Are YOU the Real Threat to Liberty?

Am I the Threat to Liberty?

A reader of mine recently commented, “I’m afraid that the older I get, the more broken and evil the world seems to me.” A lot of people might feel the same way. We readily notice external dangers to freedom, but internal dangers are harder to spot.

The Times of London reportedly once asked famous authors, “What’s wrong with the world today?” Writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton responded simply, “Dear Sir, I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton.” How many of us could say that and be sincere?

Let’s consider the possibility that the means to restore liberty are closer than we think. If freedom requires that we restrain the worst in us, we must first be aware of what the worst in us is and stop blaming others for what we find.

Wife, mother, mentor, human being, Wesley LePatner was recently murdered. Some people celebrated her death merely because they disapproved of her employer, Blackstone Real Estate.

Recently, too, a Canadian professor of religion wrote about author Jesse Singal, “Hey Jesse, it’s likely because you’re a piece of stinking hot trash and your loss would be a major W for humanity. Maybe stop being a fucking human stain, and see what happens. Fucking clown.”

Increasingly, people seem to be unable to distinguish between their opinions and reality.

I gave these two examples because our society is built out of our daily interactions. In her book The Soul of Civility, Alexandra Hudson wrote, “Our everyday interactions can either elevate or degrade our experience of living in society together. Our considerateness toward others promotes mutual trust, and in turn, our freedom and flourishing.”

Ben Franklin, Edmund Burke, and others have observed that only a virtuous people can remain free. The more people act without virtue, the louder the popular demand for government restraints on freedom.

Our lack of virtue threatens liberty, and it’s not just a rejection of classical liberal ideas. Let’s look at a mindset that causes problems for us and those around us and ultimately undermines liberty.

Fusing with Our Thoughts and Feelings

When we take the content of our thoughts and feelings as an accurate representation of reality, we become lost in our experience and behave in non-virtuous ways.

By some estimates, we have around 50,000 thoughts a day. As you become more aware of the narrative voice playing constantly in your head, you notice that those thoughts are often negative. Your monkey mind flits from fragmentary thought to thought and is full of judgments about yourself and others. Would-haves, should-haves, and could-haves arise frequently. Grievances and thoughts of victimization are common. The desire to escape from our thinking leads to coping behaviors and addictions.

It happens that some individuals rehearse their grievances so often that it leads to violence. Four years after getting the wrong sandwich, a customer assaulted the sandwich shop owners in New Jersey. Ruminating over negative thoughts, which are often old news, cannot enrich one’s life.

The 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that all the problems of humanity stem from our inability to sit quietly without distractions. Our inability to deal with our inner mental life leads us, as Carl Jung explored, to project onto others the worst qualities in ourselves.

How often do we barrel through life, thinking our overheated emotions are being generated by someone else? When enough of us think like that, we become a society of grievance holders and liberty is at risk. An authoritarian will quickly step in to harness our grievances.

Do not deny your thoughts and feelings, taught the Stoic philosophers. Instead, they advised becoming more aware of what our thoughts and feelings are costing us and then not being directed by them.

Anger was an issue at the time Stoic philosophers did their work, and anger is prominently acted out in our time. Seneca, in his work On Anger, is clear: “A mind that becomes a slave to some passion must exist as though in a tyrant’s realm.” The internal tyrant we choose will soon be joined by an external tyrant we enable.

Anger, Seneca taught, “is the mark of a weak mind.” Weak minds don’t remain free.

In his timeless Meditations, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius believed the quality of his life depended upon the “habit of examining methodically and honestly” all of his reactions to his daily encounters. As Marcus went about training his own mind, he asked, “What virtue does this require of me?” Notice, he wrote “of me,” not “of them.”

David Hume Shows the Way

The 18th-century classical liberal Scottish philosopher David Hume is considered the most important philosopher ever to write in English. Hume was a humble man who inquired into the nature of his thinking and drew lessons that were centuries ahead of his time.

Hume took to the next level the Stoic understanding that we have a choice as to how we react to external events and to the noisy internal chatter in our minds. Hume saw that his own being was not defined by his thoughts and feelings. The newest forms of cognitive behavioral therapy, such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), teach what Hume knew centuries ago: A key to decoupling from your thoughts and feelings is understanding they don’t define you.

One of philosophy’s most well-known passages appears in Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.

He noticed his perceptions were always changing. How about his thoughts and feelings? They were always changing too. Hume observed,

There is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea.

Search as he did, Hume could not find what we call our self-concept, or “the self.”

Hume believed we build our identity by trying to combine our various perceptions. We take the self we construct to be who we are and then act to defend it. We create a personal prison with our identities, limiting our decisions. Someone who often feels victimized might identify as a victim. Using a rigid identity can be a method of evading responsibility.

The disturbed individuals in the examples I shared earlier in this essay had little ability to decouple from their transitory thoughts and feelings. They have a self-concept to defend, and their minds are at war with everyone and everything that disagrees with the limits of their monkey mind. Indeed, they have built their self-concept around something, as Hume would say, that they aren’t. They misunderstand the nature of thinking.

When a critical mass of people cannot recognize and decouple from their dysfunctional thinking, they are vulnerable to exploitation by authoritarians.

You may believe that because you can reason, you are immune from such folly. Hume cautioned, “Nothing is more usual in philosophy, and even in common life,” than to claim the “pre-eminence of reason above passion.” We often believe reason steers decisions, but it’s often just along for the ride.

Hume doubted that we could rely on reason to govern our emotional antics.

I do not know if any ACT scholars have been influenced by studying Hume, though they’ve used techniques like Hume’s to deal with difficult thoughts.

In his book The Happiness Trap, Dr. Russ Harris distinguishes between the “thinking self” and the “noticing self.” Harris observes, “The thinking self thinks about your experience—describes it, comments on it, analyzes it, compares it, or judges it—whereas the noticing self notices your experience directly.”

Harris explains,

Our thinking self is a bit like a radio, constantly playing in the background. Most of the time it’s the Radio Doom and Gloom Show, broadcasting negative stories twenty-four hours a day. It reminds us of pain from the past, warns us of dangers in the future, and gives us regular updates on everything that’s wrong with us, others, life, the universe, and everything. At times, it broadcasts something useful or cheerful, but nowhere near as often as the negative stuff. So if we’re constantly tuned in to this radio, listening to it intently and believing whatever we hear, it’s a sure-fire recipe for stress and misery.

Here is where Hume’s insights offer the way out of our suffering. Because our transitory impressions are not who we are, we don’t have to process them, resist them, or be distracted from them. Harris puts it this way:

Cognitions…are basically “words and pictures inside our head,” we can treat them like background noise—let them come and stay and go in their own good time, without giving them much attention. When an unhelpful thought pops up, instead of focusing on it, we acknowledge its presence, allow it to be there, and return our attention to what we’re doing.

Reading Hume and Harris points us to consider this question: If we can be aware of our mental antics, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, aren’t we more than all these things?

Importantly, for the future of liberty, we are more than our grievances, and we can let them go. We need not identify with our grievances. Grievances define us when we insist they do.

And when we allow grievances to define us, authoritarians, as Eric Hoffer explained, will build illiberal mass movements.

Echoing Chesterton, we can ask, Are we the biggest threat to liberty? The mind won’t be freed, nor tyranny prevented, simply by reading the Stoics, Hume, or Harris. But right now, we can choose not to let grievances define us. As we do, we make our and humanity’s outlook just a bit brighter.