The Morality and Mathematics of Freedom

Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses

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“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” – Marcus Aurelius

In my previous piece, I recklessly undertook to provide a compelling argument for why the individual good must come before the common good.

In anticipation of this argument, a reader in the comments section reserved their right to “remain skeptical” on the grounds that a lot of the discourse in this milieu is soaked in the ethos of “freedom-for-me-but-not-for-thee”, although thankfully the reader was careful not to include me in this group. The term invented by Mark Passio to characterise this grouping is the My Freedom movement, which I think is sadly bigger than the Freedom Movement.

The reader homed in on the dilemma with the observation that “the language of individual and community seems bound to mislead and entrap us in insoluble dilemma, because we're already conceiving of either one or the other as primary”. Indeed, there’s the rub.

The challenge for me in this piece will be to convince you that while the individual and community are inextricably intertwined, and that the wellbeing of each relies on the other, the order of rights is vitally important. That does not mean it is an either/or argument, and I will argue strenuously against this binary thinking. But individual rights must indeed have primacy if the community is to thrive.

So let’s start with the importance of individual human rights and why they matter in very concrete terms given the times we’re living in.

It is conceivable that if every individual on the planet were able to enforce their right to just two human rights – bodily autonomy and privacy – we could reject the New World Order. We could opt out of global pandemic tyranny and its objective of bodily invasion via mandated vaccinations, and God knows what other medical interventions the global Pharma mafia will cook up. We could opt out of Big Tech’s Digital IDs and biometric facial recognition. We could opt out of Big Bank’s programmable CBDCs, which could only work as tools of oppression when linked to Digital ID.

And when I say, “opt out”, obviously I mean without fear of sanctions or punishment. It would not be an opt-out otherwise.

Individual human rights, if they had teeth, would be a powerful force against Agenda 2030 and the controllers pushing it. They know that only too well. Which is why it’s imperative for them to dilute the concept of individual human rights with the notion of the common good.

As the proponents of Catholic Social Teaching [timestamp 31:00] put it – they want us to learn to prefer the common good to our individual good. No reasonable person denies that we live in communities and that the community must thrive if we as individuals are to thrive in it. We therefore cannot deny a common good. But subordinating the individual good to the common good, as CST proposes, is the death knell of both.

The paradox underlying the relationship between individual rights and community welfare

I believe that the truth about the relationship between individual rights and community welfare is hidden in a paradox, as so many profound truths are. This paradox exposes the lie in utilitarianism. The specific brand of utilitarianism that we are concerned with holds that a minority must comply with a majority vote, even when minority rights are trampled on. Utilitarianism appeals because it feels democratic. But a democracy without a guarantee of human rights is a tyranny of the majority.

Most people profess to understand that an inviolable human right cannot serve as a firewall against tyranny unless we guarantee its non-negotiability. But that understanding tends to evaporate when they hear the siren song that appeals to their cherished notions of ‘good’.

Whereas utilitarianism holds that the group is best served by granting the wishes of the majority, ensuring the primacy of individual rights is in fact the only way to guarantee the welfare of the group. This is the paradox: utilitarianism that faithfully tries to please the greatest number of people in the group leads to a more destructive outcome than trying to guarantee the rights of each individual member of the group. The welfare of the whole group, and therefore the majority, is in fact best served by prioritising the freedom of each and every individual.

Arguing in favour of the primacy of individual rights is not an argument against a functioning healthy community that comes together to achieve common goals. The primacy of individual rights is a prerequisite for the latter.

Only individuals can have human rights. We do not grant human rights to a community, and with good reason, although if all the individuals within the community have their rights respected, the group is protected. The reason we do not grant human rights to a community is because individual rights were constructed precisely to protect single individuals from a tyranny of the majority in a group. This is what makes the expunging of an individual’s human rights to satisfy a group exigency all the more absurd.

A human right granted to the individual that can be diluted by the group is clearly not an individual right. At best, it would be a privilege that can be withdrawn when it clashes with a majority vote. It would not be worth the paper it’s written on.

