Why Humans must be Free; V. O. Watts

WHY HUMANS MUST BE v. ORVAL WATTS HUMANS DEVELOP their human qualities, they prosper and pro gress, as indi vid uals exercise their powers of choice and recognize re sponsibility for their own acts. This is why government cannot promote human progress except as it establishes freedom, which is the political condition for volun taryaction. For humans are not only pur posive and inner-directed, as all living creatures are. They are also self-controlling. They choose their purposes and their methods for pursuing their purposes. They gain human quality only as they exercise this power of choice and learn to use it skillfully - that is, ~visely. Dr. Watts is Chairman of the Division of Social Studies at· Northwood Institute, a private college dedicated to the philosophy and practice of free enterprise. This article is from lecture material for his course: Sur vey of American Life and Business.

Other creatures pursue purposes largely dictated by built-in re flexes and instincts. By instinct a bird seeks out certain kinds of food, builds its nest, preens its feathers, flies north in the spring and south in the fall. By instinct a hen scratches for food, and by in stinct and conditioned reflexes a lion stalks its prey. But man acts according to ideas which he himself fashions and se lects in much the same way that he makes his clothing and selects his food. True, he has certain reflexes and a few vague instincts. These take care of some of his more basic needs, such as his need for air and water - if he permits them to do so. But he may, if he chooses, re condition his own reflexes and act completely contrary to his in stincts. Thus, expert swimmers 4 THE FREEMAN March and divers learn new breathing habits, and Hindu yogis learn to control even their heart beats. Man gets his controlling ideas by using the evidence brought hiIn by his senses. But he himself de termines what senses he will use, how, when, and where he uses them, and what ideas he forms con cerning the sensations they bring him. He may close his eyes and refuse to see what is before him, or he may reject what he sees as useless or unreal.

And as he sifts and reworks the data supplied him by his senses, he forms patterns of ideas, values, and purposes which govern his ac tions. Man Is Responsible Because of this power of self control, man is not only account able for his acts, he is responsible for them. Like every other crea ture, he is accountable in that he must suffer penalties for error as he enjoys the rewards for being wise and efficient. But he is also responsible for his acts, in a way tha t others are not, in the sense of being "answerable as the primary cause, motive, or agent." (W eb ster's Unabridged Dictionary) For each individual human being can act or refuse to act as he wills, and whether he acts wisely or foolish ly depends on ideas which only he, individually, can control. It is true that a man may try to evade his responsibility by claim ing that others compel him to act as he does. But as long as a person retains his human faculties, he re mains self -controlling. When a bank teller obeys· the command of an armed bandit and surrenders the bank's funds, we may excuse him on the ground that his em ployers and the bank's depositors do not expect him to risk his life by refusing. But he is neverthe less responsible for his act in that he chooses to make the surrender.

We recognize this fact when we condemn a similar surrender by a guard who has pledged himself to resist such coercion. Would we hold blameless the father who killed his child at the command of an armed thug? Then neither can we hold irresponsible any person who yields to intimida tion, even though we agree that discretion is often better than valor. Not the Same Purpose We should realize, however, that when a person yields to a threat of violence, his self-determined pur pose is to avoid the violence rather than. to accomplish the purpose of his assailant. If he wanted to do what his would-be masters com mand him to do, no violence or threat of injury would be neces sary. When violence or intimida1966 WHY HUMANS MUST BE FREE 5 tion is necessary to make men act, it is because the victims of it have purposes contrary to the purposes of the aggressors. No external force can change either these purposes or the ideas from which they spring. They can be changed only by the will of the DlJpgOn who jg to !let. If the victim of violence chooses to act as his assailant directs, he does so, not because he has adopted his assail ant's purpose, but in order to ac complish the quite different pur pose of avoiding the threatened injury.

Force. Can't Control Purpose It is this inescapable conflict of purposes that makes slavery, the "planned society," and the "wel fare state" destructive of human values and character. The purpose of the slave masters may be to get certain work done. The purpose of the government officials may be to improve the understanding and character of their subjects. But in creasingly, as time passes, the sub jects of the coercion seek to es cape from the threat of violence. Fear of a master's lash or of a communist firing squad, for ex ample, may cause men for a time to go through certain dictated mo tions, but these motions do not make efficient farmers. Instead, the private purposes of those who suffer from the coercion cause increasing inefficiency in pursuing the masters' purposes because these private purposes of the vic tims have to do with escape, re sistance, or retaliation. These pri vate purposes are the ones which enlist the victims' will and ingenu ity. They are the only ones which the victims can pursue with en ergy or skill.

