Freedom and/or Democracy?

In April, 2009, during the Obama Honeymoon, when all the nation’s problems seemed to be behind us, an obscure billionaire, Peter Thiel, wrote a little noticed, but revolutionary, article for the Cato Institute. Safe to say, Mr. Thiel is obscure no more!  Let’s sample:

“I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual…”

Hold on, Death and Taxes! Abolish both? If I’m not mistaken, the last sane person to promote such an agenda in earnest went by the name of Jesus.

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Bomb shell! From Kindergarten on, American children are taught that ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ are synonymous. Of course, they’re not! A popular assembly can be just as repressive as any hereditary monarch…more so according to Hegel. Athens c. 400 BC was the paradigm of Western democracy; how did that work out for Socrates?

Was France really better off under the National Convention (1792 – 1795) and the Reign of Terror than it was under the Bourbons and the Bonapartes? Remember too that both Germany and Italy were functioning democracies c. 1930. And when democratic institutions resurfaced in Eastern Europe (c. 1990), many countries ‘democratically elected’ freedom-phobic regimes. This scenario is playing out right now in the states of the former GDR.

Look at our own history. If the United States were a ‘direct democracy’ (rather than a ‘representative republic’), would slavery have ever been abolished? Civil Rights legislation enacted? Would homosexuality still be a crime? To victims, the tyranny of the majority is just as loathsome as that of a lone dictator. 

From Pericles to POTUS, democracy has obviously ‘underdelivered’ on its promise. Still, there is a difference between saying that democracy does not guarantee freedom and saying that it is incompatible with freedom. 

Peter has made quite a leap! But perhaps he was not wrong. Does anybody remember Mikail Gorbachev (1931 – 2022)? He was a democrat who led the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991, when he was forced out of office by a demagogue (Boris Yeltsin). 

Domestically, Gorbachev attempted to implement two seemingly parallel reforms: Glasnost (openness) introduced government transparency, freedom of speech, and multiparty democracy.

Perestroika (restructuring) injected Soviet socialism with elements of Western capitalism and free enterprise. 

Unexpectedly, the two worked at cross purposes.  Russians’ long pent-up desire for prosperity overwhelmed the social appeal of democracy and New Russia ended up with neither. Gorbachev ran again in 1996, his last hurrah, receiving less than 1% of the popular vote and finishing 7th in a field of 10 candidates. Sic semper democraticus!

“As a Stanford undergraduate studying philosophy in the late 1980s, I naturally was drawn to the give-and-take of debate and the desire to bring about freedom through political means… As a young lawyer and trader in Manhattan in the 1990s, I began to understand why so many become disillusioned after college…Among the smartest conservatives, this pessimism often manifested in heroic drinking…”

Been there, done that!

“The notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ (has become)…an oxymoron…(but) I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms…The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. 

“Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.” 

Local politics can be engaging. Real issues, real candidates with real policy suggestions, and real voters choosing sides based on what’s best for them, their neighbors, and their community as a whole. 

I grew up in Boston in the 1950’s and 60’s, when boys were expected to be priests, politicians, or police and ‘citizenship’ consisted of rooting for the Celtics and engaging in local politics. I had my first formal ‘campaign position’ at age 13 though I was informally campaigning from the age of 9; and of course I still root for the Celtics! 

Politics today, local or national, bears no resemblance to my boyhood experience. As a profession, it no longer attracts ‘the best and the brightest’, and the campaign itself comes down to a ‘beauty contest’ conducted via high cost, high tech media. There is little hope that ‘any government so assembled’ will assiduously protect social and economic freedom (Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness). 

Thiel goes on to discuss the Internet and Space Exploration. Social media, though isolating in some respects, also allows the creation of new spaces where people can interact, perhaps through avatars, ideally without interference from government.

Space is ‘the final frontier’. Just as 16th century explorers and 19th century pioneers led to the establishment of new communities and new forms of community, so space travel. In 50 years, self-sustaining human civilizations will exist on multiple planets and moons in our solar system – more opportunity to experiment with consensual forms of social coordination.

Remember, Thiel wrote his essay in 2009. If rewritten today, it would most likely be expanded to include at least two other technologies with the potential to open up depoliticized social spaces: Blockchain and Computing 2.0 (AI and QC). 

Thiel-ism, if I can call it that, is the belief that the inevitably tyrannical state, democratic or otherwise, will become irrelevant as a consequence of technology. Perhaps it already has. Hmm, where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, Karl Marx!  

As the means of production (technology) evolve and as the proletariat gains access and then control over that technology, the state will become superfluous and wither away. For the first time in human history, “we have the technology” to make this happen. 

So who is Peter Thiel? Conservative, libertarian, or 21st century Marxist?    

Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Death of Socrates. 1787. By Jacques Louis David. Oil on canvas. 51 x 77 1/4 in. (129.5 x 196.2 cm). Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Wolfe Fund, 1931. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.