All of this is Human Rights 101, but one can’t dismantle the bankruptcy of utilitarianism without this basic groundwork. Most of the readers in my audience get all this, but a few feel uncomfortable with framing it in a way that states in clear terms that individual rights must have primacy. It starts to feel like a binary choice between the individual and the group. The aim of this piece is to stress that the relationship between the individual’s inalienable rights and the ability of a community to flourish is not an either/or dichotomy.

To understand this, one must reject binary thinking and embrace the complexity of paradox. It is a paradox that the primacy of individual rights is complementary to the wellbeing of the community, and not a threat to it. The inability to see this is rooted in crude mathematical thinking. Moral thinking is underpinned by a more elegant mathematics, and this is what brings us to a recognition that individuals must first feel safe before they can contribute to a functioning community.

Before we get into the bad mathematics of the common good and, conversely, the good mathematics of freedom, we must understand the nature of morality and how governments subvert it.

Natural Law and how government expunges human rights in the name of the group

Morality has to be an absolute concept. Moral relativism is simply the sophist’s device for eliminating morality since, if we can alter what is right or wrong from one situation to the next, then it becomes clear nothing is right or wrong. In other words, morality becomes an endlessly shifting academic pursuit. Which is a wonderful place for morally bankrupt authoritarian rulers to be in.

Morality can be very firmly rooted in the precepts of Natural Law: don’t steal my physical security (don’t kill or physically harm me); don’t steal the truth (don’t lie to me or deliberately deceive me); don’t steal my stuff (erm, don’t steal); don’t steal my free will by coercing me into actions that are beneficial to you but disadvantageous to me. Don’t steal. These are all absolutes and you can’t argue that these forms of theft could be morally correct in certain situations. The only one that has a qualifier on it is defending against a physical attack that was initiated by someone else. That is the only qualifier and in that sense, it too is absolute.

Natural Law, the foundation of morality, is not relative, even if extenuating circumstances and moral dilemmas might make it hellishly difficult at times to do the right thing. Human frailty might make it possible to misjudge what is truly moral in a specific situation, but that should not change the goal of making moral judgements that align with immutable Natural Law principles. It is vital to understand that extenuating circumstances and mercy do not render morality relative. Moral relativism is immoral. Mercy is not.

Group authorities cynically exploit more complex situations to open the door to moral relativism, in which a spurious common good can be deployed to usurp individual rights. Here, the group ‘authority’, typically government, will admit that the individual’s right is a nice thing to aim for, but not when it threatens the group as a whole. As I will argue, individual rights never threaten the group as a whole since individual rights are rooted in Natural Law, but this is the lie authorities try to get us to swallow.

Moral relativism cloaked in the common good is how governments justify killing or harming a certain number of citizens in order to save a supposedly greater number of citizens from harm. The individual’s right, and therefore morality itself, becomes subordinate to the spurious needs of the group or ruling power structures.

We accept many absolutes in our legal systems such as thou shalt not kill, steal or lie. It is therefore not possible to reconcile the absolute moral dictates that civilised societies recognise for individuals with the state’s immoral justification for killing or stealing under circumstances prescribed by the state unless we embrace moral relativism. The only way to explain the existence of such a contradiction, and society’s acceptance of it, is the collective immorality of the society that permits the contradiction.

A dead giveaway that the group authority is seeking to expunge individual rights is when it claims the imperative to commit some kind of harm now in order to prevent a much greater hypothetical (and therefore unproven) threat that will crystallise if the state does not compel action now.

Not only is it wrong to commit harm in the present in order to avert hypothetical harm in the future, but the state has never been able to prove that its murderous criminality has ever succeeded in averting a hypothetical greater catastrophe for the simple reason that any such attempted proof would be counterfactual. So, using the Iraq war as an example, even if Sadam Hussein had possessed all manner of WMD, the invasion of Iraq could never be justified since it could not be proven that he would have used them against the states that attacked Iraq.

There are of course savages (euphemistically termed ‘hawks’ by the media) who routinely proclaim that it would be foolish to wait and see if a supposed tyrant might use their deadly weapons against the provably uncivilised Western nations that have WMD in abundance and, in the case of the US, have actually used them. Yes, you bloody well do have to wait until you are attacked before you attack. You may make defensive preparations, but you do have to wait for the actual attack to happen because there is no justification for violence other than genuine self-defence.

