The Need for SELF GOVERNING INDIVIDUALS Freedom and responsibility, as the nation is so painfully learning, are inexorably intertwined. by Freeland Chew Those who take seriously the idea that individuals are solely responsible for governing their own behavior clearly recognize the threat to both freedom and civilization inherent in a widespread failure to do so. Freedom and responsibility, as the nation is so painfully learning, are inexorably intertwined; each is a requisite complement of the other. Where one concept is lacking or distorted, the other moves directly toward extinction. For without a sense of personal responsibility, judgments about the boundary where one's freedom ends and another's begins are invariably confused and confrontational. And absent the rewards of liberty, responsibility becomes indistinguishable from servitude. The citizen who proves incapable of self-government also undermines the ability of cooperative society to regulate itself, since appreciation for the established mores necessary for a thriving civilization can hardly be maintained by those failing to respect themselves. History, from Athens and Rome to Revolutionary France and Weimar Germany, are but the most obvious proofs that once a critical mass of citizens show themselves unfit for personal responsibility, the existing social structure is inevitably sundered, with liberty one of the principal victims. Turning to the current state of affairs, concern over the lack of personal accountability in American life is certainly warranted. For one of the hallmarks of the current era is the depressing measure of self-destructive behavior loose in the world. From violent crime to the self-denigration inherent in substance abuse (including tobacco and alcohol) to outright suicide, the rising tide of self-inflicted injury signals not only personal agony but also fosters that ideology of slavery, be it religious or secular, which asserts that freedom is dangerous and must be restrained by authority — that humans released from their chains will war not only with others but on themselves as well. What is it today that causes the human animal to turn, with such mournful frequency, away from the reality of life to the morose non-existence of self-injury and dissipation, leading eventually to purposeful death? No other animal is known to commit suicide in anywhere near the number humans do — and even then science assumes illness as a significant factor. In fact, among animals as well as humans, such behavior is a defining characteristic of illness. Science is not wrong in this assumption. The conscious will to live, so unremitting throughout the animal kingdom, only underscores the abnormality of its growing absence in humans. That the destructive behavior common today is so recognized as inimical to life, and yet still continues, and even flourishes, forces the observer to seriously consider that there is some profound disorder in many modern humans — and in them alone since only they exhibit such destructive patterns of behavior. This unremitting will to live stems from living beings valuing life above all else — a value shockingly absent in people knowingly self-destructive. It is this devaluation of life that accounts for the subconscious death wish that now defiles our civilization. Quite simply, those who value their life take care of it, and those who don't, don't. In seeking the origins of this malady that strikes only what is generally assumed to be the pinnacle of earthly evolution, characteristics distinguishing humans from other animals are likely to offer the most fruitful insights. For it seems only reasonable to conclude that similarities between animals and humans will not explain so fundamental a difference in behavior as the separation between life and death. And noting that the incidence of dissipating lifestyles and disorganization of existing societies waxes and wanes throughout history, the investigator is disinclined to accept genetic or biological explanations. Several things describe differences between humans and those from whom we evolved, but most notable is the operation of the human brain. The human intellect, as far as we know, exceeds all other animals in its ability to organize perceptual inputs into abstract concepts that are retained as a foundation for further conceptualization. As such all humans, knowingly or otherwise, have a philosophy — a systematic arrangement of conceptual relationships for the organization of knowledge. That is, humans think by building increasingly complex levels of conceptual constructions, each wholly dependent on the validity of its underlying structure. If sound, this underlying structure can be logically traced all the way back down to the perceptions which the senses initially brought to the brain. But if a concept's prerequisite rudiments are ill-considered but nonetheless generally accepted, then incredibly large errors are possible. More so than any other characteristic, philosophy is what makes us human. If some members of the human race exhibit symptoms of illness that other animals do not, the first place to look for the problem is in their philosophy, rather than in opposed thumbs, or erect posture, or tools and technology. And so, to philosophy we must turn to seek insights on self-government by the individual human being. Many citizens do not value their own existence because they have been taught not to. Their philosophy, specifically the ethical constructs pounded into their brain throughout a lifetime, explicitly claims that their life, in and of itself, is of little import unless dedicated to some greater collective. Such an idea, recognizing correctly that humans are social animals, erroneously leaps to the assumption/conclusion that some abstract collective, a concept which lacks a defensible intellectual under-structure, is the primary life entity. Grasping this floating abstraction — a concept not grounded in perceptual reality — a multi-generational cavalcade of spokesmen for the collective, both religious and secular, have denied the importance of an individual's life except as mortar tasked with holding the collective together. Since the close of the pagan era, the individual human life has been often subsumed under a higher collective — first by a commitment to God, and more recently