The local angle: giving meaning to freedom

Reason, Oct, 1993 by Charles Murray

Twenty-five years ago, in May of 1968, where were you? Some days, I was in Northeast Thailand, along the banks of the Mekong River, where in the evenings I would sit on the porch of the little house where I stayed, drinking a beer and watching the flashes of bombs over the mountains that lined the eastern horizon, where the Ho Chi Minh Trail lay. Some days, I was in front of a typewriter in my office in Bangkok, writing the very first research report I ever got paid for, and deciding that there was this very interesting pattern about Thai villagers: They knew more about what they needed than the experts from the government knew.

What a crazy time to begin a libertarian magazine. The Goldwater debacle was just four years past. The only Republicans who could win were the Richard Nixons of the world--the same Richard Nixon who at about the time of his election was saying, "We are all Keynesians now." And to name the magazine REASON?! At a time when reason was next to a dirty word, the era of "turn on, tune in, drop out," of good vibrations and karma and LSD and the Greening of America? What a foolish, impossible venture.

And what an extraordinary change we have seen since. To me it is all the more extraordinary as we look at the current administration and see how far the orthodoxies of the '60s have fallen. Bill Clinton is the perfect embodiment of his party, just as George Bush was of his. George Bush hated ideas, all of them, and was threatened by them. Bill Clinton LOVES ideas--all of them. Neither man has the least idea of how to answer the question, "How should human beings live?" with anything except mush and platitudes. We do have an answer to that question, and if we cannot ultimately prevail against this kind of opposition, we won't have been trying hard enough.

And that brings me to what I want to talk about tonight: the coming revolution. This is the kind of audience I don't get to talk to very often. Let's face it, there aren't that many audiences like this one. There are probably more wild-eyed libertarian thoughts in this room tonight than in any room since Thomas Jefferson dined alone. In the settings where I usually speak, I consider it my duty to sound as reasonable as possible. But I see no need to do so tonight.

To those of you who were brought here by a date and didn't know what kind of crowd this was going to be, you've probably already gotten the idea. Most of the folks in this room don't just want to cut the capital-gains tax, they want to repeal the 16th Amendment. We don't think government wastes money; we think government is a waste of money. Anyway, if you haven't gotten out by this time it's too late. It's time to lock the doors and call the First Los Angeles Committee of Correspondence to order.

The question before the house is: How are we going to get from here to there? How do we move from a society which is a watered-down version of European social democracy and reconvert it to a Jeffersonian republic?

First thought: We aren't going to get there one step at a time. Or here's a better way of putting it: There will be intermediate steps, all right, but the point of them is not to put Jeffersonian democracy in place reform by reform, but rather to build toward the culmination, a broad and revolutionary shift of the conventional wisdom that makes possible a large number of huge reforms all at once.

I have a particular mechanism in mind: the paradigm shift. Many of you are familiar with the idea. It comes from Thomas Kuhn's seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's insight was that scientific revolutions occur all at once. At any given point in time, there is a reigning paradigm--Newtonian physics, let us say--which works pretty well. But as time goes on, anomalies are discovered. Things that the theory cannot explain. They accumulate. And then, just as the old paradigm is so full of weaknesses that it seems it must collapse, someone comes along--Albert Einstein, let's say--with a new paradigm that resolves the anomalies. The new paradigm rules utterly. There is no half-Newtonian, half-Einsteinian physics. And the shift happens almost instantaneously.

We have witnessed paradigm shifts in American politics in the past. Look at how scrupulously Franklin Roosevelt adhered to the old paradigm in his election campaign of 1932--he ran as a budget balancer, for heaven's sake--and at how drastically the reigning assumptions about the federal government had changed by 1936. Look at the politics of race and poverty at the end of 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. Imagine saying to someone on November 21, 1963, that within three years it would be taken for granted that of course government should provide financial assistance to people who already had jobs, and of course government should require preferential treatment for blacks. Both things were close to unthinkable by even a good Northern liberal Democrat in November 1963--hard as that is to remember now.

Paradigm shifts happen. And that is the process by which we will reestablish the Jeffersonian republic. But how do we do it? How do you go about creating a revolutionary paradigm shift? There was a book that had an idea about that. It was published about 36 years ago now, written by a woman named Rand.