Is freedom inevitable?
March 6, 2008 by elcap
In the 1940s collectivist thinking dominated. The belief was that humans can create a better world by using our intellect and reason to plan for economic and social success, and who better to draw up those plans than the best and brightest around?
As appealing as the idea was to the youth of the post-World War era, their grandchildren live in a completely different world. Modern technologies such as portable laptops, the Internet and digital cameras empower today’s youth to a level unimaginable just a couple generations ago.
Will technology sweep the intellectual appeal of collectivism into the dustbin of history? And will the average person’s access to technology make it impossible for collectivism to succeed in practice?
Today the New York Times has a wonderful story about the youth in Cuba:
A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.
Now that we can watch the watchers, how will this affect the government’s ability to control information, ideas, knowledge and people? Are the days of total state control coming to an end?
Of course the future is not set in stone. Hayek made it clear that cultural evolution — like biological evolution — does not advance along a predetermined path. I do not mean to fall for the Marxist fallacy that humans will inevitably progress to a certain stage that happens to coincide with my favored political and economic views.
So, perhaps I should rephrase the initial question: Is collectivism doomed?
In fact, I do believe that freedom is inevitable. Have you ever read Douglas Adams? I think I’ll post about it on my blog.
Besides positing that evolution and innovation cannot happen best when planned, Hayek also speculates that freedom’s successes may be their actual undoing. Once society gets to a point of success, people get restless for all problems to be solved, and begin to reverse liberty in order to plan a faster way to prosperity. Our complex world does not need planning, but rather markets to decentralize decision-making and allow us to try out as many solutions as we can. Unfortunately, the more complex our world is, the more the statists will contend that we need a plan to steer it in the right direction.
I don’t think that freedom is inevitable–nothing is–which is why it’s important that we work to advance it.