Language expresses thought. But do the unexamined everyday idioms embedded in different languages cause bad thoughts to be thinkable, and good ones to be unthinkable? Are some truths suppressed by language, and are some falsehoods inculcated by it? George Orwell thought so.
An important bad idea from which we libertarians suffer is that, believing as we do in freedom, we are also assumed to believe in social isolation, in social “atomism”. This accusation is derived from another wrong idea, that sociability only happens because powerful politicians make it happen and pay for it to happen. So if someone doesn’t believe in compulsory, tax-funded sociability, then he must be against sociability itself. It is said that libertarians believe either that (in the notoriously wrong-headed pronouncement of Margaret Thatcher) “there is no such thing as society”, or that, insofar as there is such a thing as society, that’s bad, and that “freedom” must smash it to pieces.
The truth is that we libertarians are well aware of the reality of and value of society. We merely think that, like most things of importance, society shouldn’t be bossed about by the government. Society exists, but shouldn’t be a nationalised industry.
On Saturday morning I was tidying my desk and I chanced upon a print-out of the quotations section on the St Andrews University Liberty Club website. One of these quotes is from the film actor Clint Eastwood. In a March 1997 interview, Playboy magazine asked Eastwood how he would characterize himself politically. Eastwood replied:
“Libertarian … Everyone leaves everyone else alone.”
“Leave me alone!” We’ve all said it thousands of times. Sometimes we even mean exactly that. Someone is being nasty to you. Forget about them being nicer. You just want them to go away. But often we say “Leave me alone!” to soften the blow of the whole and real truth. What we really mean is: “It’s you I don’t want to be with. I want to be with others instead.”
You can see how a movie star might equate freedom, especially in his leisure hours or when trudging through extra-curricular duties in the company of a media-hack, with simply being left alone. And you can see why libertarians, dazzled by such stellar endorsement, might be glad to reproduce this hurtful little meme-package. But as a libertarian propagandist I insist that there is a fundamental difference between different company – company that I am glad to have, company that I have consented to – and no company at all.
