The View From 1776

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The following essay was written by Kartik Ariyur:

By the practice of true religion, I mean practice of the principle of reciprocity or the Golden rule, and this definition is supported by the scriptures of the world’s major religions:

Christianity: ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.’ (The New Testament, Matthew 7:12)

Hinduism: ‘One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to oneself. This is the essence of morality. All other activities are due to selfish desires.’ (Mahabharata, Anusasana Parva, 113.8)

Chinese religion: “Tsekung asked, ‘Is there one word that can serve as a principle of conduct for life?’ Confucius replied, ‘It is the word shu—reciprocity. Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.’ (The Analects of Confucius, 15.23)

Judaism: “What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow men. That is the entire Law; the rest is commentary.” (The Talmud, Shabbat 31a)
Buddhism: “Hurt not others in ways that you would find hurtful.” (Tripitaka Udana-varga 5:18)

Islam: “Not one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what he desires for himself.” (The Sayings of Prophet Mohammed, Forty Hadith of an-Nawawi)

The practice of the principle of reciprocity automatically results in abstinence from wanton violence, untruth, stealing, adultery, and other corruption. This practice of exoteric religion keeps us safe, and gives us time uncontrolled by instincts of self-preservation and procreation; time in which we observe the relations between actions and consequences, and therefore learn to choose beneficial instead of harmful actions. Thus, the practice of true religion is a necessary condition for most notions of liberty—freedom from restraint. We would not have any more choice than the beasts in a society governed by might is right. Over a long period of time, it can raise the intelligence to the point where one is able to understand the esoteric truths of religion. When this happens, True Faith and consequently fearlessness arise in the individual. If a nation produces a sufficient number of men of faith, it can retain its liberty even if its majority becomes corrupt for a while, for those of faith will have both the courage and wisdom to restore morality.

The first part of the essay below presents a consistent notion of liberty. The proposition above relating liberty and religion is then established through direct examination of the conditions for the advance of liberty and the conditions for its demise. The endeavor is to render all assertions clear enough as to permit falsification by analysis (consistency checks) and experiment (including historical observation). The object is to open up the topic for fruitful research by making precise our common sense notions. Indeed, several of the notions presented below are amenable to quantification through the tools available in statistical decision theory, in statistical learning theory (E.g., Vladimir Vapnik, The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory), and in the theory of constraint satisfaction and optimization. The mathematical difficulties in solving these problems are, however, significant.

What is liberty?

Liberty is often caricatured as license. However, moving on wheels of whim-led fancy, and accumulating imprudent habits of thought action, will quickly reduce our free choice, for the habits combined with the environment will control our time. Hence, liberty, the freedom from restraint, must of necessity include freedom from control by the environment through habitual reactions. A greedy man starts salivating when he sees a plate of good food, and possibly eyes the platter more than his plate. But the effects of overeating restrict his free choice later on—he becomes sleepy, needs to sleep more, his mind does not work as efficiently, and therefore he has to spend more time performing his duties, and has less time for acquiring knowledge. Thus, the presence of a delicious dish in the environment is able to restrict his choices throughout the day, and later on, through repeated overeating and consequent disease, restrict his choice throughout his life.

This leads us to a definition of liberty that may perhaps be quantified—liberty is the ratio of the sum over all decisions of the number of exercisable alternatives the individual is aware of in each decision exercising choice made in a given time period to the sum over all decisions of the number of alternative choices possible in each decision. In mathematical terms,
Liberty=free decisions(number of known exercisable alternatives)/ total decisions(number of alternatives).

Consequences of the definition: Maximum liberty is unity—when one knows all possible alternatives, and is able to make any of the choices in every decision (all choices for every decision are exercisable). To have this complete liberty, one needs to have complete knowledge (perhaps omniscience) of all the alternatives, and also the power to exercise any of the alternatives (perhaps omnipotence). Thus, it is consistent with the religious ideal of the Truth setting us free. It also shows us that the liberty that most of us have is vanishingly small, because of our limited knowledge and power. Free choice means decisions taken without any compulsions, and where alternative courses of action exist. Thus, our decisions to work, or eat, or sleep, or breathe, or let our hearts beat (and all other involuntary functions of the body that some choose to stop by suicide) are not included as they are compelled by the instinct of self preservation. However, our decisions as to what work we do, what we eat and when, or when we sleep and how much, and how we breathe (through the upper chest or via deep diaphragmatic breathing) can all possibly be made freely.

Free choice includes both whim-led actions and actions performed after consideration of the consequences of actions. In the first case, the lack of knowledge of the effect of the environment upon the thought process prevents adequate thinking before acting. In the second case, the lack of knowledge of cause-effect relationships between actions and consequences limits decision quality and thereby future liberty (someone who doesn’t know smoking is addictive may decide to smoke). Then there is also willful disregard of consequences for immediate gratification, which results in both the loss of free choice in the future and the loss of the ability to consider consequences of actions (through repeatedly avoiding thinking before acting).

With the above background, we can define all our familiar liberties—

Economic liberty can be defined as the ratio of the sum over all economic decisions where choice is exercised, of the number of known exercisable choices for each decision to the sum of the number of choices possible over all economic decisions taken during the time period. Economic decisions are those of buying and selling different kinds of property. If taxes are high, several possible commercial exchanges are ruled out; similarly, if property rights are not exclusive and easily transferable, or enforceable, most commerce is prevented, and economic liberty is small.