The entire planet has to patiently wait to see if the US and its NATO allies will bomb them before they are permitted to take whatever action they can to defend themselves, and yet the US and its allies claim that it is not subject to the same reciprocal act of having to wait to see what its declared enemies might do. Israel and the US, the two most savage nations on the planet right now, professed a right to pre-emptively attack Iran, while Iran is required to wait until those attacks have occurred before it responds.

Infuriatingly, when a criminal regime under the West’s sponsorship – Israel – actually does commit the most horrific crimes in plain sight of the entire world, the West not only idly stands by and waits, it actively supports the crime.

The bottom line is that whether the state’s action involves going to war with another country or simply harming an individual within its own borders, it is immoral to harm someone on the purported grounds of preventing an unproven future harm. There is no moral justification for offsetting an actual harm in the present moment against a hypothetical future harm. Bear this in mind for the final section of the essay as we discuss the state’s Net Zero plans.

Mitigating a crime that has begun is of course a different matter. Here, you are trying to stop a crime in progress. Even so, the measures taken to stop a crime that is underway must be proportional to the goal of stopping the harm. Going beyond that goal runs the risk of the committing a new crime by creating harm that outweighs the harm currently being experienced.

The maths of individual and group freedom that disproves the maths of state and group terror

Authorities all too frequently invoke the greater good to compel our action. The sophistry that underpins the compelled action hinges on a mathematical lie. It begrudgingly and disingenuously acknowledges that you as an individual matter, but one person cannot matter more than ten people or a whole village. The coercing authority then seeks to convince the majority of the group that it is necessary to abrogate the rights of the minority in order to safeguard the interests of the group as a whole.

However, the simple and appealing maths underlying majoritarian abuse progressively falls apart with each iteration of this process. Continually changing imperatives of group authority lead to abuses of different constituencies within the group until the abuses cumulatively result in the majority of the group members’ rights being repudiated at one time or another. This is the meaning of Martin Niemöller’s famous words:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

It is mathematically undeniable that a free society is the sum of its free individuals. Conversely, as already argued, over successive abuses, we arrive at a situation in which an enslaved society is the sum of its enslaved individuals.

What’s more, it ought to be apparent to the more savvy members of the group majority that their rights have also been violated even if they have not objected to the abuse of a dissenting minority. They have simply chosen not to exercise their right at that moment or on that issue, but they may wish to cash in their rights chips at a future date. It should therefore be clear that they have eroded their rights and that their future freedom is not guaranteed. Rather, their future freedom is now conditional on an ongoing struggle to avoid becoming a minority at some point in the future. Thus, the group has not been saved by a majority decision to abrogate the rights of the minority; it has been terrorised into obedience by the majority.

The coercive power of tyranny is internalised by those who see it. They must question when they will be next. This is a poisoning of the well. Mathematically speaking, the free citizen is the indivisible unit of society. Break the free individual and you have created a crack in the whole of society. The crack widens with each successive abuse, until the society is broken. The empirical evidence of history has always proved this to be true.

There is yet another fallacy built into ‘common good’ justifications. As I’ve pointed out under the previous heading, they are almost always based on a future hypothetical benefit that cannot be proven at the time the decision is made to abuse the minority. An obvious example with which readers are more than familiar is the vaccine ‘efficacy’ canard and the grossly exaggerated lethality of diseases to justify mandated ‘vaccines’. Whether it’s public health or climate change – now part of public health under the WHO’s ‘One Health’ paradigm – the propaganda landscape is always rife with calculations of future lives saved or lost based on modelling riddled with biased assumptions and variables.

This is why the ‘greater good’ is invariably the alibi of despots. This dish by definition must be served up with lashings of spurious unproven hypotheses. After the ‘greater good’ terror has been unleashed, and once the hypothetical gains crystallise into actual losses, the defence invoked by the agents of state terror is that of the ‘honest mistake’. It’s a win-win for the authorities – they are permitted to create spurious hypothetical gains and losses and then escape justice precisely because the calculations were hypothetical. They claim that mistakes are bound to happen when dealing in the currency of hypothesis, and the main thing is that they acted in good faith. And so the never-ending cycle of lies, coercion, abuse of rights, and destruction of lives repeats ad nauseam, aided by the whitewashing of the crimes with a rigged public enquiry and pledges of ‘lessons learned’.

