 Individualism, a reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. 20. From the Voluntaryist Creed, Oberon Herbert The Voluntaryist Creed being the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1906. London Oxford University, 1908. Oberon Herbert, 1838 to 1906, studied at Oxford and served in the British Army. Herbert was a member of Parliament from 1870 to 1874 only to repudiate under the influence of Herbert Spencer the political process as a means of bringing about social change. Herbert turned instead to individualism and the spontaneous voluntary cooperation of free individuals in a free market. In the following excerpt from The Voluntaryist Creed, Herbert contrasts a society governed by political power with a society of free individuals. We who call ourselves Voluntaryists appeal to you to free yourselves from these many systems of state force which are rendering impossible the true and the happy life of the nations of today. This ceaseless effort to compel each other in turn for each new object that is clamoured for by this or that set of politicians, this ceaseless effort to bind chains round the hands of each other is preventing progress of the real kind, is preventing peace and friendship and brotherhood, and is turning the men of the same nation who ought to labour happily together for common ends in their own groups in their own free unfettered fashion into enemies who live conspiring against and dreading often hating each other. What good, what happiness, what permanent progress of the true kind can come out of that unnatural, denationalizing miserable warfare? Why should you desire to compel others? Why should you seek to have power, that evil, bitter, mocking thing which has been from of old as it is today the sorrow and curse of the world over your fellow men and fellow women? Why should you desire to take from any man or woman their own will and intelligence, their free choice, their own self-guidance, their inalienable rights over themselves? Why should you desire to make of them mere tools and instruments for your own advantage and interest? Why should you desire to compel them to serve and follow your opinions instead of their own? Why should you deny in them the soul that suffers so deeply from all constraint and treat them as a sheet of blank paper upon which you may write your own will and desires of whatever kind they may happen to be? Who gave you the right? From where do you pretend to have received it to degrade other men and women from their own true rank as human beings taking from them their will, their conscience and intelligence in a word all the best and highest part of their nature turning them into mere empty worthless shells, mere shadows of the true man and woman mere counters in the game you are mad enough to play and just because you are more numerous or stronger than they to treat them as if they belonged not to themselves but to you? Can you believe that good will ever come by morally and spiritually degrading your fellow men? What happy and safe and permanent form of society can you hope to build on this pitiful plan of subjecting others or being yourselves subjected by them? We show you the better way. We ask you to renounce this old weary hopeless way of force ever tear-stained and blood-stained which has gone on so long under emperors and autocrats and governing classes and still goes on today amongst those who whilst they condemn emperors and autocrats continue to walk in their footsteps and understand and love liberty very little more than those old rulers of an old world. We bid you ask yourselves what is all our boasted civilization and gain in knowledge worth to us if we are still like those who had not attained our civilization and knowledge to hunger for power still to cling to the ways of strife and bitterness and hatred still to oppress each other as in the days of the old rulers. Don't be deceived by mere words and phrases. Don't think that everything was gained when you got rid of autocrat and emperor. Don't think that a change in the mere form without change in the spirit of men can really alter anything or make a new world. A voting majority that still believes in force that still believes in crushing and ruling a minority can be just as tyrannous as selfish and blind as any of the old rulers and are the conquerors in the great conflict better off if we try to see clearly than the conquered. We can only answer no. For power is one of the worst, the most fatal and demoralizing of all gifts you can place in the hands of men. He who has power, power only limited by his own desires misunderstands both himself and the world in which he lives. If you wish to know how power spoils character and narrows intelligence look at the great military empires, their steady perseverance in the roads that lead to ruin, their dread of free thought and of liberty in all its forms. Look at the sharp repressions, the excessive punishments, the love of secrecy, the attempt to drill a whole nation into obedience and to use the drilled and subject thing for every passing vanity and a grandisement of those who govern. Look also at the great administrative systems. See how men become under them helpless and dispirited incapable of free effort and self-protection at one moment sunk in apathy, at another moment ready for revolution. Do you wonder that it is so? Is it wonderful that when you replace the will and intelligence and self-guidance of the individual by systems of vast machinery that men should gradually lose all the better and higher parts of their nature for of what use to them is that better and higher part when they may not exercise it? And thus it is that seeking for power not only means strife and hatred, the splitting of a nation into hostile factions, but forever breeds trick and intrigue and falsehood, results in the wholesale buying of men, the offering of this or that unworthy bribe, the playing with passions, the poor unworthy trade of the bitter unscrupulous tongue that heaps every kind of abuse deserved or not deserved upon those who are opposed to you that exaggerates their every fault, mistake and weakness that caricatures perverts their words and actions and claims in childish and absurd fashion that which is good is only to be found in your half of the nation and what is evil is only to be found in the other half. Such are the fruits of the strife for power. Evil they must be because power is evil in itself. How can the taking away from a man his intelligence, his will, his self-guidance be anything but evil? If it were not evil in itself there would