The phenomenon of children inventing imaginary friends is a well-documented and common occurrence in early childhood development. These illusory companions are often endowed with idealized features, representing perfection in both character and behaviour. They serve as companions, like Marvel comic book superheroes in a fantasy world; but as children grow and begin to form relationships with real peers, this phase of fanciful play typically fades to the background as reality comes to the fore.
In contrast to children, adults do not fashion fake friends; but we do engage in the construction of grand ideals on a macrocosmic scale. Rather than ideal companions, adults often conceive pristine societies—utopias in which human existence is perfected, where absolute harmony with nature and humanity is achieved. For instance, Karl Marx, while critiquing the utopian socialists for their collectivist dreams, proposed a ‘scientific’ theory for construction of a communist society. Within it, at the highest stage of communism, we are extricated from the bondage of class distinctions, inequality, and even the state itself.
Private property, class conflicts, wars, and the very economic systems of commodity- money relations cease to exist; work is instead driven by the common good, with individuals receiving what they need from those who produce according to their abilities.
This utopian vision was however not without stipulations. To achieve such an ideal society, Marx envisioned a global dictatorship of the proletariat; a transitional phase in which the working class would shape the unconscious masses into a new kind of human being— one so exemplary as to be reminiscent of Platonic Forms.
The new human being in Marxist utopia would embody an ideal, perfect in nature, harmony, and cooperation. For many, this vision of society is more dystopian than utopian. History records that those who resisted this transformation were quickly deleted—both metaphorically and literally—as the march toward communism pressed onward. The tragic consequences of this pursuit were felt most acutely in the former Soviet Union, where ordinary citizens, caught in the throes of communist ideology, cynically referred to their political and ideological leaders as “Kremlin dreamers”.
The impulse to imagine and construct ideal forms is regrettably unconfined to left-wing ideologies. On the right side of the spectrum, anarcho-capitalists also envision an ideal society—albeit one rooted in fundamentally different principles. Here, the state has no place. All property is privately owned, including what are typically seen as public goods like roads, police forces, and military services. Society functions entirely through voluntary exchange, where individuals produce, trade, and compete in an unfettered free market. Conflict is minimized, proponents argue, through adherence to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), ensuring peaceful cooperation.
Despite its theoretical coherence, this ideal society has never existed, and so it remains uncertain how well it might actually function. Nonetheless, many find the concept of anarcho -capitalism captivating and even claim that it presents a worthy ideal. However, this vision too encounters a basic obstacle—namely, human nature. Its success demands a new kind of human being, one who fully respects the property of others, who tolerates differing values and beliefs, and strictly adheres to the NAP. Those who own and serve in private police forces or armies must behave like noble knights, not exploiting their power for personal gain. Likewise, community leaders must refrain from using public means to justify their own ends. The theory of anarcho-capitalism is a fascinating intellectual exercise, but the reality of human existence does not even approach such an ideal. Despite this, many anarcho-capitalist theorists have chosen the convenient policy of criticizing everything and everyone from their ivory tower. First of all, the state gets the brunt, especially due to its two main actions: intervention in the economy and military aggression.
We can agree with such criticism in principle. Any rational libertarian understands all of the negative down-stream consequences of state intervention in the economy. There are no differences of opinion here amongst advocates of the free market economy. There are however troubling exceptions when the economy must give in to political expedients, such as the security of society as a whole. Wars and pandemics are two obvious such cases.
When it comes to military aggression, the situation should be clear—the NAP provides a straightforward guide for how a society or state should behave in international relations. Libertarians are justified in criticizing government for engaging in aggressive, unjust wars; as well as conflicts with unclear goals or uncertain criteria for what defines victory. Conversely, if a nation becomes a victim of aggression, then it has the right to defend itself by all necessary means—including Israel. In such cases, the NAP takes a back seat until peace is restored.
The situation becomes more complex when other nations are engaged in conflicts, and anarcho-capitalists remain bystanders. In these instances, their stance often involves critiquing their own government for offering military or financial aid to other nations. Regarding the warring nations themselves, opinions vary depending on personal sympathies and preferences. While anarcho-capitalists might first condemn the governments involved for violating the NAP, they do not always take the time to determine which side is the aggressor and which is the victim.