For all these reasons, the crude mathematical lies and false hypotheses of state and group terror are disproven with a morality that is self-evident and whose principles leave the entire group both free and safe.

The moral starting point is that coercion of thought, coercion of belief, violations of bodily sovereignty and privacy – these are antithetical to civilised behaviour. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, bodily sovereignty, the right to privacy – these principles are self-evident, and even the violating authorities don’t deny this. They can’t. They simply ask for them to be negotiable to accommodate changing exigencies.

Individual liberty and a healthy society is not a binary either/or choice. There is no greater good than individual liberty, and it is the value from which the communal good flows. The inviolable and universal value that binds us together – don’t trample on me – is a value that does not preclude societal cohesion. It guarantees it.

The paradox of making the individual’s rights sacrosanct is that the freer the individual is, the more spiritually and materially equipped he or she will be to contribute to the greater good of their community. The individual is the building block of any grouping: the weaker the individual, the weaker the group. That’s the truth that the crude ‘greater good’ equation hides when it seeks to terrorise the minority with a majority vote.

The ultimate spiritual and mathematical truth of individual and group dynamics is embodied in Mark Passio’s simple yet elegant maxim: the freedom of a society, and therefore its wellbeing, correlates directly with the morality of that society. The less moral we are – in other words, the more we fail to respect each other’s inviolable human rights – the sicker society gets.

Don’t you just love VALUES?! Ruling class sophistry in the service of the greater good

As the language used in embracing the common good evolves, I’ve noticed that the word ‘values’ is now firmly embedded in the ruling class’s lexicon. Fancy that! A ruling class that’s run by a billionaire plutocracy, sanctions genocide and arrests old age pensioners for objecting to it – that ruling class wants you to believe it shares your values.

In my last piece, I discussed how a form of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) suffuses the sophistry of societal change management. An idea, or a fragment of an idea, that we can all agree on is introduced in reverent tones. I liken this to agreeable mood music that sets you up for a subversion of the idea, which is expressed in inscrutable language. That’s crucial to the success of the subversion. If you took the time and effort to deconstruct it, you’d see the subversion. Ain’t nobody got time for that! Instead you hear key words that are instrumental in embedding the subversion in your subconscious.

I pointed this out in the previous piece when I analysed the scheister Catholic priests selling Catholic Social Teaching. There was 30 minutes of mood music before they said the key words almost right at the end: “learning to prefer the common good to our individual good”.

Mark Carney – former central bank supremo, billionaire lackey, and now Canada’s Prime Minister – loves values so much he dedicated a whole book to the subject titled…wait for it… “Value(s): Building a Better World for All”. If that doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, then take a listen to Carney [timestamp 9:50] talking about how much he cares about “society’s values”:

“Markets are social constructs, whose effectiveness is determined partly by the rules of the state and partly by the values of society. If left unattended, they will corrode those values. We must concentrate on rebuilding social capital to make markets work. To do so, individuals and their firms must rediscover their sense of solidarity and responsibility for the system. More broadly, by rebasing valuation on society’s values, we can create platforms of prosperity.” [emphasis added]

“Rebasing valuation on society’s values”. That’s the NLP punch line. At first glance, the rational response is: Qué? But remember we’re dealing with a banker here. The key words are “rebasing…values”. ‘Rebasing’ is mathematical lingo for modifying a calculation by changing reference points within it. What looks like gobbledygook is NLP lingo for revaluing society’s values. So, he’s introduced the idea that values are, and should be, on shifting sands. Welcome back to the wonderful world of Moral Relativism.

Rebasing means a simultaneous downgrading of certain rights and values, like individual human rights, to make space for an upgrading of new values, like climate alarmism, or CBDCs, or whatever the System is prioritising at that moment in time. As Carney informs us, the purpose of this reprioritisation of System ‘values’ is for firms and individuals to “rediscover their sense of solidarity and responsibility for the system”. Ah, I know you’re all dying to express your solidarity for The System, so don’t all step forward at once please.