The final result depends on the victims' ideas about how they may best escape the threatened vio lence. They may decide on open flight or resistance, or they may choose secret sabotage and slow downs. If they decide that all flight or resistance is hopeless, they are likely to feel increasing fatigue and depression ("lazi: ness") when at work, with the gradual atrophy of will and initia tive, along with increasing desires for the wasteful dissipation, or "vice," that characterize people long subject to enslavement and tyranny. To his report of a strike of trolley-car workers in Lodz, Po land, a few years ago, the Warsaw correspondent of Newsweek added these comments: The complaints of Lodz are echoed everywhere except among the peas ants who have benefited from Go mulka's de-collectivization policy. In the cities, low living standards, des perate consumer-goods shortages, and hopelessness over the future all combine to throttle initiative. Walk6 THE FREEMAN March outs and work stoppages are on the increase. Thievery and drunkenness are rampant. Absenteeism runs as high as 30 per cent. Apathy char acterizes the Polish worker. As a leading intellectual put it: "Gray ness has entered our spirit."

forced Goodness Turns into Evil Other victims of communist "planning" show similar evidences of demoralization. Says Mihajlo Mihajlov, Yugoslav lecturer at Zagreb University, writing of his recent experiences as an exchange student in Moscow: In each district there is a vytrez vitelj, a dispensary for sobering up drunks. . .. A liter of vodka costs as much as six long-playing records, and I cannot understand where all the drunks come from, yet at night you often meet drunks. . . . In the outlying sections of town, it is dangerous to go into the streets at night despite numerous patrols of druzhinniki, the special people's mi litia. ( The New Leader, March 29, 1965, p. 4.) If a man is to become an ef ficient farmer, he must want to farm, and he must recognize his responsibility for doing the things necessary to produce the crops. The slave can never become an ef ficient farmer if his real purpose is to avoid the lash rather than to raise crops, for it is to his private purpose that his thoughts and in gen uity turn even when he is un aware of the fact.

Similarly, when a person or group tries to compel others to be charitable, industrious, or thrifty, the victims of the coercion lose their sense of personal responsibil ity for acquiring these virtues. De pri ved of opportunity to use and develop their human qualities of self-direction, they revert toward the animal level. At this lower lev el, they become more like domesti catedcattle, lacking ingenuity, en terprise, and reasoning ability. Or, they may become as intractable as the tiger, the zebra, or the polar bear. Says Mihajlov in the articles on Soviet Russia mentioned above: "Never was and never will any thing be created in a man by force. Fortunately, as Berdyaev [Rus sian philosopher whose works are on the communist "black sheet"] says: 'Truth makes man free, but man must freely accept the Truth, he cannot be forced to accept it. Forced goodness is no longer good; it turns into eviL'" (The N ww Leader, June 7, 1965, p. 6.) The Limits of Government's Power Now, government is an agency for compulsion. Men organize it and use it only to apply force and threat of force against their fel lows. As a means for applying force, it can imprison or execute wrongdoers, recover stolen prop erty, punish fraud, and repel in1966 WHY HUMANS MUST BE FREE 7 vaders. In short, it can do to or for humans whatever force and violence can do: hurt them, re strain them, destroy them, take from them things they prize, or make them fear it will do one or more of these things to them.

As it uses its force to combat thieving, gangsterism, rioting, and armed invasion, government can free producers from interference. The more effectively it thus pre vents such interference, the greater is the output of goods, and the greater are the revenues gov ernment can· get for its own uses. It is this service to producers that explains whatever production and progress we observe in the rel atively more socialistic countries, ~uch as Soviet Russia and Yugo slavia. The price (in terms of med dling and spoliation) which the rulers charge producers for their services in these more or less en slaved nations is exorbitant but not quite prohibitive. Beyond this protective service to producers, government coercion not only has no usefulness, but it actually works to limit and reduce government's power. For, as it bullies producers in its effort to direct their labor and to get more production from them, it restricts their output and so reduces the flow of goods from which the gov ernment gets its own coercive weapons and manpower.

Such government bullying of producers has this effect because no external force can form a man's ideas or determine his purposes. No force or threat of violence, le gal or illegal, can inspire the de sire to do good or the will to do evil. It cannot make men compas sionate, thrifty, foresighted, or in dustrious. It cannot awaken their sense of responsibility. In short, force, violence, and in timidation cannot make bad men good or good men better. For no man is merely clay to be molded by his fellows, whether they be government officials, teachers, em ployers, or his neighbors. Nor is he a machine for going through certain prescribed motions at the command of any master or gov ernment. Instead, man fulfills his Crea tor's purpose only as he develops the power to know and choose good and rej ect evil. The compulsions of the welfare state can no more de velop this power in its subjects than riding men about in wagons can make them into long-distance runners or star football players.

Every human being's progress de pends on the amount of effort that he himself exerts in pursuit of good purposes. Among the essen tial conditions for this effort are the opportunities, the risks, and even the obstacles, of freedom. ~ 18. The Origins of Reform Methods CLARENCE B. CARSON THERE IS NOT, to my knowledge, any thorough historical study of the origins of reform methods. References to this subject are apt to be casual; for example, that Marx did not tell precisely how a country went about achieving communism. This absence of care ful study is the more amazing in view of the tremendous amount of scholarly activity in this cen tury, accelerated by the increas ing numbers of students under taking and completing doctoral work. Revolutionaries, reformers, and their assorted "isms" have come in for a great deal of study, of course. But the focus of such studies has usually been upon ideas and ideologies, their origin, development, and spread. It is as Dr. Carson is Professor of American History at Grove City College, Pennsylvania. Among his earlier writings in THE FREEMAN were his series on The Fateful Turn and The American Tradition, both of which are now available as books.