Civil reciprocity

Remember the Greeks:

Pittacus: "Do not to your neighbor what you would take ill from him."
Thales: "Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing."
Sextus the Pythagorean: "What you wish your neighbors to be to you, such be also to them."
Isocrates: "Do not do to others what would anger you if done to you by others."
Epictetus: "What thou avoidest suffering thyself seek not to impose on others."
Epicurus: "It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly, agreeing 'neither to harm nor be harmed'."

Major world religions have similar sayings.

Yet today many people wish their preferred freedoms to be respected, while applauding governmental crackdowns upon other freedoms they dislike or are indifferent to. And sadly we know what this attitude leads to, in the end...

Martin Niemöller, a Protestant pastor, is the author of "First they came...", a famous poem he recited in speeches. Here's one variant inscribed in the New England Holocaust Memorial:



Similarly the following is attributed to Benjamin Franklin:

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Building on the above ideas, J.D. Tuccille writes:

Until pot-smokers and gun owners and low-taxers and sexual minorities recognize that liberty is indivisible and that we're all in this together, we're going to be picked off piecemeal by government officials all too happy to exploit our mutual antagonisms.

It comes down to the same thing: When liberty is under attack, everybody is at risk. But that's not what the politicians and inspectors and tax collectors and police officers say, of course. No, they're all too happy to tell you that the queers next door are a threat to your way of life, or that the gun nuts are a public danger, or that the tax dodgers are greedy and not doing their fair share, or the store keepers are running amuck without entangling red tape, or that the pot heads are lazy parasites who will corrupt your kids.

But once the politicians and inspectors and tax collectors and police officers are done with the queers, they'll happily shift their sights to the gun nuts, then to the tax dodgers, the store keepers, and then the pot heads, and ...

Where were you planning to hide? Forget about it. Because you're some kind of menace, too, and you'll be fresh out of allies if you don't realize that the freedom of people you don't care very much about is just as important as your own.

The sort of people who make up the political class -- the control freaks of the world -- are experts at divide and conquer. They have all sorts of reasons why you should be glad that somebody else is being hemmed in by laws and threatened with prison. Those people are bad -- until it's you who's so bad. What the control freaks will never tell you is that they'd be entirely unable to impose those draconian laws and threats if you'd ally yourselves with those different folks and their peculiar interests to protect their liberty and your own at the same time.

You don't care about your neighbor's gun collection and he doesn't give a damn about your pot farm? So what? If you help each other out, everybody wins. If you don't, you'll both end up losing something you want, or else hiding it in the shadows and hoping for the best.

Keep that in mind the next time a politician promises to protect you from bogeymen who look an awful lot like the pleasant couple who live down the street. Maybe it's time to knock on their door and talk about an alliance of convenience.

Because you're not going to stay free if the only liberty you care about is your own.