be no meaning in the higher part of nature, there would be no guidance in the great principles for power, if we once acknowledge it, must stand above everything else and cannot admit of any rivals. If the power of some and the subjection of others are right, then men would exist merely as the dust to be trodden under the feet of each other, the autocrats, the emperors, the military empires, the socialist, perhaps even the anarchist with his detestable bomb, would each and all be in their own right and find their own justification, and we should live in a world of perpetual warfare that some devil, as we might reasonably believe, must have planned for us. To those of us who believe in the soul and on that great matter we who sign hold different opinions, the freedom of the individual is not simply a question of politics, but it is a religious question of the deepest meaning. The soul to us is by its own nature a free thing, living its life here in order that it may learn to distinguish and choose between the good and the evil, to find its own way whatever stages of existence may have to be passed through towards the perfecting of itself. You may not then either for the sake of advancing your own interests or for the sake of helping any cause, however great and desirable in itself in which you believe place bonds on the soul of other men and women and take from them any part of their freedom. You may not take away a free life putting in its place the bound life. Religion that is not based on freedom that allows any form of servitude of men to men is to us only an empty and mocking word, for religion means following our own personal sense of right and fulfilling the commands of duty as we each can most truly read it, not with the hands tied and the eyes blinded, but with the free, unconstrained heart that chooses for itself and see clearly that you cannot divide men up into separate parts into social, political and religious beings. It is all one. All parts of our nature are joined in one great unity and you cannot therefore make men politically subject without injuring their souls. Those who strive to increase the power of men over men and who thus create the habit of mechanical obedience, turning men into mere state creatures over whose heads laws of all kinds are passed, are striking at the very roots of religion which becomes but a lifeless, meaningless thing, sinking gradually into a matter of forms and ceremonies whenever the soul loses its freedom. Many men recognize this truth, if not in words yet in their hearts for all religions of the higher kind tend to become intensely personal, resting upon that free spiritual relation with the great over-soul, a relation that each must interpret for himself. And remember, you can't have two opposed powers of equal authority, you can't serve two masters. Either the religious conscience and sense of right must stand in the first place and the commands of all governing authorities in the second place, or the state machine must stand first and the religious and moral conscience of men must follow after in humble subjection and do what the state orders. If you make the state supreme, why should it pay heed to the rule of conscience or the individual sense of right? Why should the master listen to the servant? If it is supreme, let it plainly say so, take its own way and pay no heed as so many rulers before them have refused to do to the conscience of those they rule. Such are the fruits of power and the strife for power. It must be so. Set men up to rule their fellow men to treat them as mere soulless material with which they may deal as they please, and the consequence is that you sweep away every moral landmark and turn this world into a place of selfish striving, hopeless confusion, trickery and violence, a mere scrambling ground for the strongest or the most cunning or the most numerous. Once more, we repeat don't be deluded by the careless everyday talk about majorities. The vote of a majority is a far lesser evil than the edict of an autocrat for you can appeal to a majority to repent of its sins and to undo its mistakes, but numbers, though they were as the grains of sand on the seashore cannot take away the rights of a single individual, cannot turn man or woman into stuff for the politician to play with or overrule the great principles which mark out our relations to each other. These principles are rooted in the very nature of our being and have nothing to do with minorities and majorities. Arithmetic is a very excellent thing in its place, but it can neither give nor take away rights. Because you can collect three men on one side and only two on the other side that can offer no reason, no shadow of a reason why the three men should dispose of the lives and property of the two men should settle for them what they are to do and what they are to be. That mere rule of numbers can never justify the turning of the two men into slaves and the three men into slave owners. There is one and only one principle on which you can build a true rightful, enduring and progressive civilization which can give peace and friendliness and contentment to all differing groups and sex into which we are divided, and that principle is that every man and woman should be held by us all sacredly and religiously to be the one true owner of his or her faculties, of his or her body and mind and of all property inherited or honestly acquired. There is no other possible foundation. Seek it wherever you will on which you can build if you honestly mean to make this world a place of peace and friendship where progress of every kind like a full river fed by its many streams may flow on its happy fertilizing course with ever broadening and deepening volume. We ask you then to limit and restrain power as you would restrain a wild and dangerous beast. Make everything subservient to liberty. Use state force only for one purpose, to prevent and restrain the use of force amongst ourselves and that which may be described as the twin brother of force wearing a mask over its features, the fraud which by cunning sets aside the consent of the individual as force sets it aside openly and violently. Restrain by simple and efficient machinery the force and fraud that some men are always ready to employ against other men. For whether it is the state that employs force against a part of the citizens or one citizen who employs force or fraud against another citizen in both cases it is equally an aggression upon the rights upon the self ownership of the individual it is equally in both cases the act of the stronger who in