I tend to believe that philosophical differences boil down to differences in terms of values, of which none is better than the other since they are essentially assumptions about the nature of our world. The conflict between primitivism and liberalism serves as a fine example:

When I speak as a liberal, one of the most wonderful things about this world is the number of choices we have. In this modern world, our economy is so advanced that millions of people can live within the same, relatively small, area. These technological advances are the natural product of a liberal economy and one of the advantages is that I, as an individual, have access to so many different people that I can easily find specific types of people and thus associate with a human subculture of my choice. This allows me more freedom to shape my life how I want it to be shaped. Yes, we are all limited by external factors, some of which are imposed by our society, some of which are imposed by reality, but, in the end, we have greater control over our lives than we have ever had. We are not limited to a few sources of food, to the people in our village and to “survival” as our main job.

However, this perspective conflicts with another: yes, it is true that we can now shape our social surroundings with more ease than before, but this may destroy the natural balance of personalities that we may find in villages. In the past, just like we do not choose our family today, we did not choose anything about our social surroundings. We were born in a random village and that’s where we grew up and died. Even nomads would usually remain with the same group of humans. What happens in a modern, liberal society is that — if I am to use such crude language to describe people — “intelligent” people will leave the “village” to form a subculture with like-minded people, leaving the village without “intelligent” people. The same goes for different personality types. Thus, while this may be of benefit to “intelligent” people who crave interactions of a certain level, the village gets deprived of its share of “intelligent” people. The same goes for its natural chiefs, natural shamans, natural strongmen etc and it is, in the end, wholly abandoned as we are all stratified by liberalism and its efficiency. People who work in factories tend to frequent people who work at jobs of a similar nature. The same goes for people who work in law, in the arts, in farming and so forth.

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Let’s consider these words by Winston Churchill:

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

I would not extend this to the economic systems of capitalism and socialism, but still, it holds a certain truth:

Something that is too often ignored is the value of wealth inequalities within human societies, at least at some point in their histories. It does cause certain problems that we should most definitely be aware of, but it also offers certain advantages that could not be gained without it and progress — by any definition I am aware of — would never have been possible without relying on wealth inequalities.

For example, we can consider Socrates, who is often used as the symbol of Western philosophy. We are told that he was an eccentric man who would walk around Athens and ask men difficult questions that might otherwise seem simple. We are all familiar with the concept of “justice”, for example, but if someone came to you, asking what “justice” was, could you really explain it in an intelligible manner?

Now, the reason that Socrates could spend his free time doing such things was precisely due to wealth inequalities. Athens was only a great place to live for the minority of its population — the rest were slaves. We can speak of equality all we want, but the choice we must make here is between a society where everyone is forced to spend all their free time working to survive or a society where these people share the burden of supporting a minority class of people, who, for mostly arbitrary reasons (such as the achievements of their ancestors), do not need to work much to ensure their survival. Most of this class, like most humans, are trivial creatures dedicated to no more than the pursuit of worldly pleasures. However, in this class, again like in the rest of humanity, there will be, by chance, some who will have the potential to innovate in the realm of art and philosophy. Thanks to wealth inequalities, these people will have been taught to write and read, they will have access to books and they will have plenty of free time, all of which can simply not be offered to every individual within a society with little technology.

Today, thanks to technological advances, we can afford to provide this opportunity to everyone. We still need to work, but it is not a burden so heavy that we have no time to educate ourselves or refine our art. However, these technological advances were in large part brought to us by men who benefited from wealth inequalities, especially once we look further back in our history.

It no longer makes sense for us to have a system of entrenched wealth inequalities, but in the past it did and this is something that we should keep in mind when looking at history as well as our modern world.

Such ideas might seem blasphemous, like spit upon the idealism that unites both liberal and socialist, but, ultimately, what must reign is what must work. Ideologies are useful tools in forming a coherent society, but attempts to define a single true ideology that is effective and moral for all cultures through all periods of time is, at best, an achievement that we are no closer to than the theory of everything in physics. The truth seems to be that such despicable things (to us, Westerners) as child labour and entrenched wealth inequalities do have a perfectly valid functions in certain contexts, which also happen to be the contexts where they arise. As for when they are no longer needed, well: it is there that the fight must begin, and, hopefully, end.

- Dussault

(recommended Artist: Karsh Kale – Distance)

REMINDER: I use “liberal” in the original sense of the term, so those who identify liberalism as “the left” — a mistake common in the United States and English Canada — should perhaps see it as being roughly (roughly) equivalent to “libertarianism” or “classical liberalism”. Read more about this detailhere (though I see liberalism a bit differently than the author of that page).

Reminder #2: This is a bit of a rant.

I have an issue with people who spout ideological garbage about individual rights and refuse to go further than that when looking at issues. Individual rights goes just as much for the person who wants to own a pit bull as the person wanting to paint his house pink; as the person wanting grow opium poppy in his backyard as the person wanting to dress as he wants; as the person wanting to masturbate on his front lawn as the person who wants to drive without a seatbelt; as the person who wants to have an abortion as the person who wants to own a gun; as the person who wants to live in a shaky house as the person who wants to let his grass grow tall.

It is extremely easy to argue in favour of each of these cases from an “individual liberty”, “personality responsibility” standpoint; such liberalism, stripped down to its core, makes individuals the sole agents responsible for their what they do to themselves and on their properties; and even, to a certain extent, on public property (such as dressing as one wants and perhaps such as walking naked in public).

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