Cargo cult liberty
or what connects modern USA and 17th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
Cached thoughts
Rationalist community has this concept of cached thoughts — outdated beliefs that accumulate over time when we fail to reflect critically upon old beliefs as we encounter new information. Our processing power and attention span is limited - we simply can’t rethink everything from scratch every time we get new information - so we often hold on to beliefs which have long ceased to be useful for modeling or changing reality. Most people develop heuristics to know when to reevaluate their core beliefs, and for most people these heuristics only ever get closer and closer to “never” as they age.
"Cached thoughts" aren’t only a feature of individuals. Entire societies can, and often are captured by beliefs that were working fine at some point, but have clearly outlived their usefulness. It might sound suspiscious - after all societies have millions of brains and can think about A LOT of things in parallel. The problem in societies shifts from the processing power to coordination and exchange of information. When a society fails to engage in honest public debates, or when these debates are confined to isolated groups that seldom interact and almost never change their minds - such a society is trapped with the system that it developed, unable to adapt to changing circumstances.
Liberum veto
An illustrative historical example of a beneficial rule that became detrimental due to societal inertia is the liberum veto in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Initially, this rule was a hallmark of the "Golden Liberty" that defined the Commonwealth, ensuring that no legislation could pass without unanimous consent of the (quite wide for the period) ruling class1. A country made of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant nobility, with laws written in Latin, Polish, Chancery Slavonic and Hebrew, with massive Jewish minority and a lot of German-speaking regions - probably couldn’t be maintained with a voting system that lacked such consensus-building mechanisms.
Nobility of Commonwealth valued their Golden Liberty and their priviledges so much that on many occassions they rebelled risking their lives against any attempts to reform the country. There were groups that understood the problem with liberum veto, but there were also groups that considered any attempt at reforms a threat to their core beliefs in Golden Liberty. Ultimately the PLC nobles who fought to preserve their cargo cult liberty - caused their own enslavement at the hands of modernized absolute monarchies of the region - Prussia, Russia and Austria. Poland and Lithuania disappeared from map for over 100 years.
2nd amandement
The Second Amendment of the American Constitution, crafted in a different era to address reasonable concerns of the founding fathers - presents a lot of challenges today. While the right to bear arms made sense in a time when militias were considered necessary to oppose tyranny - modern tyrannies do not seem to be deterred by personal firearms, and in fact sometimes they arise BECAUSE of the militarization of the society as a response to the spiraling violence. The military capabilities of contemporary armies make individual armaments largely irrelevant. It’s hard to argue that you can take on the US Army with your AR-15. Moreover, the prevalence of firearms in the U.S. contributes to crime, accidents, and suicides at rates significantly higher than in other comparable nations. It can be argued that police brutality is at least in some part caused by the possibility that every suspect might draw a gun at any moment.
It is exactly in the militarized, violent societies where tyrannies are created to solve the problems that seem impossible to solve by any other means. It is understandeable that people who just like to shoot guns want to preserve their right to do so, given that most of them did nothing to abuse it. At the same time - the gun control laws adopted by most other countries in the world would only inconvenience the gun enthusiasts slightly, and the benefits for the safety of the whole society would be enormous.
Public healthcare
The absence of public healthcare is another example where the pursuit of liberty paradoxically curtails freedom. The belief that minimizing state intervention in healthcare preserves individual liberty ignores the reality that those who are financially destitute and ill cannot exercise their freedoms at all. The lack of a public healthcare system increases the costs of healthcare for almost everybody and traps some in cycles of debt and poor health, severely restricting their ability to pursue their aspirations and participate fully in society. It is only in the US where “Breaking Bad” story could be written. This “liberty to die of insufficient funds” compounds with other problems like student debt, opioids crisis and widespread firearms to create a country in which it’s easy to fall and hard to get back up. If you can’t afford to slip - are you more or less free about each step you take?
Race politics
It’s not like American left is completely free of cargo cults. Just like 2nd Amandement - political correctness and “positive discrimination” made much more sense in the past than now. As society is becoming more and more equal - priviledges given to minorities are less and less neccessary. And it’s not like these priviledges have no bad consequences. Access to education for “white trash” is one obvious example. The existence and acceptance of the term itself is another. At some point “positive discrimination” will become detrimental. Some people think that time is in the past. I’m not sure, but the trend is obvious.
Low hanging fruits
Each of these problems seems to be at least partially caused by a “cargo cult liberty” which made some sense at some point, and wasn’t reevaluated honestly by the whole society for a long time. They are clearly harmful at this point, and they present low-hanging fruits for improvement of actual liberty of actual Americans. These so-called liberties enslave people to external influences, whims of the oligarchs, spiraling violence, police brutality, debilitating debt. And the benefits are mostly in the abstract realm.
Moving forward, the key to overcoming these outdated notions lies in unblocking the channels of public debate between isolated societal groups. People have thought about these things for decades if not centuries. All the solutions are out there. I’m probably mistaken about some of them because I do not live in USA. But I’m sure the details could be worked out pretty quickly - if people were willing to abandon ideologies and talk facts. A genuinely free society much better adapted to the modern world could be created and the downside for vast majority would be minimal.
Why do I care?
I’m not American, after all. I have some compassion and good will, but I’ll freely admit it’s not my main motivation. The problem with these cargo cult liberties is that they spread like any other ideas. And American culture is still hugely influential all over the world. The American culture war splinters everywhere. I have heard some people in Poland demand our public healthcare and public education be privatized because anything else would be “communism”. When conservatives and liberals fight in USA - the much more reasonable conservatives in Europe get stupid ideas about car-centric urban planning, global-warming denialism, abolishing gun control, etc. And the much more reasonable liberals in Europe get stupid ideas about cancel culture, race war, political correctness taken to extreme, etc.
Ironically - this is yet another way in which this phenomenon resembles a cargo cult. Just like some societes engage in cargo cult preserving outdated features of their systems - others copy the worst features from other countries mistakenly believing these will make them more free.
So it is with self-preservation in mind that I beg you, Americans. Please, get your shit together.
around 5% of population in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was nobility. Half of that were women, so 2.5% of the population had the right to vote on who becomes the king, what the taxes will be, what (if any) wars to participate in, what to spend money on, etc. They even forced the king to give them Universal Basic Income in the form of “salt quotas” from the royal salt mines. All of that took place while over 90% of the population were serfs (effectively slaves) with no rights nor legal protection.