I took a walk on the streets of San Francisco yesterday. It was Christmas day. I don’t hold much emotional attachment to the day, let alone religious one and I find the mandatory shopping sprees absurd. It would have been a day like any other had it not emptied the streets of the majority of it’s usual tenants, who were most likely celebrating Christmas at home somewhere in suburbia.
That void was filled with extra waves of homeless and insane people. Walking on Market street, the main avenue of San Francisco going straight through financial district, there seemed to have been more homeless and crazy people than the ones who were not. A lot of them murmuring to themselves, shouting at passers by, asking for money. I must have gotten asked for change at least twenty times on this short stroll. A lot of these people seemed like they simply needed treatment in a mental institution. But nobody made them go, let alone pay for the treatment. They should. Society should.
A society should be judged on how it treats its weakest members. These people on the streets hold a mirror to the American society. If its citizens see the real picture, not the one filled with empty rhetoric of “greatest nation on Earth”, the picture is deeply disturbing. I’m not saying we don’t have homeless people in Slovenia or Europe in general. Of course we do and we should all strive to do better, nut nowhere in my travels in Europe have I seen homeless and ill on the streets on a scale such as here. Mind you, United States are supposed to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world. They rank 7th in GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity. So the lack of means surely isn’t a problem, the ideology and the lack of will emanating from it are.
One of the core tenants of American ideology is freedom. It’s the buzzword of political campaigns. They export their concept of freedom worldwide, along with a host of other ideological underpinnings. Who could be against it? Freedom is always good and an end it itself, right? It’s not that simple and here’s how the American perception of it goes horribly wrong.
Freedom can be divided into negative and positive freedom. Negative and positive are not value judgments, but simply terms for different types of freedom. Negative freedom means freedom from something. Freedom from oppression, control, the freedom to do what you like, go wherever, speak whatever. It’s more focused on the individual.
Positive freedom however, usually comes from being part of a community, collective and the possibility of self-realisation in that community. It provides us with freedoms that come with a communal life, life in a society. We forfeit some of our negative freedoms in exchange for positive ones by living in a society. We give up our negative freedom in exchange for living in a society being protected by laws and other social norms.
To give a banal example, we could have the negative freedom to kill other people, but as societies can’t function that way, we have made social norms and laws deeming that unacceptable, and for forfeiting that negative freedom we get the positive freedom of being protected by those same norms and laws against us getting killed. Another example could be giving up the freedom of having sex with whoever for the benefits of a family life (nothing personal against polygamous arrangements, simply giving an average societal example :)). For more reading on positive and negative freedom (or liberty) check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and of course, Wikipedia.
How does that relate to the homeless people on the streets of San Francisco? Well there’s always a balance between negative and positive freedoms. Shift towards the extremes of negative freedoms and you get a Hobbesian world of “Homo homini lupus est“, meaning men being wolves to fellow men, a world of constant conflict among egotistic individuals. Shift towards the extremes of positive freedoms and you get a collectivist society where individual freedoms are trampled for the supposed benefits of the collective, sort of an Orwellian 1984 dystopian world.
The problem with American society is that it perceives freedom mostly according to the definition of negative freedom. The individualistic sense is very strong and that precludes the establishment of more community based mechanisms which would generate positive freedoms for its citizens. Positive freedoms emanating from solidarity and even long term self-interest, like guaranteeing people free education and healthcare. Picking up mentally ill people from the streets, curtailing some of their negative freedoms in exchange for the positive freedoms of care and being an active member of society.
On the other hand, American focus on negative freedoms has had some benefits in helping to produce a vibrant and dynamic economy. After all, I am here, raising funding for our enterprise, because there is a vibrant technology and investment ecosystem here. But that ecosystem exists as much as a result of negative freedoms of enterprise free from disruptions, as of the positive freedoms of establishing a legal framework of fair competition and society actively investing in its development (Silicon Valley can trace a lot of its roots to government military research).
My point in all of this is that the United States have missed the balance and lean too much towards the negative freedoms. The result are homeless people on the streets and a host of other issues who would not have to exist on such as scale had some more pragmatic reason been applied. The loss of some negative freedoms could be minimal compared to the positive freedoms gained. American people are being presented a false choice of freedom versus no freedom. Cling to outdated or misunderstood 18th century ideals at your own peril.
[...] a new appreciation for the work of Adam Smith. The topic is deeply connected with my recent article Freedom from freedom, on how the US is ideologically trapped in misinterpreted 18th century ideology. Share this [...]