The Sovereign Individual Versus the Community of Life

The end of my anti-libertarian polemic

This is the last in a series of essays critiquing libertarian ideas. The first focused on the libertarian concept of private property as an Absolute. The second interrogated libertarian ideas around the “free market.” This one looks at libertarian concepts of self-ownership or individual sovereignty, particularly in relation to the ecological crisis

Libertarianism insists on individual sovereignty as a core principle, as something sacrosanct. According to libertarians, the government – the State – is evil by its nature because it is coercive. Mark Gober writes in An End to Upside Down Liberty: “The State is inherently an invasive, coercive aggressor: it forces itself upon citizens’ private property (for example, via taxation) without their explicit consent.” The State establishes laws that violate our free, voluntary choices, such as taxation, which equals, according to Murray Rothbaud, “predation on private property.” 

I deem it necessary to examine, unpack and patiently deconstruct this concept of self-ownership or individual sovereignty — to refute the libertarian ethos, comprehensively.  What I am going to say next may seem, at first, a bit paradoxical or contradictory. As an anarchist, I oppose intrusive government controls. I seek to increase the domain of authentic, meaningful human freedom. But, at the same time, I believe we are bound by responsibilities extending beyond our individual selves, that we cannot simply shirk. 

My very abbreviated take on government is that it is not an ultimate evil but a continuously renegotiated, highly imperfect contract between the “rulers” (major holders of financial assets, physical or intellectual property) and the “ruled” (everyone else). Monarchies became too constraining in the 18th Century as the middle class grew more affluent. Representative governments offered a new bargain, guaranteeing the masses a certain level of participation while maintaining elite power. The social contract expanded, over time, to include support for the less privileged, such as schools, hospitals, and other public services (mainly because the rulers feared revolution). If you are going to get rid of the State at this point, you better have something better to offer than “free markets,” or chaos is inevitable.

In a recent essay, I proposed that we require a massive collective campaign to address the ecological emergency. We need to institute urban composting, reduce consumption of energy and consumer goods, limit travel, reforest, establish strict quotas on meat eating, and transform industrial agriculture back to small-scale permaculture or organic farming plots. I would prefer this was organized through strictly voluntary networks (I tried to build one years ago). However, given the circumstances and the timeframe, governments will probably need to implement it.

One pushback I received is that this would require coercion: We would have to force people to act against their free will and voluntary choice. This would be tyranny, interfering with individual sovereignty. I was told that what I propose is no different from the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, which seeks to force environmental change through top-down control, coercion, and legal restriction. But what if the alternative is collective doom? Does that change the picture?

I intend to critique this Libertarian ideal of individual sovereignty in a few different ways. First of all, within Libertarian ideology itself, I find contradictions. Libertarians make “non-aggression,” non-violence against others, one of its core principles. Gober writes: “In a voluntarist, Stateless society, citizens would have the liberty to live as they choose, as long as they do not initiate any form of aggression upon another’s private property—whether it be theft, coercion, physical violence, fraud, extortion, and so on.”

But we already know, right now, that the sum total of our individual freely chosen actions are causing tremendous physical harm – violence and death – from a distance, due to anthropogenic climate change as well as species extinction caused by habitat loss and ecosystem disruption.

The collective impact of our individual, voluntary decisions – to eat meat, buy new cars and houses, travel around the world, etcetera – cooks the climate and drives all of us toward extinction.  According to scientific evidence, the collective impact of these activities is already making life close to unlivable for many people in the Global South. It already causes heatwaves and droughts (all around the world, right now), increases famines and deaths, and forces climate refugees to abandon their homes.

If our actions are causing great harm and violence against others (no matter how physically distant), doesn’t that already violate the Libertarian principle of non-aggression?

Isn’t the claim of “individual sovereignty” already impinging on and limiting the sovereignty of other people and even condemning them to death? My freely chosen actions are, actually, coercive from their perspective – as coercive as the worst government repression. I am literally robbing them of their ability to survive. 

That’s one level of critique. Here is another one: 

We need to ask ourselves if “the sovereign individual” exists as anything more than a meaningless abstraction. Like “private property” or the “free market,” self-ownership is a construct that libertarians shape (and weaponize) for particular political and economic aims. Charles Eisenstein, among others, have proposed the concept of “interbeing” as a different approach. Or we might consider the idea of an “interdependent self.”

The libertarian ideal of self-ownership reflects a psychology that seeks to avoid limitations and responsibility for the collective. Libertarianism perpetuates the legacy of Colonialist privilege and entitlement. The construct of the sovereign individual is an ideological trope, a way of maintaining power and control via seemingly unbiased or “rational” reasoning.

Personally I do not think we know where “free will” is located, or even if there is such a thing. Buddhism and Vedanta argue that the individual, ego-ic self doesn’t exist. The self is a kind of optical illusion onto which our minds grasp. According to this perspective, the freedom of choice we feel we have is a hallucination. Every choice we make is the end result of a very long chain of causes and effects. We are constructed out of past karma and conditioning. We fulfill a function in the endless Samsaric cycling – until we break the cycle by realizing our void-nature, dissolving the karmic conditioning.  

As individuals, we are community creations. To take an example, the language that I use, with all of its inherent biases and metaphysical preconceptions, is not something I have created out of whole cloth. Language is a legacy from my predecessors which shapes my Psyche. As Wittgenstein put it: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

In every domain of life, I am the product of long genealogies extending back through time, like the roots of a tree going down and down. My body is an artifact of evolution, made up of trillions of cells and microorganisms. 

Documentary filmmakers wanted to make a film with an aboriginal community in Australia. Before starting, they showed the indigenous people many different documentaries and asked them how they wanted to be represented. The aboriginals said that they didn’t want any closeups. They wanted the entire community to appear in every shot. So the filmmakers used a wide-angle lense and shot the film in this way. For those aboriginals, the idea of a sovereign individual is nonsensical. Each individual is embedded within their community, inseparable from it. The human community is nested within the community of organic life.