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I like to make the distinction between "freedom as method" and "freedom as blueprint." Freedom as method is akin to classically liberal law, with its two functions: the stoic function and the conservative function of law (again two terms of my own inspiration).
- The stoic function is to ensure that people committed to disparate belief systems can coexist peacefully while forming a productive community.
- The conservative function is to filter out practices and principles that efficiently serve all members of the community.
While these functions are very useful and cover large parts of human life, they do not constitute a blueprint. i.e. a gap-less ground-plan, where all elements of "the good society" are registered in their exact functions, proportions and relationship to one another, but rather a method to
- improve social relations by trial-and-error-elimination and procedures of orderly contestation and
- reduce in piecemeal fashion conflict and inefficiencies in social interaction.
Liberty is an open system, whose evolution is unpredictable, as it depends upon the free access of the entire population to whatever agencies of institutional change may be available.
Particular doctrines and ideologies, including certain liberalisms and anarcho-capitalism, tend to overlook the competitive nature of liberty and attempt the reduction of "liberty" to a uniform blueprint that is intolerant of visions and other contributory elements of a variant nature. Liberty encourages and thrives on variety, whose fruits of disparate kind and quality get pruned and sorted out in a free world thanks to a vast crop of procedures effecting pluralistic selectivity, some of which growing spontaneously and some arising by design.
The incentives of people with real life concerns to interfere with reality are stronger than the arm-chair ambition to be right thanks to a world view that falsely makes a boast of being self-contained and free of contradictions -- not even mathematics fulfils the latter two conditions while nonetheless working with powerful effectiveness. And liberty too, gathers her powers from being an open system, geared toward permanent improvement and accommodating all creative sources as represented by each and every member of a free society.
In order to understand why liberty is a competitive enterprise that naturally over-arches doctrinal factions one needs to throw into clear relief the erroneous tendency amongst libertarians to ignore the fundamental difference between freedom in a one-person-world (from which much of libertarian philosophy is derived - see my Elementary Errors of Anarchism (2/2)) and freedom in a multi-person environment (which is the condition under which freedom develops in reality).
I am examining the issue at greater length in Competing for Liberty (5/6) - Crusoe-Freedom and Multi-Person Freedom.
In this serial of posts on "Competing for Liberty" see also Competing for Liberty (3/6) - Coercion as an Inverse Index of Freedom and Freedom as Real Wealth.
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