Hey dear freedom lovers
The other day I was thinking about my journey of becoming a libertarian and would like to share my thoughts with you. To start with the reason: It was minimalism. Let me explain.
Ever since I was a child, I have had the habit of collecting my possessions around me, organising them and occupying myself with them. In the beginning, I wanted to have as much as possible and hoard everything around me in my small “kingdom”. Over time, I realised that this was a very tedious task. At the latest when my parents admonished me to finally tidy up my things, I clearly felt the burden of owning so many things.
As a reaction to this, I decided to give away everything I didn’t really need. Everything that I wouldn’t use very often or that I had a particularly strong emotional attachment to, I cleared out with my parents about once a year and took it to a collection centre.
This ritual has accompanied me through my life ever since and is by far no longer limited to real objects. It is now much more about software tools, ideologies or even political principles. The latter raises the question for me: What does it really take for a society to function well? What is the core, what is the essence that is sufficient to enable everyone to live the best possible life?
For me, the answer is clear: if everyone has the absolute freedom to do with their lives what they think is right without interfering with the freedom of others, then the prerequisites for a good life together are given. Everything else can be deduced from this and can safely go to the collection centre.
The latter raises the question for me: What does it really take for a society to function well? What is the core, what is the essence that is sufficient to enable everyone to live the best possible life?
The answer to this necessitates a high degree of contextual dependence. It depends on what one believes is the purpose of the state, and what they think is a “well functioning society”. To answer such a question with certainty, I would argue, is to believe in moral absolutism, rather than moral relativism – to be completely fair, however, I don’t think that I would say that libertarianism is mutually exclusive with moral absolutism, but it does change the framework of the question that you are asking. I would argue that libertarianism, itself doesn’t provide exact answers to such questions, but is, instead, a collection of ideals that seek to maximize one’s level of freedom under the state. True, it can be said that, for it to be inline with liberalism, it must have, at the bare minimum, an acknowledgement of one’s fundamental rights, but I would not go so far as to argue that this is the sole answer to “What is a properly functioning society?”, or “What is sufficient to ensure that everyone lives their best possible life?”. That being said, the best answer to the latter, I would argue, does seem to be the existence of a competitive free market.
Exactly, freedom isn’t gonna make the world better per se but it gives the people the opportunity to form their lifes after their ideals. Libertarianism guarantees that no others freedoms are harmed so everyone can interact without much friction.
What is your story?