by the demands of collective Society voiced by the State, which only substitutes Society for God and then marches merrily along, convinced beyond all doubt of its righteousness. In the process, authority never misses a beat; be it a tithe for the church or a tax to support those driven into poverty, be it death for heresy or death in the cause of wars for morality. Such a construction of slavery's ethos is driven by the belief that individual humans do not know, are not capable of knowing, the reality they inhabit — that their sense perceptions are invalid; that conceptual constructions predicated on such perceptions are in error; that human knowledge * impossible. Such knowledge, depending on the theology involved, is reserved for God (revealed in ancient texts) or Society (comprehended by a democracy of all things). Believing that individuals are unable to comprehend reality and thus incapable of legitimate conceptualization, proponents of this view encounter little difficulty concluding that primary ethical concerns also cannot be concerned with the individual. In this manner, for periods measured in millennia, the individual life has been deemed but an expendable servant for the collective voice — a condition that accounts for the appalling similarity between a surging politician on the stump and the fire-and-brimstone tirade of a Baptist preacher. Both assure the congregation that a higher authority possesses the knowledge they are incapable of knowing, and thus their duty is to that authority. In the wake of such chaos inducing bunkum lies, strangely enough, a profound tribute to the strength of the human mind; that the species remains upright in the face of a multi century, counterfactual onslaught directed at the core of its existence. Naturally, little wonder is experienced that some people, although unwilling to serve God or State as a dutiful slave, fail to reject the underpinning lie that their being is worthless in itself, and thus perish in the confused void that describes the ethical no-man's-land between slavery and freedom. Given the frightening power of modern centralized information systems to frame debates, limit dissent and, through sensory domination, actually program the mind of the intellectually defenseless, that the number of people falling into the void is rapidly increasing cannot be considered surprising. With the message being rammed home in a thousand different ways: in schools, on television, in newspapers and magazines, in church, and from parents taught the same nonsense — it is inevitable that a people brought up in conditions so contradictory to their fundamental nature would experience growing disorientation, and see more and more of their number devalue their own life to the point of self destruction. Some individuals and organizations, many psychologists and the school system for example, now comprehend the shattering social consequences of such destruction of the individual psyche. All too often, however, they treat only the symptoms rather than the disease — witness the school system's recent focus on "self-esteem" while still wedded to an ideology that otherwise subverts human independence, and generally fails to assure students the lasting self-esteem best accomplished by teaching a philosophical outlook necessary to comprehend their experiences in the world. A serious flaw in such efforts toward building self esteem lies in the gestalt that views individuals as but components of a collective whole. Individuals do comprise the aggregate, of course, but more importantly they are sovereign entities in themselves. With the dominant institutions in our society concerned primarily with the collective, focused on specific citizen-subjects only insofar as they can be made to mesh, efforts directed toward the individual are structured only to "reform" or remake them so as to allow a better fit within the larger collective. Thus, the effort to confront destructive individuals' dissociation from their natural instinct to survive and grow itself contains the same philosophical malady that separates people from their natures to begin with. Human beings are individual students of existence. To the extent they voluntarily cooperate with each other, they do so because they discern gain in such activity, responsibly building social institutions in the process. Closet authoritarians who view the abstract collective as primary and definitive cannot fail to view the individual as little more than a diminutive cog in a more significant wheel. A cog to be reshaped as need be. Modification, forced and otherwise, of that individual's behavior soon follows, and in vulnerable cases denial of human nature is thus learned. It may well be that the more a given individual accepts external regulation under a collective rationale, be it religious theology or secular mobocracy, the less likely he or she is to voluntarily restrict their behavior to norms reflecting the basic structure of that particular civilization. The challenge today for the self-governing individual is to arrive at an ethical code of conduct and adhere to it regardless of whatever contrary measures might be advanced in the name of higher morality. This, of course, will eventually place the individual's integrity at odds with self-appointed voices of the Higher Good. It has always been so. Such conflict must, unfortunately, be recognized as the cost of following one's nature in a world too often dedicated to its repudiation. Only after individuals adopt such a personal code of ethical responsibility and apply that code to others will the task of building a civilization be resumed.   Bibliography: Peikoff, Leonard, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand Rand, Ayn, Philosophy: Who Needs It? Freeland Chew has his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and a Master of Science in Systems Management. He has been a student of history since the age of 12, when he discovered Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples in his father's library. It was from a serious and self-directed study of American history that he developed the individualism that characterizes his perspective on events current and past. He lives in Mammoth Lakes, California, where he and his wife own an art gallery and home school their two young daughters.