Social liberty can be defined as the ratio of the sum over all personal decisions where choice is exercised, of the number of known exercisable alternatives in each decision to the sum over all personal decisions of the number of choices possible in each decision inside of a given time interval. Personal decisions are those that do not involve buying or selling. Limits on social liberty are enforced both by law and by community action (boycotts, attacks, lynching, etc.). Of course, social and economic liberties are related, for personal decisions depend upon what we can buy or sell. Thus, in a state with little or no economic liberty, the number of exercisable alternatives in any personal decision is small (One can’t choose between bananas and toast for breakfast when one can get only bread from the ration store). Moreover, the number of personal decisions over which choice can be exercised is also small (Individuals in Continental Europe perhaps have liberty only to dalliance).

Political liberty can be defined as the ratio of the sum over all political decisions where choice is exercised, of the number of known exercisable choices to the sum over all political decisions of the number of possible choices in a given time period. Political decisions are those that determine the number of exercisable choices in economic or personal decisions or both. This usually is laid out in constitutional constraints and in the common understanding of society of the desirability or otherwise to society of different personal and economic choices (this is the unwritten constitution that underlies any system of law).

The Evolution of Liberty
A consequence of the above definition of liberty is that our liberty can never be static, except in the case of omniscience and omnipotence—it changes from time interval to time interval. This is because the choices made in one time interval reduce or increase the number of exercisable choices in decisions over future time intervals. The questions that naturally arise in this context are:

1. How should an individual make decisions that increase his liberty or at least prevent its decrease?

2. What sorts of decisions must different individuals in a society make so as to enhance collective economic, social and political liberty? Collective liberties are the individual liberties summed over all members of the society—this is consistent with our notion that the formation of privileged classes reduced liberty (quota systems for government employment are an example).

The solutions are clearly in the individuals increasing their knowledge, so they are aware of more and more possible choices in making any decision and in increasing their power, so that they can exercise more and more of them. This is identical to being in control of the circumstances of one’s life. But the increase of exercisable choice results in an increase in all sorts of possibilities, and therefore is not necessarily monotonic (in the sense that increasing liberty is not self-sustaining over time), for the control of circumstances can be misused. To make this clear we define actions whose consequences increase liberty as beneficial and those that reduce it as harmful. This also gives us an operational definition of intelligence—the ratio of beneficial choices to the total number of choices made in a given time period (in the limit as the time period tends to the smallest possible decision interval possible for a human being—this is necessary because decision horizons continuously shrink with the expansion of knowledge).

How Liberty Can Be Lost. As liberty increases in a society under the expansion of knowledge (uncovered largely by the intelligent few), the choices exercised by different individuals within it differ according as their intelligence. Thus, there will be individuals who will think an economic boom to be permanent and misuse their free choice This is primarily through decisions about using leisure time in trashy books, jarring noise (’music’), and titillating entertainment of different varieties. This of course leads to further reduction of the intelligence. But when further new knowledge is discovered, and the economy reorganizes to take advantage of that knowledge, old modes of thinking and acting will be rendered obsolete, and there will be a bust. Naturally those that are addicted to the hedonism facilitated by the boom will want its continuance through any possible means, and they will therefore attempt to slow down or stop the process of change.

They will therefore help prop up demagogues and totalitarian ideologies that appear to them to preserve their current ways of acting. If such individuals are in a majority in a society, they will inevitably attempt to drive it toward lesser liberty. Socialism is just one example of this fact. The proliferation of fields of study where reality does not matter, leading to the loudest voices overpowering all others; the shrewdest manipulators/rent seekers being crowned with recognition and success is another example (on the other hand, business, engineering, medicine and law all confront reality, and the truth or falsity of an opinion has real consequences—whether in product utility and success or human safety). Rich businessmen who want to preserve their business empires without continuing to improve their products/services or moving their money to areas which provide greater benefit to society, and therefore try to co-opt government for achieving their purposes are another example.

To sum up, the increase of liberty makes available more choices and power to exercise those choices. But it also increases the chance that individuals will misuse their choice because they are exercising more choices than ever in their daily actions. And this can restrict their future liberty for a single drink can result in a spiral of addiction. Now, individuals can and do self-correct under the prod of suffering and seldom reform under coercion (both discussed in greater detail in a few comments written previously); but if the numbers of the errant exceed the numbers of the ‘intelligent enough’ for a sufficiently long period of time, liberty can be undone.

Hence, it appears that the libertarian credo of a self-sustaining combination social, economic, and political liberty does not hold when a large part of the population does not increase its intelligence significantly with the expansion of liberty. This immediately raises the questions of how do we avoid this contraction of liberty, and how do we ensure a monotonic increase of liberty? Clearly, if the intelligence (as defined above) of most of individuals in society increases fast enough compared to the number of choices exercisable in a time period, the number of harmful choices made in a given time period can be held constant. But even more interesting is the result that the intelligence needs to increase far faster for the number of harmful choices made in a given time period to decrease.

But the rapid increase of intelligence needs a continuous application of concentration to all activities. This is because we need both to understand more of the consequences of different actions and also use that knowledge from moment to moment to increase intelligence. The answers to how this concentration is obtained are in my previous essay on The Case for Religion.

Even so, the first step lies in the practice of exoteric religion—the principle of reciprocity.

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