virtue of his strength praise upon the weaker has not the real prosperity the happiness the peace of a nation increased just in proportion as it has broken all the bonds and disabilities that impeded its life just in proportion as it has let liberty replace force just in proportion as it has chosen and established for itself all rights of opinion of meeting of discussion rights of free trade rights of the free use of faculties rights of self ownership as against the wrongs of subjection and do you think that these new bonds and restrictions in which the nations of today have allowed themselves to be entangled the conscription which sends men out to fight consenting or not consenting which treats them as any other war material as the guns and the rifles dispatched in batches to do their work or the great systems of taxation which make of the individual their tax material as conscription makes of him mere war material or the great systems of compulsory education under which the state on its own unavowed interest tries to exert more and more of its own influence and authority over the minds of the children tries as we see specially in other countries to mold and to shape those young minds for its own ends something of religion will be useful school made patriotism will be useful drilling will be useful so preparing from the start docile and obedient state material ready made for taxation ready made for conscription ready made for the ambitious aims and ends of the rulers do you think that any of these modern systems though they are more veiled more subtle less frank and brutal than the systems of the older governments though the poison in them is more thickly smeared with the coating of sugar will bear different fruit will work less evil amongst us all will endure longer than those other broken and discredited attempts which men again and again in their madness and presumption have made to possess themselves of and to rule the bodies and minds of others no one and all they belong to the same evil family they are all part of the same conspiracy against the true greatness of human nature they are all marked broad across the forehead with the same old curse and they will all end in the same shameful and sorrowful ending over us all is the great unchanging law ever the same unchanged and unchanging regardless of all our follies and delusions that come and go that we are not to take possession of and rule the body and mind of others that we are not to take away from our fellow beings their own intelligence their own choice their own conscience and free will that we are not to allow any ruler be it autocrat emperor parliament or voting crowd to take from any human being his own true rank making of him the degraded state material that others use for their own purposes force whatever form it takes can do nothing for you it can redeem nothing it can give you nothing that is worth the having nothing that will endure it cannot even give you material prosperity there is no salvation for you or for any living man to be one by the force that narrows rights and always leaves men lower and more brutal in character than it found them it is and has ever been the evil genius of our race it calls out the reckless violent cruel part of our nature it wastes precious human effort in setting men to strive one against the other it turns us into mere fighting animals and ends when men at last become sick of the useless strife and universal confusion in the man on the black horse who calls himself and is greeted as the saviour of society make the truer the nobler choice resist the blind and sordid appeal to your interests of the moment and take your place once and for good on the side of the true liberty that calls out all the better and higher part of our nature and knows no difference between rulers and ruled majorities and minorities rich and poor declare once and for good that all men and women are the only true owners of their faculties of their mind and body of the property that belongs to them that you will only build the new society on the one true foundation of self ownership self rule and self guidance that you turn away from and renounce utterly all this mischievous foolish and corrupt business of compelling each other of placing burdens upon each other of making force and the hateful trickery that always goes with it into our guiding principles of treating first one set of men and then another set of men as beasts of burden whose lot in life it is to serve the purposes of others true it is that there are many and many things good in themselves which you do not yet possess and which you rightly desire things which the believers in force are generous enough to offer you in any profusion at the expense of others but they are merely cheating you with vain hopes dangling before your eyes the mocking shows of things that can never be force never yet made a nation prosperous it has destroyed nation after nation but never yet built up an enduring prosperity through your own free efforts not through the gifts of those who have no right to give them that all these good things can come to you for great is the essential difference between the gift whether rightly or wrongly given and the thing one by free effort that which you have won has made you stronger in yourselves has taught you how to know your own power and resources has prepared you to win more victories the gift flung to you has left you dependent upon others distrustful and dispirited in yourselves why turn to your governments as if you were helpless in yourselves what power lies in a government that does not lie also in you you have in yourselves the great qualities though still undeveloped for supplying in your own free groups the growing wants of your lives you are the children of the men who did so much for themselves the men who broke the absolute power who planted the colonies of our race in distant lands who created our manufacturers and carried our trade to every part of the world who established your cooperative and benefit societies your trade unions who built and supported your non conformist churches in you is the same stuff the same power to do as there was in them and if only you let their spirit breathe again in you and tread in their footsteps you may add to their triumphs and successes ten fold and a hundred fold but nothing can be well and rightly done nothing can bear the true fruit until you become deeply and devoted in love with personal liberty consecrating in your hearts the great and sacred principle of self-ownership and self-direction that great principle must be