One example of this aggressor vs victim dichotomy is being framed in the context of free speech. I think that we need to update the metaphors we use around free speech. Everyone can see that our communication tools and practices are swiftly evolving, with a mix of welcome and unwelcome results; but there is an aspect of this change that is seriously under appreciated. Our communication tools and practices are increasingly subject to standardizing and homogenizing pressures. We are being corralled into a narrower range of devices and methods for talking to each other. We need to actively strategize about how to deal with the threat that this homogenization poses to our abilities as creative, reflective, thinkers.
First of all, we need to recognize the threat.
The prevailing moral metaphor in free speech discourse—namely, the marketplace of ideas—inadvertently desensitizes us to this threat. This metaphor invites us to worry primarily about authorities controlling the ideological content of public communication. At the same time, it analogically portrays homogenization in our methods of communication as something benign or even good. We need a new metaphor that frames this homogenization as something that is worrisome and problematic.
Cities are more liveable when they are connected, when they have an integrated mix of trains, cars, buses, cycling routes, and walking paths providing a diversity of locomotive conveniences. Similarly, societies are more liveable if they enable us to use a variety of idea- transmission media with diverse communicative modes to express ourselves: formats such as text or voice, stylistic options, breadths of audience, and tempos of exchange. We should be able to freely exchange ideas and information, subject to reasonable caveats; but we should not be content with this measure of freedom. We should also be free to exchange ideas using a heterogenous repertoire of media and methods, suited to various purposes. We should have a connected city of ideas.
J.S. Mill’s writing inspired the marketplace of ideas metaphor, which has become dead dogma of the kind that Mill foresaw as inhibiting our mental vitality. If we want to carry the free speech tradition’s underlying ideals forward and refashion liberal society, then we need interpretive lenses with a deeper focal point than is offered by the marketplace metaphor. We require lenses orienting our gaze toward problems that Mill in the 19th century and the lawmakers who implemented his ideals in the 20th, could not yet forecast.
By pitting the connected city metaphor against the marketplace of ideas, I do not insist that the latter is the best of currently available options. I target the marketplace metaphor mainly because it is so ubiquitous, so influential. At the same time, I disagree with critics who regard it as a totally hollow or disingenuous piece of rhetoric. I still believe that it has some enduring merit as a highlighting device.
What the free speech debate really illustrates is that many of the most significant and acrimonious disputes in modern society arise from conflicting cultural visions. These conflicts appear to be much more stark, if not vicious, in the past half century, and the reason may lie in a subtle but significant distinction in the understanding of rights.
It is at least arguable that up until about a century ago, the ultimate end and purpose of rights was happiness. This may be inferred from the 1776 American Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson asserts one of the unalienable rights of people as ‘the pursuit of happiness’:
The right was to ‘pursue’ and the object was ‘happiness’. This assertion echoed the views of John Locke, who wrote that “a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness” was the foundation of liberty. The idea of happiness in the late 18th century was somewhat nebulous. Philosophical consideration of the term dates back at least to Ancient Greece, and most likely to the time when we first developed the ability to have ideas.
The notion of happiness in written thought originally referenced good fortune, or luck. The English word ‘happiness’ comes from the Old Norse word “happ”, meaning ‘chance’, ‘good luck’. English words reflecting the same origin include ‘perhaps’, meaning ‘there is a chance’, and ‘haphazard’, meaning characterized by randomness and chance.
The relationship between rights and happiness in Western thought evolved with the Judeo-Christian notion that the ultimate goal of life and fulfilling the purpose of life depended on volitional acts. Happiness—especially the concept of eternal happiness— assumed human agency to make choices. The idea of happiness as a contented or prosperous life contingent only upon luck grew to accommodate the notion that human happiness was related to ethical and moral conduct.
Other ethical systems certainly had similar views of happiness, but there is no question that the founders of nations like the U.S., Canada, and Australia were heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian values of Western civilization. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 even declared that “the happiness of a people...depends on piety, religion, and morality.”
Two centuries ago, happiness was understood to mean physical and spiritual well- being, and that we were endowed by God with rights essential to our needs. The point is that happiness was associated with the good. Religious notions of eternal damnation—the conceptual opposite of happiness—were inextricably linked with sin and iniquity.
