Learning from our mistakes and making reasonable choices
The heart of liberal - meaning free - democracies and liberal - meaning free - markets as better means of organizing people is not found in an ideology or a party or an institution even one single idea or value. All of these play important parts of democratic life (though ideas, values, and institutions play a far more important role than ideologies or parties, which are generally byproducts of peoples' dysfunctional and foolish propensity for polarization and schism).
The heart of liberal democracies and liberal markets is in the space that they create - through their compassion, their understanding, and their thought and engagement - a stronger propensity than any other form of culture or government or society for self-correction and for making reasonable choices.
That is true for committed liberal peoples as individuals and as cultures. And it is in people - in individuals and cultures - where the heart of democracy and markets are found.
No person or people or society or government is or ever has attained perfection. That illusion and our fetish with it has bedeviled humanity since its inception. And it is the source of much of our hubris, as we perpetually think that we have out-thought or outmaneuvered or controlled for our now and forever limitations of thought and integrity.
Every person or people or society or government is only and can only make progress. We can improve and make choices we think are reasonable. We can learn from our mistakes, benefit or suffer with our choices, and move forward.
We never do any of these things by some uninterrupted march ahead. We do these things by the most important strength of free markets and free democracies and the people that make them up: our ability to self-correct and make new choices.
Self-correction - our forever limited and growing ability to note and correct our mistakes - and our ability to make choices and live with their consequences are the source of our individual, cultural, economic, spiritual, institutional, governmental and all other forms of growth - is the sole source of our genuine progress, as individuals and as cultures, and the most important form of progress in our relationships with one another in any society, nevertheless a democratic or market society.
And the heart of liberal democracies and liberal markets - meaning democracies and markets centered around liberty - is our ability to engage one another, discuss and debate and think with one another, to learn from one another, and to make choices out of our individuals consciences that experiment with and identify better options and which self-correct for our mistakes. The fact of life that advocates of repression never come to terms with is not just their own fallibility, their own weaknesses of integrity and thought, their own pettiness and cruelty, their own failures and cowardice to acknowledge their failures. The fact of life that advocates of repression never come to terms with is the inability of any of us to correct others, at all, without their consciences making the final corrections, making the final choices, for whatever path might need to be taken or avoided, including the discussion about what path that might be.
Self-correction and making choices that have consequences we can live with is the only way we make any real progress.
This is why Communism was such an enormous lie of the 20th century (it is a particularly nefarious lie since liberals of the 20th and 21st century have perpetually rationalized it in the name of their own power). Because it not only undermined the real capacity for self-correction and for choosing our lives that a freer and free democracy and freer and free markets offer, it pretended like government could ever be a substitute for that self-correction or self-direction. Nazism, Fascism, and theocracies were all similar lies on the right. And conservatives similarly defended dictatorships that promised markets or which they believed served their countries' interests or which promoted theocratic or similarly reppressive compromises to free democracies and market.
And what all of these more serious and ugly compromises and mistakes did was to undermine the ability of individuals and cultures to self-correct and to develop stronger and better ideas and a more honest culture to tackle their problems.
They were all based on the more serious mistake and manipulation that power - and the forces of repression - could somehow replace the ability of individuals and democratic peoples to self-correct and to explore newer and better ideas for self-organizing and self-determining their lives, independently and interdependently.
The heart of liberal democracies and markets - meaning societies centered in freedom of thought and conscience and choices - is the space that its people create for themselves and for one another to make mistakes and learn from them, not in some impossible notion they have or can or will ever avoid them.
At its heart, that is what it means to be liberal. Not being a Democrat or to have radical or socialist leanings or even to favor democratic elections.
At its heart, what is means to be liberal is to favor the freedom that people, individuals, cultures, governments, etc., need to make choices and live with them and to make mistakes and learn from them.
And the correction that others might offer can never and will never replace where real progress happens in a liberal democracy - in the corrections that we finally make out of our own consciences.
Everything else is bullshit. And, as much as anything else, what liberal democracies and free markets allow us to do is to keep from stepping in the bullshit. And there is plenty out there.
And when we do, the freest democracies and markets allow us to clean off our boots more readily and reliably than any government or group or individual could ever do for us.
Freedom doesn't guarantee that we make all the right choices. But it offers us the surest paths to make choices for lives that we can love and to learn from the mistakes we make along the way.
Love,
Ben