our guiding start through the whole of this life's pilgrimage away from its guiding we shall only continue to wander as of old hopelessly in the wilderness for its sake we must be ready to make any and every sacrifice that is worth them all many times worth them all for its sake you must steadily refuse all the glittering gifts and bribes which many politicians of both parties eagerly press upon you if you will but accept them as your leaders and lend them the power which your numbers can give enter into none of these corrupt and fatal compacts see also another truth there are few greater injuries that can be inflicted on you than taking out of your hands the great services that supply your wants why because the healing virtue that belongs to all these great services education religion the winning of land and houses the securing greater comfort and refinement and amusement in your lives lies in the winning of these things for yourselves by your own exertions through your own skill your own courage your friendly cooperation with one another your integrity in your common dealings your unconquerable self-reliance and confidence in your own powers of doing this winning these efforts are the great lessons in lifelong education that lasts from childhood to the grave and when learnt they are learnt not for themselves alone but for your children and your children's children they are the steps and the only steps up to the higher levels you can't be carried to those higher levels on the shoulders of others the politician is like those who boasted to have the keys of earth and heaven in their pocket vainest of vain pretenses the keys both of heaven and earth lie in your own pocket you the free individuals who can unlock the great door all these great wants and services are the means by which we acquire the great qualities which spell victory they are the means by which we become raised and changed in ourselves and by which as we are changed we change and remake all the circumstances of our lives each victory so gained prepares the way for the next victory and makes that next victory the easier for we not only have the sense of success in our hearts but we have begun to acquire the qualities on which it depends refuse then to put your faith in mere machinery in party organizations in acts of parliament in great unwieldy systems which treat good and bad the careful and the careless the striving and the indifferent on the same plane and each on account of their vast and cumbersize their complexity their official central management pass entirely out of your control refuse to be spoon fed drugged and dosed by the politicians they are not leading you towards the promised land but further and further away from it if the world could be saved by the men of words and the machine makers it would have been saved long ago nothing is easier than to make machinery you may have any quantity of it on order in a few months nothing is easier than to appoint any number of officials is of another and much sterner kind and the victory comes of our own climbing of the hills not by sitting in the plane with folded hands watching those others who profess to do our business for us do you think it likely or reasonable do you think it fits in with and agrees with your daily experience of this fighting working world of ours that you could take your chair in the politicians shop and order across his counter so much prosperity and progress and happiness just as you might order cotton goods by the piece or wheat by the quarter be brave and clear sided and face the stern but wholesome truth that it is only you you with your own hands you with your unconquerable resolve without any dependence on others without any of these childish and mischievous party struggles which are perhaps a little more exciting than cricket or football or even bridge to some of us but a good deal more profitless to the nation than digging holes in the earth and then filling them up again without any use of force without any oppression of each other without any of these blind reckless attempts to humiliate and defeat those who hold different beliefs from ourselves and who desire to follow different methods from those which we follow without any division of the nation into two three or more hostile camps ever inspired with dread and hatred of each other it is only you yourselves fighting with the good pure honest weapons of persuasion and example of sympathy and friendly cooperation it is only you calling out in yourselves the great qualities and flinging away all the meaner things the stripes the hates the jealousies the mere love of fighting and conquering it is only you treading in the blessed path of peace and freedom who can bring about the true regeneration of society and with it the true happiness of your own lives and through it all avoid that favorite that much loved snare of the politician by which he ever seeks to rivet his hold upon you refuse to attack and weaken in any manner the full rights of property you who are workers could not inflict on your own selves a more fatal injury property is the great and good inducement that will call out your efforts and energies for the remaking of the present form of society deprived property of its full value and attractiveness and we shall all become stuff only fit to make the helpless incapable crowd that the socialist so deeply admires and hopes so easily to control but it is not only for the sake of the magic of property its power to call out the qualities of industry and saving it is above all because you cannot weaken the rights of property without diminishing without injuring that first and greatest of all possessions human liberty it is for that supreme reason that we must resist every attempt of the politician to buy votes by generously giving away the property that does not belong to him the control of his own property by the individual and the liberty of the individual can never be separated from each other they must stand or fall together property when earned is the product of faculties and results from their free exercise and when inherited represents the full right of a man free from all imaginary and usurped control of others to deal as he likes with his own destroy the rights of property and you will also destroy both the material and the moral foundations of liberty to all men and women rich or poor belong their own faculties and as a consequence equally belongs to them all that they can honestly gain in free and open competition through the exercise of those faculties it is idle to talk of freedom and whilst the word is