Excellent essay. Since the so-called Enlightenment, Western culture has tried to based their society on impossible things, on squared circles. Even with the huge amount of wealth that has protected us against a quick collapse, this has produced all kinds of absurd ideologies. Libertarianism is one of them.
Libertarianism is only the logical consequence of one of these absurdities proposed by the Enlightenment. Please, read this sentence:
«The political system should be based on freedom. Nobody can impose his will on other people and everybody is free to do anything he wants, except crimes or similar. And your freedom ends when other person’s freedom starts».
I can almost feel the approval of most of you and good vibes that have flooded the brain of many of you. Well, congratulations, you have been brainwashed to believe such an obvious absurdity, as absurd as there may be married bachelors. Western civilization is the story about how to protect this kind of nonsense in real life without nobody noticing what is front of their eyes.
No political system can be based on freedom, because the freedom of a person is the lack of freedom of another person. Your freedom to divorce is the lack of freedom of your spouse and children to have a stable family. The freedom of trans of living life as a woman is the lack of freedom of everybody else not to lie. The freedom of gays not to be discriminated when buying a cake is the lack of freedom of a Christian baker not to betray his beliefs while baking a cake.
There is only a way to have complete freedom. Go to a mountain and stay away from society. If you live in society, your freedom is the lack of freedom of someone else. So there is no political system that can be founded on freedom, the same way there is no road with only a left side and no right side. This is why libertarianism is absurd and the Western political tradition is too.
What any political system does is to prioritize some freedoms and restrict other freedoms based on some set of values, that is, some morality. So there are not political systems that are freer than another ones. They prioritize different freedoms.
So a Christian political system (which does not exist anymore) would prioritize the freedom of the Christian baker to bake according their beliefs, because it is based on Christian values and prioritizes Christian freedoms. A progressive political system would prioritize the freedom of gays of buying any cake without discrimination, because it is based on progressive values and prioritizes progressive freedoms.
That is to say, «freedom» is a smokescreen. The values are the ones that decide how a society works. Any conflict has a «freedom» part and a «lack of freedom» part. So you can justify any political decision looking at the freedom part and disregarding the «lack of freedom» part. Of course, we are protecting the freedom of Christian bakers of following their beliefs! Of course, we are protecting the freedom of gays of not being discriminated!
Are Muslim political systems less free than ours? I don’t think so. They privilege freedoms like women having the freedom not to work, men having stable families, children having stable families, people living the Muslim religion without being forced all kinds of degeneracy upon them, which are not available in our society. Of course, this means restricting other freedoms, but this is unavoidable.
How did we end up creating a myth for our society that it is obviously impossible? You can discuss whether Christ is Son of God or Mohammed the Prophet of Allah… but these beliefs are POSSIBLE. «We live in a political system based on freedom» is impossible and it is obvious that it is impossible. It is like saying your society is based on a squared circle.
The history tell us how. The bourgeois wanted to take the political power from the nobles (the aristocrats). The ideological justification of the nobles and the Ancien Regime, as any other sane political system, was based on duty, hierarchy and tradition. The bourgeois used three false values that were the opposite: freedom (the opposite from duty), equality (the opposite from hierarchy) and progress (the opposite from tradition).
They didn’t believe them. The Founding Fathers waxed lyrically about the equality of men while having slaves and producing a political system where only people with property could vote. For the bourgeois, the meaning of liberty was «we don’t want the rules of the Ancien Regime: we want our own rules». The meaning of equality was «we are not less than the nobles. We can have power». The meaning of progress was «we have to trash the old Ancien Regim and move to the future, that is, us having power»
However, the bourgeois revolutions won and the incoherent concepts of liberty and equality and the false concept of progress were enshrined as the new gods of the new religion. They were put in constitutions, laws and textbooks and the population was brainwashed to accept them, even if they are completely absurd. (I have only spoken of liberty here, but equality is also incoherent and progress is false).