Carney’s crap is riddled with contradictions, which is how you know it’s crap. First, the Carneys of the world don’t deny that individual rights are important and good things to have. It’s just that in certain situations, they get in the way of society’s – The System’s – smooth operation. So rebasing is necessary. But you can’t rebase values like human rights – that’s the contradiction, because rebasing actually means getting rid of. We’ve either got these rights and we need to respect them, or they’re a nuisance and we get rid of them. You can’t have it both ways with human rights. Carney wants to get rid of them but he can’t say that. So he’d rather contradict himself and hopes that you don’t detect the contradiction.

Another contradiction inherent in the urge to ‘rebase’ societal values is that if what is valuable today might be discarded or downgraded tomorrow, then we cannot trust those like Carney who talk about ‘rebasing’ values because their principles must, by definition, be fluid. The only solid principles they have revolve around controlling wealth and you.

Fusing technocracy with utilitarianism

As we watch the arch technocrats waxing lyrical about society’s values, we are in fact witnessing the sinister fusion of technocracy with utilitarianism or communitarianism. As elucidated here by one of its foremost advocates, Amitai Etzioni:

“Communitarianism seeks to shore up the moral, social, and political foundations of society by emphasising the importance of community values, social cohesion, and moral order, without abandoning individual rights…..The good society does not seek to maximize personal autonomy, but to balance it with the common good.” [emphasis added]

There we go again – those bloody individual rights! Yet again, we see the very begrudging acceptance that you just can’t get rid of those pesky ‘individual rights’ but, by Jove, do they need to be ‘balanced with the common good’! Balancing always seems like a reasonable proposition to most people. Who doesn’t want to be balanced? But, when it comes to individual human rights, it’s not a reasonable proposition. Individual rights aren’t things to be balanced. They aren’t the starter in a 3-course meal. They’re the main course, without which there is no meal.

The technocrats are desperate to get you to accept a paradigm shift – if individual rights can be classified as values-based commodities that need to be balanced against other ‘values’, then they can be balanced in such a way that they play second fiddle to other imperatives.

An analogy for the technique that comes to mind is clickbait. You keep talking about individual rights because you know that’s what punters want to hear, but once you’ve got their attention you sell them something they weren’t intending to buy. Here’s the sales pitch:

“Looking for undiluted human rights are you? Good! We’ve got something very similar… in fact even better, because when you dilute the rights you can have a bit of rights and a whole lot else besides! It’s a new thing we call balancing. You do like being balanced don’t you? I thought so. Because we wouldn’t want you to lose your balance. Balance is so important for one’s sanity, isn’t it? I knew you’d agree!”

We witnessed ‘balancing’ during the covid psyop when bodily autonomy and informed consent had to be balanced with mandated vaccines. Absolutely no contradiction there at all. And there’s a freight train of more ‘balancing’ coming at us with CBDCs and Net Zero policies, more of which in a minute.

Moral dilemmas – imagined and real

It would be remiss to write an article about moral relativism and moral absolutism, and not include a moral dilemma or two to illustrate how tricky this subject is both emotionally and intellectually.

The first dilemma, slightly modified to make it more politically neutral, is purely theoretical. You have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being faced with this dilemma, but I selected it because, despite its unrealistic quality, it has the necessary ingredients that a moral dilemma requires to help you focus your moral scruples. It has the added advantage of being surreally comparable to a scientific scam that’s been in train for at least three decades now, and it doesn’t look like the production team are ready to throw in the towel yet.

You’re on an expedition in a foreign land ruled by a military dictator when you encounter a battalion of soldiers repressing an uprising. The soldiers have captured 20 protesters and the commander in charge presents you with a stark choice. If you personally shoot one protester, he will let the other 19 go free. If you refuse to kill the one protester, he assures you the soldiers will shoot all 20.

What do you do? Utilitarianism demands that you do the maths – kill one person in order to save 19 lives. Whatever guilt you might experience ought to be assuaged by the knowledge of 19 lives saved, right?