These conceptions of happiness and rights reflected contemporary beliefs about the nature of mankind and pre-requisites to a meaningful life. These naturally assumed that the ultimate goal of rights was happiness. This assumption has however changed over the past century, coinciding with waning religious influence and the rise of post-modern theory. Today, there is a significant political and philosophical movement asserting that the ultimate goal and purpose of rights is pleasure.
Now, pleasure is not in and of itself objectionable. It is associated with almost all of the activities necessary to continue individual life, including perpetuation of the species. Hedonism is one of the oldest and most straightforward ethical doctrines; but not all pleasures are equal, either in their distribution or consequences. That happiness and pleasure are distinct can be observed in the common experiences in which a person can be unhappy but still experience pleasure, or be happy and yet feel pain.
Pleasure and happiness are not exclusive. Happiness typically and legitimately involves experiencing pleasure. However, there are distinctions between the two which are significant when undifferentiated pleasure is used as the basis of rights enforced by the state. The distinction between happiness and pleasure as the ultimate goal of rights is important, since happiness is still associated with what is ultimately good for an individual or community, but pleasure need not be.
The pursuit of pleasure can lead to desirable outcomes, including procreation, economic and technological progress, and artistic masterpieces. It can also lead to destructive and socially corrosive outcomes. Drug addicts pursue pleasure through means that routinely cause misery, social burdens and death. Pleasure related to certain eccentric sexual activities leads to promiscuity, infidelity, degradation, and disease. Pleasure is thus an unreliable guide to pursuit of a meaningful life, and a tenuous basis for the assertion of rights. Recognizing rights to those pleasures that are objectively harmful and exploitive undermines the very pillars of civil society.
Man’s Search for Meaning is an exploration of how we may find meaning in the most unusual places—even the infamous Nazi concentration camps. Dr. Viktor Frankl describes his lessons learned as a Holocaust survivor, and how such experiences shaped his understanding of meaning as something completely detached from pleasure. The will to meaning, his iconic Logotherapy, and the true meaning of life are all masterfully explained by Frankl.
Conventional thinking about the meaning of life usually involves a life-long task that is unchanging. If we find meaning in becoming a musician, it is assumed that we practice constantly. The same goes for writers, artists, and entrepreneurs alike. Frankl’s idea of meaning is a bit different, however. Rather than sticking to one objective meaning, Frankl argues that meaning is not only subjective but ever-changing. In order to live a meaningful life, we must identify what is meaningful to us each moment. There is a kind of mindfulness to meaning—a level of focused attention where we must focus on identifying what we find meaningful.
So how do we find meaning?
According to Frankl, it is not through pleasure. It is simply a shift in perspective.
When pondering our meaning, we often ask ourselves the question of meaning. The problem of meaning is more easily solved when we reverse the question as if it is being asked of us instead. As Frankl puts it:
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of is life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he so is being asked. In a word, each man is questioned by his life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible. Thus Logotherapy sees in responsibility the very essence of human existence....what man actually needs is not a painless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”
If the condition of life is to suffer, then the meaning of life is to do what is meaningful to us, despite this condition. For Frankl, it was just that simple. The pursuit of pleasure is thus antithetical to this concept of what constitutes a meaningful life. It is neutral from the perspective of individual and societal well-being. Hence, using it as the basis of rights invites scenarios where one person’s pursuit of personal pleasure may infringe upon the rights and wellbeing of others, and of society as a whole. This generates conditions under which claims of right, such as to unrestricted drug use, euthanasia, clandestine conversations with minors undermining parental authority, and bodily mutilation for sexual fetishes, are asserted even though they may lead to disaster—exploitation, degradation of the inherent value of life, societal decay, immiseration and subjugation of others.
Expanding the purpose of rights to include transient pleasures that exploit others inevitably leads to a self-negating concept of rights and to our current cultural discord. Rights of free speech and association are subordinated to demands that virtually any behaviour involving puerile indulgence be not only accommodated but also endorsed as a matter of human rights.
