Freedom and the Psychology of Ideological Consumption

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In studying freedom one encounters a number of surprising paradoxes.

Liberalism is being refuted by freedom.

Freedom thrives in the absence of vocal champions of her cause.

Liberalism reveals an in-built illiberality.

In this post, I discuss the surprising observation that the louder and the more ardent people advocate freedom, the less interest they exhibit in looking closer at the phenomenon, let alone subject it to in-depth scrutiny.

The "trumpets of freedom," or the "whistles of freedom" - my allusion to the practice of German unionists to blow whistles to viscerally rather than intellectually express their strong "views" - fall silent when deeper issues of freedom challenge the stereotypes at the bottom of their political identity.

They are consumers of an ideology. Their minds are too inelastic to deal with new ideas, making them barren and often rather unpleasant interlocutors for the open-minded.  

When faced with sophisticated and well-grounded challengers the typical sequence of reaction is - in this sequence:

• first, surprise, 

• then an immediate willingness to defend by attack (mostly verbally, but also physically, if one considers cadence, loudness and other bodily signs of aggression), 

• next they appeal to ideological stereotypes, 

• finally they discontinue debate, only to retreat to their peer group, to their reassuring scriptures and sectarian rites of self-affirmation.

I have never met a vocal "lover of freedom" who was willing to engage with me in a sustained, long-term discussion of heterodox findings concerning the nature of freedom.

Do not discuss freedom with them, they are not interested in her. They want to feel safe, and safety means to them acquiring a sense of being comprehensively right and morally competent to such an extent as to qualify as the authoritative umpire on all the contentious issues they choose to debate. It does not seem to ever occur to them that liberty may be the source of countless indeterminacies and undecidable or naturally contentious issues, that, in fact, liberty has the purpose of letting out such uncertainties rather then pretending they do not afflict us.

Being a lover of freedom often seems to involve a double exercise in  self-enhancement by

• (a) premature complexity reduction (claiming more unique conclusions than can actually be drawn from certain premisses), and

• (b) moral elevation based on collective resonance effects resulting largely from being cheered for by fellow-believers.

Lovers of freedom are artisans of selective perception. Their cognitive energies are preponderantly dedicated to propping up fantasies, most notably the ardently sought invulnerability of their ideological dykes and the precariously low lying polders behind a furious ocean of infidelity. Their commitment to building a fortress sheltered against corrective criticism implies that strategies of camouflage and beguilement dominate over strategies of verisimilitude. The whole enterprise is akin to erecting a dam and constantly stuffing the leaks in it, rather than opening it and swimming out into the sea. 

Among the things that fellow lovers of liberty have in common is the systematic blinding out of aspects that are considered to be and/or actually are an embarrassment to the central premisses, arguments and conclusions (which may well be non-derivable from the premisses) of the ideology one holds.

Among them, perhaps the most popular strategy of unwarranted complexity reduction comes in the shape of wielding together premisses and conclusions that do not truly correspond to one another, which ruse may take the form of straightforward logical error (non-sequiturs etc.), but probably far more often, it is achieved by ignoring or avoiding to recognise "intermediary conditions" - empirical conditions - that cast doubt concerning the correctness of the deductive link between the premisses and the conclusions.

Arguments for liberty are variegated and large in number, many of which many being characterised by complexity reduction and self-enhancement, and subject to criticisms of the errors inherent in (a) and (b) above. Unsurprisingly, arguments for and postures in favour of freedom are regarded by many as faulty, and even dishonourably faulty. This creates strong presumptions against the reputability of freedom. In brief, the ideologicalisation of freedom (and themes associated with her) engenders  forces opposed to freedom.

Freedom lovers create resistance to freedom, which, however, may result in less ideological and better arguments in favour of freedom.

So here we have yet another paradox of freedom. Bad arguments for freedom may incite resistance to freedom, which, in turn, may force better accommodations to the conditions of freedom than are to be had by purist-ideological "attempts at liberty." The denial and resistance toward one form of freedom is capable of bringing about a higher quality of feasible freedom.