On Independence

 July 4, 2024.  Independence Day.  This morning, I write of the concept of independence.  On July 4, 1776, the founding fathers of the United States of America declared independence, and Thomas Jefferson's statement of principle stands as a testament, like few historical documents, to unifying principles of timeless philosophy.  Truth is universal and invariant, by definition.  Moral truth, philosophical truth, and empirical truth all follow that rule.  We seek truth, and apply methods that approach it asymptotically when we cannot derive it absolutely, but we seek truth.  And we do not deny truth when we read it.

We normally read the Declaration of Independence as a statement of political philosophy and place it in historical context.  We of positive disposition read the document in good faith.  We see Jefferson and his contemporaries as humans-- flawed as all humans are-- who moved history in the direction of the principles that he stated, but which he failed to meet.  We observe the principles of the document, the process of history, and see everything in context.  This morning, I waste no words with those of bad faith.

Instead, I consider the broader principle of independence.  Whose independence?  From whom?  Of what?  The prefix, in- negates that which follows.  To be independent is the opposite of the state of being dependent.  To be dependent, then, raises the question of who is dependent on whom, and for what?

The Declaration of Independence was a statement that the Americans were independent of England and the Crown.

Let us examine more closely.

Perhaps you have noticed a certain focus, of late, on the notion of "colonialism."  Words have meaning.  Colonialism was a system in which a country sent its own government to a foreign land, regardless of whether or not that land was inhabited, and set up its own branch office there, so to speak.  If the land was inhabited, too bad, sucks for you, we are now in charge of your television set, we control the horizontal and the vertical, and no, I am not updating my references.

Why do it?  (The colonialism thing, not the reference updating thing.)  The country engaged in the colonial enterprise does so for the purposes of resource extraction under a pre-capitalist system called mercantilism.  Perhaps you have heard the ill-informed claim that colonialism and capitalism are intertwined.  They are not.  Capitalism defeated colonialism.  Indeed, capitalism was the economic system first derived in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, published in... wait for it... [fife-and-drum roll]... 1776.

Fact-check me.

Colonialist endeavors operated under the pre-capitalist system called mercantilism, which Smith thought was moronic.  How does mercantilism work?

Badly.  [Ba-dum-bum.  Toot-toot!]

Briefly, the difference in theory is that capitalism is an economic system based on economic non-intervention and voluntary exchange.  The core principle is that when exchanges are voluntary, the result is positive-sum.  Everyone involved gains.  When I buy a candle, in the somewhat dated reference, I prefer the candle to the money, and the candlestick maker prefers the money to the candle, so we are both better off from the voluntary exchange.  We both win.  That is the core of capitalism.

Mercantilism presumes that economics are all zero-sum.  All transactions have a winner and a loser.  Whoever gets the most gold at the end, wins.  Everything, then, is a resource extraction model, in which you find the resources around the world, set up colonial governments, prohibit the colonies from trading outside your mercantilist network, set the terms of the trades, and use those rules to direct all of the resources back to your home country from the colony.

Now, take that brief description and compare it to Jefferson's list of grievances against England in the Declaration of Independence.  Many of the complaints were complaints against mercantilism.  As for example, "For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:"

Indeed, the most famous/infamous examples of colonial exploitation were always mercantilist, never capitalist.

Capitalism is definitionally voluntary.  Anything extractive, anything that applies force is not capitalist, by definition.  Capitalism is not "evil money system, bad corporations, evil evil evil."  Yes, I know that's what modern leftists and too many college students now think and say, and to a large extent, that is the failure of my profession, the professoriate, because most professors are mindlessly uneducated ideologues.  Words have meaning, "capitalism" has a definition, and that's not it.

So I return to my question.  Dependence.  Who was dependent on whom?

In a sense, in the mercantilist sense, England was dependent on the colonies.  That is why it used force to keep the colonies.  It needed them.  Colonialist powers are the dependent ones, economically speaking.  That's why the system doesn't work.

Yet that is not how we think of "Independence Day."  Were the colonies "dependent" on England, in any sense?

Liberty and responsibility are two sides of the same coin.  You cannot have one without the other.  You cannot have liberty without the responsibility to care for yourself, and you cannot be saddled with the responsibility for any task without the liberty to make the decisions necessary to carry out that task.  The two are inseparable.

But while one sounds awesome, the other scares a lot of people.

Funny, that.  Consider the etymology of "awesome."

Authoritarianism means no liberty, but it also means no responsibility.  Democracy requires liberty, and attendant responsibility.  Does that sound like a no-brainer, or a scary proposition?

Democracy, as H.L. Mencken wrote, is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard.  That is the most eloquently crass way that anyone ever described the principle of the consent of the governed.  Democracy operates by the consent of the people.

Or that's what we say.

The secret, the dirty secret, is that all systems operate by the consent of the people.  Russia is an autocratic system, but it operates by the consent of its people.  No, they do not have real elections, but if the Russian people truly denied consent, truly, Putin would be gone.  You've seen what the rabble have done to dictators and monarchs from whom they have denied consent in the past, right?  Edmund Burke approved of the American Revolution, but not the French Revolution.  The French people, the masses, denied their consent to the rule of Louis XVI.  It did not take an election, and the rules of the monarchy did not permit one.  Consent still mattered.  Just ask Louis.  Or Nicolae Ceausescu, or any number of others throughout history.

Anyone who isn't getting Louis-ed or Ceausescu-ed has the consent of the governed, at some level.

Take your pick of authoritarian governments, from the psychopathic theocracies in the Middle East to the failed state kleptocracies in South America and Africa.  Are their citizens satisfied?  No, but they are not sufficiently motivated to revolt, and that's a form of consent.  No, it's not "affirmative consent," but the world is not a college campus.  Where rights exist, there's a high likelihood that there was a war to advocate and defend those rights.

But those rights?  They come with responsibilities that you don't have if you just keep your head down.

The result of keeping your head down, over time, is no rights, but no responsibilities, because they're the same thing.  Instead of responsibilities, you are dependent.

What do the citizens of those countries have?  Freedom from responsibility.  To many, alas, that is comforting.

Of course, I don't want to live in one of those countries.  I don't want to depend.  To be independent is to be responsible for yourself, with the freedom required for that, because those two principles are the same.  Just two sides of the same coin.

Principles matter.  Independence is a concept built on personal and political principle, intertwined.  Those principles are moral and functional.  They work.  They are good, and they work.

Also, today is awesome because it's another excuse to fire up the ole' grill and live the cliche shamelessly.