This article was excerpted from Part I of The Discovery of Freedom.

Contents:

• The Pagan Faith
• Communism
• The Living Authorities
• The Planned Economies
• War
   

The Pagan Faith

Very few men have ever known that men are free. Among this earth's population now, few know that fact.

For six thousand years at least, a majority has generally believed in pagan gods. A pagan god, whatever it is called, is an Authority which (men believe) controls the energy, the acts, and therefore the fate of all individuals.

The pagan view of the universe is that it is static, motionless, limited, and controlled by an Authority. The pagan view of man is that all individuals are, and by their nature should and must be, controlled by some Authority outside themselves.

Everyone has this belief when he is very young. A chick can scratch as soon as it is dry from the shell, and a fish emerging from the egg can swim, but a baby must be spanked before he can breathe, and then he cannot control the little energy that he has. For a long time, he will kick himself in the eye when he is only trying to taste his toes to find out what they are.

"Thou shalt not steal" is a rule as old as human society itself. It must have been, else no complex human society would have proved viable.

We are all taught very early to respect what belongs to others: "Don't take your sister's toy away from her," your mother admonished, punishing you if you persisted in your toddler's larceny. By the time you were three years old, you understood the difference between mine and thine. If you didn't take the lesson to heart and persisted beyond your childhood years in treating everybody's property as something for you to take, so long as you could get away with it, then you were viewed as a sociopath, an enemy of decency and of civilization itself.

Government as we know it, however, rests entirely on this kind of sociopathy. Rulers take what does not belong to them and dispose of it to suit themselves.

When the government has only recently placed itself in a position of domination over a group of people, the people recognize full well that the government's taking amounts to looting. They pony up only because they are given the stark choice of "your money or your life," and they want to go on living.

This work was originally presented as an address before the Mont Pelerin Society at St. Moritz, Switzerland, on September 4, 1957.

There are times when one’s humility seems to go on vacation, as it did, for me when Profes­sor Hayek proposed: tackling this topic for dis­cussion. Then later when reality returned to plague the victim, there ended a beautiful, balmy sense of well-being during which all had seemed perfectly clear and simple; during which the topic of liberty—its meaning and philosophic base—posed no apparent problem of a serious nature; during which, at first blush, it seemed almost trite to presume to dwell on the obvious.

But is the meaning of liberty so clear and simple?

Were a stranger to observe the nature of the Mont Pelerin Society and note its convening for this decennial occasion, would he not be surprised to find us devoting an entire session to the meaning of liberty—the word perhaps more basic than any other to the original purpose of the Society? Might he not expect this to have been a matter resolved with essentially unanimous agreement at the outset of our Societal associa­tion together? The fact that it has not been thus resolved seems to me to reflect the lack of any clear agreement as to the meaning of liberty; apparently it is something not so clear and simple. We use this beloved word in our communication with one another and assume an understanding that apparently is not there.

A good example of this collectivist mindset is the use of government to perform acts of charity. Most people believe that we all have a responsibility to help others in need if we can, but what about those who disagree, those who couldn’t care less about the needs of others? Should they be allowed to be selfish while we are so generous?

There are many words commonly used today to describe political attitudes. We are told that there are conservatives, liberals, libertarians, progressives, right-wingers, left-wingers, socialists, communists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Fascists, Nazis; and if that isn’t confusing enough, now we have neo conservatives, neo Nazis, and neo everything else. When we are asked what our political orientation is, we are expected to choose from one of these words. If we don’t have a strong political opinion or if we’re afraid of making a bad choice, then we play it safe and say we are moderates – adding yet one more word to the list.