The answer I prefer is not to take the life of an innocent protester. If I follow that order, if I pull the trigger, then I am responsible for that person’s death. And I am not going to be able to live with that. If the soldiers kill all of the protesters, the guilt rests with them, not me.

The utilitarian answer treats people like machines by downplaying the anguish that would be caused in killing an innocent person, and it assumes that the mathematics of hypothetical lives saved is what should motivate us. If you’re a moral relativist, then you needn’t worry about passing a test – there’s no wrong or right answer! If you’re a moral absolutist, you’re going to baulk at committing an obvious harm in the present moment to avert a harm that might occur in the future. You also believe that guilt, which rightfully belongs with the murderers should the 20 protesters be killed, cannot be transferred to you by virtue of your refusal to kill.

This dilemma also probes a feature of do-goodery that I touched on at the beginning of this piece. The lives you are going to save are hypothetical. There cannot be 100% assurance that the commander will follow through on his threat. The 19 people whose lives you think you are saving might have lived anyway. Why not plead with the commander and the soldiers for the lives of all the captives?

The real-world dilemma I have in mind is similar though more complex in some ways – Net Zero. The full weight of national and global power structures is being brought to bear in advocating enormous societal and economic changes to avert an alleged global warming catastrophe, the purported primary cause of which is man-made greenhouse emissions. I explained in this piece why there is no scientific consensus on the key aspects of this claim. There is no consensus on how much global warming can be attributed to human activity, and whether or not this degree of warming is actually as dangerous as the climate alarmists claim it is. Furthermore, a growing number of scientists robustly refute the man-made global warming hypothesis.

In spite of the monumental uncertainty about the causes and consequences of global warming, power structures in the West are imposing far-reaching social and economic policies to severely curb global industrial and domestic energy usage, which will result in de-industrialisation, and restrictions on farming and food supply. It would be entirely irrational to base potentially catastrophic decarbonisation policies on unproven catastrophic climate-change theories. But that’s exactly what Net Zero does.

The immiseration and loss of life that these policies could cause is literally incalculable, but a glimpse into the Net Zero future was provided in 2023 when widespread food insecurity and economic losses triggered rioting and civil unrest in Sri Lanka.

At the root of Sri Lanka’s agricultural policy failure was a ban on chemical fertilisers in 2021, resulting in a loss of a third of agricultural land and an 85% loss of crop. Reliance on chemical fertilisers for agricultural production is a key pillar of Net Zero policies that finger fertilisers as key contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

Net Zero is a text book ‘greater good’ ploy. Based on claims for which the scientific evidence is at best very shaky, advocates of climate alarmism are advocating to kill a lot of people now in order to save an unproven hypothetical number of lives in the future.

The imaginary moral dilemma we discussed at the beginning of this section has some similarities to the real Net Zero moral dilemma. The Net Zero maths is undoubtedly far murkier. The Net Zero scenario is also more complex in at least two ways.

First, the criminals at the top who are advocating the policies know what they’re doing, but their army of soldiers cranking the handle on this juggernaut are fervent believers. This is what makes the Net Zero scenario more frightening than the imaginary scenario of extinguishing one life to save 19. As C S Lewis remarked – those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Second, the soldiers marching to the tune of Net Zero madness are well-to-do middle-class bureaucrats in the West who will not see the people they are slowly killing in order to purportedly ‘save the planet’. They will be comfortably distanced – physically and emotionally – from the poor people they are harming. They aren’t literally holding a gun to someone’s head and pulling the trigger, but their religious faith in climate alarmism will be no less lethal in its consequences.

So we have this lethal combination of religious fervour and emotional distance from the harm being done.

When the sole focus of the crowd and despots is a ‘greater good’, manufactured from the clay of ideology and divorced from morality, then harm to the individual is not just inevitable: it becomes a justification to do harm. And when the final bill is tallied and the total harm to all those who weren’t agile enough to get out of harm’s way exceeds the theoretical benefits of the imagined ‘greater good’, society buries the dead and eulogises their heroic sacrifice.

And we rinse and repeat. After all, if you can continually redefine ‘good’ to align with the imperatives of each new heroic campaign for justice and goodness, there is no end of ‘greater goods’ that can’t be achieved… with a lot of sacrifice, of course.

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