Freedom; The Mortar of Maturity; S. Miles, Jr.

They conclude that "mental health" has now become important enough to be taken over by government. But here may be an issue made to order for liber tarians. For mental distress is largely, if not mainly, loss of contact with reality. In fact, this is how schizophrenia, responsible for 55 per cent of the "mental cases" in hos pitals, is now described. And loss of contact with reality is directly traceable to loss of freedom. The classic example of contact with reality used to be farming. The farmer prepares the ground; sows; the seeds grow into plants; he harvests the crop. The better he has done his job, the better the harvest-and the betMr. Miles offers a 'management consulting service in Los Angeles and does freelance writing and editorial work. 115 116 STEPHEN B. MILES, JR. ter he and his family will live. But today, farmers (and others) are not free to work in this way. Often the work a man does bears little relation to the rewards he reaps.

And so it is little wonder that he tends to lose contact with reality. In the Winter 1959-60 number of Modern Age (re printed in Essays on Liberty, Vol. VII, p. 149), William C. Mullendore traces the confusion of our society to lack of "responsible individualism." It may be that one of the most striking examples of that confusion is pre cisely the same mental distress that the socialists would cure by less individual responsibility. Problem Children Examining studies of insanity, one finds such cases as the man who, all during his childhood, was protected by his mother-and when it finally became necessary for him to get a job and assert himself, went into a tailspin. Here is a young woman who had been told all her life by an older sister what to do, what to eat, what to wear -and who had broken down shortly after getting mar ried. Here is another young lady who had waited on her invalid father day and night for the 30 years since he suffered a stroke and so became totally dependent on him for an emotional outlet. Here is a man with a his tory of almost constant illnesses as a child who, as a consequence, was never expected to do any real work or assume any real responsibility even during his well peri ods. And so it goes.

FREEDOM: THE MORTAR OF MATURITY 117 Most of these persons as children went regularly to school and studied their school lessons. Many of them became known as especially "bright" students. But none of them learned enough about the fine art of control ling situations, rather than being controlled by them, to develop the maturity necessary to cope with life once the crutch of overprotection or emotional dependence was withdrawn. They did not learn how to make their own decisions and choices-and how to take the consequences. They did not have the freedom that comes only with standing on their own two feet and physically and men tally "slugging it out" -a freedom more vital to man than any of his gregarious "drives." Even a new-born infant seems to have a deep-seated need for freedom of movement. When the baby gets a little older and stronger, he will scream and kick and struggle and get red in the face if he is constrained from turning over when he feels like it, or stretching, or doubling up. The behaviorists call this "rage." It would be equally appropriate to call it a demonstration of man's basic, and elemental, love for freedom, and of his growing awareness that he is an individual with inalien able rights.

Evolution y,oward Liberty The normal development of the child is such that, as he grows older, more and more freedom becomes avail able to him, seemingly restricted to that amount he can use in each of his stages of growth. Just as by using his 118 STEPHEN B. MILES, JR. freedom to pit himself against the obstacles of the world, the child-and later the man-develops the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual muscles that will build ma turity and enable him to understand his world, so has our civilization developed by gradual (and fitful) steps. The evolution of life itself, if read correctly, suggests that the need to be free is one of the primary needs of man. Lecomte du Nouy says in his great book, Human D'estiny: "Evolution has all the appearances of being a choice, always made in the same ascending direction towards a greater liberty .... The increasing freedom of living be ings is evident if one starts from the monocellular be ing and the mollusks: freedom of movement, liberation from the chains imposed by a strict dependence on the environment (concentration of saline medium, tempera ture~ food, etc.) ... liberation from the necessity of us ing the hands for walking or digging, liberation from the time-consuming method of transmitting useful ac quired characters and experience (through speech and tradition), and last of all ... liberation of conscience."1 The quest for freedom is not simply a thing added on, as dictators and bureaucrats seem to assume, or even one of the luxuries of integrity. It is part and parcel of the stuff of which human life is made, built in through a hundred million years of evolution, a million years of pre-history, thousands of years of history. When the circumstances of a man's life deprive him of freedom, 1 Du Nouy, Lecomte. Human Destiny. Longmans, Green and Co., 1947. pp. 92-93.

FREEDOM: THE MORTAR OF MATURITY 119 they also deprive him of sanity and maturity for which he was born. Without freedom he cannot build up and toughen those inner resources which give him the flexi bility and initiative so necessary for the give and take of life. By Trial and Error It is by freely trying out many different modes of be havior and then evaluating the consequences that are associated with such-and-such a type of behavior under such-and-such a circumstance that the wild gyrations of childhood, laughter one moment and tears the next, are narrowed down with the oncoming of maturity to smaller and more controlled emotional swings that will enable him to face the problems of life with initiative, self reliance, and love. The gradual integration of reality into the patterns of thinking, feeling, and behav ing is interrupted for the mentally disturbed in dividual. He somehow never learns to be self-reliant in the confidence that things will turn out as planned; to take the initiative, and thus make himself into an agent through which the cosmic creative force may flOW;2 or to love, which for the mature individual involves self-discipline and responsibility for. others. He knows only the dependence of the child-but he yearns to ex press the emotions of adulthood, the emotions intended to fit him for maturity, without knowing how to do so.

:I See Leonard E. Read, "Economics for the Teachable," Essays on Liberty, Vol. VII, p. 78.

120 STEPHEN B. MILES, JR. He is torn between two worlds, and the result is the extremes of behavior of the manic-depressive; the de lusions of persecution and of grandeur of the paranoic; and the silliness, negativism, apathy, and "split person ali ty" of the schizophrenic. T he Inner World of Man Friedrich Hayek shows in The Sensory Order that re ality is not simply something in the "outer world" to be reached out to by sensory organs, but rather is created by each individual for himself. 3 Such a concept of the development of reality makes it even more apparent that a nice balance between emotional responses, be tween work and accomplishment, between experience of effect and understanding of cause is required-in order that relationships (which are all we know) may be inte grated in a constantly tightening nexus. The "develop ment" of "reality," so conceived, which is here called maturity, is threatened by injudicious interference with the freedom of the individual, whether it be by parental overprotection, teacher coddling, welfare-statism, or whatnot. In its most extreme form, non-freedom leads to, or perhaps is, insanity. (For his I984J George Orwell expanded a lunatic asylum to be coterminous with civilization. ) Life always throws down a challenge to the newcomer.

That challenge reads: "Prove thyself." Parents, teachers, 3 Hayek, F. A. The Sensory Order. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952.

FREEDOM: THE MORTAR OF MATURITY 121 friends can help the individual get ready to meet that challenge, but they. can protect him from accepting it and the attendant risks only by withdrawing him· from the enterprise of life. A nd the attendant risks. Facing challenges from which the teeth have been pulled just will not do. Such a situa tion is as artificial as providing a dog simultaneously with food and with electric shocks-and likely to have the same result: breakdown. Whatever can be said in opposition to an agency us ing coercion against one group or individual to protect another (and it is much) the greatest harm may, in the last analysis, be caused not by the coercion, but by the protection. Society can provide the individual with an esthesia but not with maturity. Only by "bringing off" affairs where he has freely staked something of value can the individual learn-and by learning, hold the bricks of security in place by freedom, the mortar of maturity.