I’ve recently become fascinated with a phenomenon that goes virtually unnoticed in our day-to-day lives, but should be seen as the miracle that it is: the “double thank you”. What I mean is basically this: you go to a shop, you buy something, and both you and the vendor say “thank you”.
You both benefit, not merely in a material sense, but in an ethical, virtuous sense. Freedom, or the free market, is a wellspring, a fountainhead, basically a geyser of “double thank-yous”. The profound positive impact that these interactions have on us, I believe, is immensely underrated.
This phenomenon is a direct consequence of a state of freedom, but what gets far less attention than it deserves, is the profound positive effect that it has on our character. A free society incentivizes virtuous behavior: honesty, hard work, courtesy, self-responsibility, creativity, initiative, et cetera.
When a society is forced to interact and organize only through voluntary means, this invisible engine of virtue comes online. We see ways to benefit from a course of action, and we see ways to benefit others if they cooperate with us. So we must resort to persuasion in order to gain their cooperation. We then persuade others to buy from us, or to sell to us. Virtue is reinforced within everyone, who then unconsciously take it and further reinforce it throughout their lives. This process is miraculous.
Voluntarism incentivizes virtue. Simple, and yet the difference between a prosperous, productive, and culturally vibrant civilization, and prehistoric, tribal conflict.
This self-reinforcing influence on virtuous behavior is probably the primary reason why we as a species have been able to reach our current state of material and cultural advancement. Which is why it is so dangerous for government to attack the foundations that make these interactions possible. We depend on this endless, self-reinforcing, virtuous process for the existence and progress of civilization.
The removal or suppression of the incentives to act virtuous, usually by government or attempts to suppress competition by an industry, result only in the resurgence of dormant character traits of conflict, distrust, tribalism, violence, et cetera.
The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as a direct attack on that foundational process of voluntarism that provides the emotional glue, essentially, for civilization itself. It resulted in predictable unrest, violence, despair, and every other negative force residing within us.
The pandemic response set into motion a civilization-ending process, that, if allowed to proceed too far, would certainly result in our return to the Stone Age, which is why I’ve always referred to the events of the past year as part of a process of “rebarbarization”, a rapid cultural and economic regression.