The differences in treating happiness as the purpose of rights and treating pleasure as such is illustrated in that there is a word for extreme indulgence in bodily pleasures— debauchery. It would be quite remarkable to learn that one has a right to as much happiness as possible, but scandalous and even depraved to demand that government enforce a human right to debauchery. The adoption of pleasure as a guiding principle also shows up in other areas of public discourse. Once pleasure is established as a goal of rights, any denial of pleasure can be treated as oppression. This reinforces the clumsy postmodern philosophy which now subverts and perverts much of Western Civilization.
The idea that happiness, i.e. general well being resulting from moral and virtuous living, was the ultimate goal and purpose of rights has slowly been abandoned over the last several generations. This is not the result of persuasive appeals to reason or evolving notions of fairness of decency; rather, the rationale is that a significant portion of society has taken the foundations of our civilization and culture for granted.
It is because we have assumed that prosperity and societal well-being are our birthrights, and that we can trade the virtues and disciplines they require for transient pleasures. This is not a mere philosophical abstraction; but rather a fundamental characteristic affecting the type of society that we will bequeath to future generations.
This then is the challenge faced by each of us: whether to pursue a version of happiness which simply avoids pain and seeks pleasure; or to adopt a concept of meaning that calls us to embrace struggle and to accept that we were born for such a time as this, when literally everything worth saving hangs in the balance.
Christians who believe that we should avoid politics—even voting—need to reflect upon the Old Testament story of Esther. She rose from a lowly woman in the court of King Xerxes to influencing the entire Hebrew nation. She humbly struggled, accepting the weighty responsibility presented to her by God at an extremely critical, life-and-death moment—not only for she and her family, but also for every Jew living in the kingdom.
It is from the life of Esther that we derive the phrase “born for such a time as this”. Esther saw herself not only as a Jew but also as one with access to the king. She was prepared to risk her own execution to speak truth to power by approaching Xerxes with a vital plea. An evil man named Haman had twisted the truth about the Jews living in the kingdom and hatched a plot to turn Xerxes against them. Certain genocide awaited the Jewish people—unless someone stepped into the gap to save them. Esther was one seemingly insignificant person, but her boldness in doing God’s will made her influential.
By embracing the burden of responsibility when it came, she not only spared her people but also changed the course of history against the malevolent enemies of her day. Xerxes was alerted to the true mendacity that Haman had brought to the kingdom, and immediately rectified the situation. Haman and his wicked followers ultimately suffered the very annihilation they planned for the Jews.
Has evil not permeated our homeland land today? And is there an Esther around to set the wheels in motion to save all of our God-fearing people?
Donald Trump, in his own inimitable way, has applied the phrase ‘born for such a time as this” to himself, and has been accused by some as being arrogant; but each of us should be able to state this with humility. God has chosen to create us for the here-and-now and granted us the freedom to either follow or forsake Him. God is infallible. He does not make mistakes. Thus, each of us, just like Esther, were ‘born for such a time as this’. All of us, whether we follow the God of the Bible or not, have a unique opportunity to accept great responsibility and thereby make a difference in the lives of others.
God reveals His existence and truth to those who choose to keep our eyes open. He loves us, and remains involved in human affairs. Countries like ours were established under the Rule of Law. We have the power to vote into office representatives who carry out our needs and desires. As Christians, we have citizens both in heaven and on Earth. God has raised up all of us to freely govern ourselves:
“Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” (Romans 13:1)
Our governments were established constitutionally, and not be controlled by elites through an unelected bureaucracy or Deep State. It is we who are the true governing authorities. We must all therefore take this role seriously. As followers of this amazing God, we must take up the struggle in what He is doing. We “make our plans” and “God will direct our steps.” (Proverbs 16:9). Such is the only path to a meaningful life, to true happiness.
Things certainly could have turned out differently for Esther. After all, we are also told in Scripture that “the battle belongs to the Lord.” God could have chosen to let the Hebrew people suffer a terrible fate; but the prayers and courage of this one righteous woman turned out to be “powerful and effective”.
Surely, life offers us no guarantees; but perhaps, with even just a remnant of faithful Christians and Jews praying—and voting and campaigning and speaking out—we might witness the advent of the kind of nation described so eloquently in the Psalms:
For our part, we must be guided by the Spirit and make the most of this one life which God has granted to each of us, because we know at this critical juncture in history that we were all ‘born for such a time as this.’
