the ultimate slaves to appetite. Driven by trauma or isolation, they seek something to numb the pain. But what does anyone do, when we define ourselves by bigger houses and sleeker cars, than a socially acceptable version of addictive behavior? Likewise, Maté writes, addicts gradually develop control over their appetites using Buddhist meditation. Though many, including Maté himself, remain agnostic, spirituality yields self-control.

American libertarianism might work if citizens had spiritual self-control. While we’ll always necessarily outsource some acts of regulating ourselves to our neighbors, who can see us in context more objectively, we might captain our lives better if we knew ourselves better. But we don’t. We’ve relinquished all forms of self-knowledge to corporations, billionaires, and financiers. Americans can’t regulate ourselves because we’re strangers from ourselves, walking around with weak, malnourished souls.

Watching Americans demand their freedom without knowing themselves first, I believe we could’ve avoided this whole catastrophe. The problem began long before a noisy, aggressive minority thought they were too important to wear masks. It began when Americans surrendered decision-making authority to rich property owners, while maintaining the illusion that they were free. We’re an individualist society full of withered individuals, and the only solution is to turn inward.