Are We Too Wicked for Freedom? [Good Life series]

An ancient myth tells of a poor young man who found a magical ring. The young man’s name was Gyges. He was a shepherd, responsible for tending his village’s sheep as they grazed in the summer meadows away in the hills. His job was lonely, poorly paid, and most of the time he smelled like a sheep.

But in a cave one day Gyges found a gold ring with a jewel in it. He put the ring on his finger and discovered something amazing: when he turned the ring so the jewel faced inward, he became invisible. When he turned the jewel outward, he again became visible.

You can predict what happened next.

A crime wave soon followed. Gyges abandoned the sheep and returned to the village. Expensive things were stolen. Women were raped. People were killed. There were no witnesses.

Gyges next moved on to greater conquests — stealing, deceiving, and killing his way to the top. He eventually murdered the king, put himself on the throne, and took the dead king’s lovely wife to bed as his own queen.

How horrible, you say.

But if you had Gyges’ ring, wouldn’t you do the same?

Ancient storytellers from Herodotus to Plato used the Gyges myth to meditate upon political ethics. Gyges, they argued, is not a peculiar individual — he is everyman and a stand-in for human nature. The ring is a metaphor for power — the power to do whatever one wants without consequences. And what does Gyges want? He wants what any human being wants — wealth, sex, revenge upon one’s enemies, and more, more, more.

The ring’s power of invisibility means that he can now satisfy his strongest desires in the easiest ways possible. He need not work hard for money. He need not elaborately court women. He need not devise complicated plans to kill his enemies.

Thus, in philosophy-math: Human Nature plus Power equals Crime.

Human beings, the myth claims, are by nature creatures of predatory passions — greed, lust, anger, and more. But to the extent that we act on our strongest passions we make social living either brutish or impossible.

The myth poses a new challenge to the ideal of a free society. The ring’s power gave Gyges freedom — the freedom to do anything he wanted. But the lesson seems to be that such freedom is socially destructive. Freedom unleashes human nature, and human nature is socially degenerate. So if we want to have a peaceful and productive society, then freedom is the enemy.

The Gyges challenge is distinct from the other challenges to freedom we have considered:

* That environmental conditions such as scarce resources set us against each other, and freedom therefore means a dog-eat-dog society. (See “Lifeboat Ethics: How Scarcity Thinking Sets Us at Each Others’ Throats.”)

* Or that freedom is a kind of power, but power corrupts us and turns otherwise decent people into monsters. (See “Why Power Does Not Corrupt — and It’s Character That Matters Most.”)

The Gyges myth says that it’s not external forces like scarcity or power that make us do bad things. Rather, the corruption is already inside us. Human nature is dominated by desires that make us unfit for freedom. (See also “Conservatives Against Free-Market Capitalism.”)

Gyges is a Greek myth, but we get a similar version of the story as we move further east to other ancient Mediterranean cultures.

In the book of Genesis, a common source for the Western world’s three major religions, we learn that Eve and Adam, in their first significant act of freedom, stole the fruit. In the next generation, Cain killed Abel. The subsequent generations, left free to their own devices, constantly lied, raped, assaulted, massacred, and so on — until God returned in the generation of Noah. God saw the corruption and devastation that humans had wrought and decided to wipe them out and start over. But even in the do-over era, human nature outed itself once again and led to the same destructive outcomes. Hence the doctrine of Original Sin.

From the ancients to our own era, this pessimistic view of human nature has been a regular source of attacks on the free society.

“Man is too wicked to be free,” wrote Joseph de Maistre in the nineteenth century. “Homo homini lupus” (“Man is a wolf to man”), wrote Sigmund Freud in the twentieth. “Cruelty and conflict are basic human traits,” agrees philosopher John Gray in the twenty-first.

So, according to the advocates of this grim view of human nature, what should we do to make social living possible?

Returning to the philosophy-math can guide us: If human nature combined with empowering freedom leads to bad results, then to avoid the bad results we either have to change human nature or take away freedom. But since we can’t change human nature, the argument typically runs, we have to focus on stifling its negative manifestations.

One way is through fear. Before he found the ring, Gyges did not act on his passions because he was afraid of being caught. But the ring eliminated that fear, so his passions were unleashed. So to solve the problem we have to make sure that humans remain the way Gyges was before the ring: relatively powerless and afraid of getting caught by the authorities.

In secular form, we can make sure that the police and the courts have great surveillance and punishment powers. Or in religious form, we can try to make people believe in a God who is always watching and who will punish them strictly. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” for example. We must instill the fear of authoritarian forces, whether secular or religious, as a necessary counter to natural human depravity.

Fear of external powers like the police or gods is one check, but we can also use internal checks by trying to teach people to stifle themselves. Instead of political fear, we can use moral guilt.

If the problem is greed, for example, then from day one we can teach children a moral lesson: that the love of money is the root of all evil. When they naturally come to desire money, an internal battle will be waged between their desire for money and their acquired belief that wanting money is immoral. It won’t work perfectly, but their guilt will to some extent lead them to suppress their greed.

Or if the problem is lust, then teach sexual abstinence as the moral ideal. Of course it won’t work all of the time, but sexual guilt will help dampen the lust. Or if the problem is anger, then teach that one should always forgive. The natural desire for vengeance and the taught morality of forgiveness will fight mightily within each of us, and if we feel guilty about seeking revenge then we are less likely to do so.

So if the myths of Gyges, Eve, and Cain capture a deep truth about human nature, then we seem to have only two solutions: we need a morality of guilt or a politics of fear — or both.

There is a strong tendency in history: pessimism about human nature is almost always correlated with authoritarian morality and politics. The contrapositive is also true: liberal moral and political systems are almost always based on optimism about human nature.

I am a liberal* and an optimist — which means that I must respond to the powerful Gyges myth. That will be the subject of my next article.

[* In the philosophical sense of advocating human freedom, not in the sometimes-oxymoronic contemporary American sense of advocating a mixture of liberties and controls.]

[This article was published originally in English at EveryJoe.com and in Portuguese at Libertarianismo.org.]

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