Paean to Individualism - Maggie Thatcher's Sad Burial Under the Viciousness of Mobocracy.

In my last post I said I was writing in the funereal dimness of the death of the last Western leader who understood Western classical liberal values, albeit, she was no libertarian, though a rare thing in spite of that, being a radical Tory set on change, rather than a conservative: Margaret Thatcher. Since that post I have been watching horrified at the pure, unadulterated celebratory vitriol being thrown at this grand individual from not just pockets of the Left, but a huge portion of it. As Liberty Scott points out on his post on this phenomenon, in the free society both he and I want, people are free to conduct themselves disgracefully like this; however, that doesn’t make it any less frightening, and the clip from the movie of Orwell’s 1984 of the mandatory two minutes of hate against enemies of the state Scott has put on his post, is way closer than is comfortable for those of us who understand the wellspring of what we are witnessing on the news and in the blogs.

Here’s a challenge. Can anyone think of similar vitriol as this from the Right, or Libertarians – because we’re different - to the death of a comparable left of centre Western leader? I can’t. This reaction, including the street parties celebrating her death in the UK and interviews with the barely literate attending, is beyond compare.

The issue in microcosm, and the essential truth that a civilised, free society must draw from this, are usefully all evidenced on New Zealand Marxist feminist blog, the Hand Mirror (yes, that blog has been mentioned here before). The Hand Mirror is a loose collection of twelve contributors. Anonymous contributor Maia on Tuesday put up their first Thatcher post, and it was a particularly hate-filled, hateful one celebrating the ‘death of the witch’: read her post ‘Dear Left, This is a Great and Glorious Day’, if you can stomach it, and ask yourself what sort of society such a woman as Maia would find us all in.

Fortunately, anonymous contributor LudditeJourno on Friday redressed this somewhat in her piece ‘On Margaret Thatcher and Empathy’; her last paragraph, even though I don’t agree with the conclusions of her reasoning on the politick and economics, is at least penned by a fellow human being whom I can respect, which Maia counts herself out from. However, it is not this I found of interest in the former’s post; these two snippets were:

[Margaret Thatcher was a …] woman who did as much as she could to dismantle society into a collection of individual men and women … [snip] … Margaret Thatcher would have revelled in the importance her individual death has been granted because it continues that placing of the individual above society, that privileging of individual agency over the importance of social structures, that she held so dear, that she championed so fiercely.

I put it to LudditeJourno that when a society loses sight of the fact it is made up of individuals relating and transacting peacefully and voluntarily under the tenets of a classical liberal laissez faire, then it quickly slides into the barbarity of the collectivist Gulags that sickened the Free World throughout the twentieth century. Societies, which Maggie rightly saw as the enemy of freedom, that have not set their sights on the rule of law protecting their smallest minority, the individual, have allowed tyrants to bully them into wiping out the individual, en masse.  Even Orwell, a socialist, understood this. Speaking of writing and the arts, he said:

... Modern literature is essentially an individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man thinks and feels, or it is nothing.

As I say, we take this notion for granted, and yet as soon as one puts it into words one realizes how literature is menaced. For this is the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and probably cannot allow the individual any freedom whatever. When one mentions totalitarianism one thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy, but I think one must face the risk that this phenomenon is going to be world-wide. It is obvious that the period of free capitalism is coming to an end and that one country after another is adopting a centralized economy that one can call Socialism or state capitalism according as one prefers. With that the economic liberty of the individual, and to a great extent his liberty to do what he likes, to choose his own work, to move to and fro across the surface of the earth, comes to an end. Now, till recently the implications of this were not foreseen. It was never fully realized that the disappearance of economic liberty would have any effect on intellectual liberty. Socialism was usually thought of as a sort of moralized liberalism. The state would take charge of your economic life and set you free from the fear of poverty, unemployment and so forth, but it would have no need to interfere with your private intellectual life. Art could flourish just as it had done in the liberal-capitalist age, only a little more so, because the artist would not any longer be under economic compulsions.

Now, on the existing evidence, one must admit that these ideas have been falsified.

LudditeJourno’s remarks miss an important truth that I have yet to find someone from the Left who can comprehend: libertarians, those of us who want the small state and free lives, understand we live, as the cliché goes, ‘in the village’, we relish it, as we relish arts, culture, et al. The point of difference is we understand, as Orwell did above, all of this is only possible when the village doesn’t own us, as individuals: once that happens we are slaves, subject to the seemingly depthless viciousness of the mob mind.

And if you want to know how vicious that barbarity of the collectivist based society LudditeJourno wants is, look at the vicious reaction of the Left on the death of this grand individual. Maggie understood this viciousness was precisely what individuals must be protected from, that’s why she espoused classical liberalism in much of her policy (not all of it).

There must be empathy, Ludditejourno, most certainly, but without the employ of our reason, thinking, then empathy slides directly to its opposite, the sick hatred of the Maia’s and the Borg at the street parties, which is the hatred at the heart of all collectivist, totalitarian societies. Perhaps some of the Hand Mirror contributors should start their own blog called the Rear View Mirror, because the Left have already plumbed depths that go deeper than this, and learned nothing from the bloodshed.

Margaret Thatcher is on record as stating a peaceful, free society must have the rule of law, not the rule of the mob: unfortunately despite the good she did, it was only but a break in the West’s relentless march toward statism that gathers pace year on year; that is why the society that will be burying her is the mobocracy she feared the most, as do I, with over 700 policemen having to protect her body at her funeral. A mobocracy founded on redistributive law making that allows the state to take an individual's private property which the state, properly confined, should only have been about protecting. A mobocracy wherein the state operates by force and police state means, to have become the biggest abuser of private property rights. There will be no policemen to help me when Maia and her vicious street party gang manage to get into the Fortress of Legislation; albeit the rules from the fortress are over time delivering me to her, regardless, because really, anonymous Maia’s is the ruling ethic in the surveillance states of the West now.