on one's lips to attack property he who attacks property joins the camp of those who wish to keep some men in subjection to the will of others you cannot break down any of the defenses of liberty you weaken liberty at any one point without weakening it at all points liberty means refusing to allow some men to use the state to compel other men to serve their interests or their opinions and at whatever point we allow this servitude to exist we weaken or destroy in men's minds the sacredness of the principle which must be as regards all actions all relations our universal bond but it is not only for the sake of liberty though that is far the greater and higher reason it is also for the sake of your own material progress that you the workers must resolutely reject all interference with all mutilations of the rights of property resist therefore all reckless unthinking appeals made to you to deprive the great prize of any part of its attractions if you surround property with state restrictions interfere with free trade and any part of the open market interfere with free contract make compulsory arrangements for tenant and land owner allow the present burdens of rate and tax to discourage ownership and penalize improvements you will weaken the motives for acquiring property and blunt the edge of the most powerful material instrument that exists for your own advancement only remember as we have said that great as is your material interest in safeguarding the rights of individual property yet higher and greater are and ever will be the moral reasons that forbid our sanctioning any attack upon it or our suffering state burdens and restrictions and impediments to grow around it true liberty as we said cannot exist apart from the full rights of property for property is so to speak only the crystallized form of free faculties establish freedom and open competition in everything and all forms of trade and enterprise all relations of men to each other tend to become healthy and vigorous pure and clean the better and more efficient forms as they do throughout nature's world slowly displacing the inefficient forms it must be so for in the fair open fight the good always tend to win over the bad if only you restrain all interferences of force it is so with freedom everywhere and in all things freedom begets the conflict the conflict begets the good and helpful qualities and the good and helpful qualities win their own victory they must do so for they are in themselves stronger more energetic more efficient than the forces the trickery's the corruptions the timidities the selfishness to which they are opposed the same truth rules our good and bad habits only keep the field open and allow the fair fight and the bad at last must yield to the good sooner or later the time comes when the clearer cited the more rightly judging few denounce some evil habit that exists gradually their influence and example act on others in ever widening circles until many men grow ashamed of what they have so long done and the habit is abandoned such is the universal law of progress which prevails in everything so long as we allow the free open fight between all good and evil but in order that the good may prevail there must be life and vigor in the people and this can only be where freedom exists and now place before yourselves a picture of the nation that not simply out of self interest but for rights sake and conscience sake took to its heart the great cause of true liberty and was determined that all men and women should be left free to guide themselves and take charge of their own lives that was determined to oppress and persecute and restrain the actions of no single person in order to serve any interest or opinion or any class that flung out of its hands the bad instrument of force using force only for its one clear simple and rightful purpose of restraining all acts of force and fraud committed by one citizen against another of safeguarding the lives the actions the property of all and thus making a fair open field for all honest effort think under the influences of liberty and her twin sister peace for they are inseparably bound together neither existing without the other how our character as a people would grow nobler and at the same time softer and more generous think how the old useless enmities and jealousies and strivings would die out how the unscrupulous politician would become a reformed character hardly recognizing his old self in his new and better self how men of all classes would learn to cooperate together for every kind of good and useful purpose how as the results of this free cooperation innumerable ties of friendship and kindliness would spring up amongst us all of every class and condition when we no longer sought to humble and crush each other but invited all who were willing to work freely with us how much truer and more real would be the campaign against the besetting vices and weaknesses of our nature when we sought to change that nature not simply to time ends hands and restrain external action no longer setting up and establishing in all parts of life that poor week motive the fear of punishment those clumsy useless penalties evaded and laughed at by the cunning that have never yet turned sinner into saint how we should rediscover in ourselves the good vigorous stuff that lies hidden there the power to plan to dare to do how we should see in clearer light our duty towards other nations and fulfill more faithfully our great world trust how we should cease to be a people divided into three or four quarrel some unscrupulous factions ready to sacrifice all the great things to their intense desire for power and grow into a people really one in heart and mind because we frankly recognized the right to differ the right of each one to choose his own path because we respected and cherished the will the intelligence the free choice of others as much as we respect and cherish these things in ourselves and were resolved never to trample for the sake of any plea for any motive on the higher parts of human nature resolved that comes storm or sunshine we would not falter in our allegiance to liberty and her sister peace that we would do all dare all and suffer all if need be for their sake then at last the regeneration of society would begin the real promised land not the imaginary land of vain and mocking desires would be in sight this has been individualism a reader edited by George H Smith and Marilyn Moore narrated by James Foster copyright written by the Cato Institute production copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute