In The Ethics of Thelema, we stated that Liber OZ:

does not grant rights; it lists rights that are available to those who are able to enforce them.

It may seem ironic to some that many Thelemites – claiming to adhere to “the law of the strong” (AL II, 21) – should exert so much effort clamouring to be handed their “Liber OZ rights” on a plate, when one might expect that a more consistent course of action would be to just take them, and indeed it is. A popular topic that has been doing the rounds on various blogs, news outlets and business journals is the concept of the so-called “generation entitled”. In a nutshell, this concept suggests that the current generation feels that they have a right or a claim to something, and generally it is supposed to be an unreasonable feeling. This might range from a feeling that one has the right to be treated as a de facto member of royalty by any waitress in any culinary establishment that one might happen to wander into, through a feeling that one has the right for one’s psychological needs and creative outlets to be fulfilled through one’s employment, to a feeling that one has the right to have that parking space because one believes that one saw it first.

It should not be difficult to recognise this sense of entitlement as essentially a childish urge, and it accordingly should be of little surprise to find that Thelemites – the “Aeon of Horus” being the “Aeon of the Child”, of course – should more than proportionately succumb to it. Taken at face value, Liber OZ reads like a juvenile tantrum to end all juvenile tantrums – “you will give me absolutely everything I want, right now, or I’ll kill you!”

What constitutes the sense of entitlement in this context is not the simple desire to satisfy all ones whims, or even the actual act of satisfying them, but the idea that one has a right to be accorded that privilege by someone or something else. This sense of entitlement, this feeling that one has a right to be handed privileges by others, is at the heart of most of what passes for “Thelemic political discussion” these days, as commentators search for a political system where they can be given the right to “do their wills”, whatever they might mean by that.

What these commentators really need is a healthy dose of reality to bring them back down to the ground. As an illustrative example, let’s take the fundamental question of self-determination. Suppose that we have a number of independent city-states in close proximity, each governed by direct democracy, where each citizen has the privilege of voting directly on every single action of the state. Suppose further that through this process, each city-state has secured for itself a libertarian utopia, where government interference is at an absolute minimum, taxes are almost non-existent, governmental institutions are tiny and there is essentially no central forced coordination beyond what the free market may be expected to provide.

Then, presume that one of the city-states begins to run short of resources. The citizens of that city-state look with envy upon the wealth of their neighbours, and discontent begins to fester. One bright spark might pipe up and say, “you know, if we all grouped together and decided to put a substantial part of our wealth at the disposal of the state which it could use to build an army, if we all agreed to forego some of our freedom for a while that we might serve in that army, and if we all agreed to delegate a large part of our autonomy to a small leadership group skilled in military and organizational matters who could order our society in a much more effective way than can be achieved by voluntary cooperation alone, then we could invade all the other states, easily take their resources, employ their populations as slaves and never go hungry again”. Finally, suppose that just such a plan is agreed to and successfully put into operation.

Clearly, the point is that, as we have said, a sense of entitlement requires the existence of a governing authority to grant those privileges, and that the ability of such an authority cannot be guaranteed to be capable of doing so. In this case, even though the citizens successfully arrived at a form of government that granted them as close as is practically possible to what might be considered total autonomy, a rival society can waltz in at a whim and overrun that society if they forego some freedom and submit to strong rule in order to make their own society stronger.

Neither need we restrict ourselves to warfare – simple economics can get us to the same eventuality. If central coordination can be argued to improve an economy, then we may expect societies with a degree of coordination to be economically more successful than societies without that degree of coordination. If the economy of a relatively free society becomes so bad that people are forced to voluntarily migrate to a more restrictive society in order to secure their financial wellbeing, then their initial libertarian achievement isn’t going to mean much. (For the avoidance of doubt, the purpose of this illustration is not to suggest that more centralization necessarily means more economic power – the example of the Soviet Union providing a compelling counter-example – although it is reasonable to assume that some centralization will be beneficial, and this centralization always comes at the cost of some restriction. For example, we may suggest that strongly-enforced laws against the giving or receiving of bribes might lead a market to be much more efficient, even though it restricts some market participants in the amount of personal profit they can make from transactions).

Aleister Crowley wrote in the largely bizarre The Scientific Solution to the Problem of Government that:

The average voter is a moron.  He believes what he reads in newspapers, feeds his imagination and lulls his repressions on the cinema, and hopes to break away from his slavery by football pools, cross-word prizes, or spotting the winner of the 3.30.  He is ignorant as no illiterate peasant is ignorant: he has no power of independent thought.  He is the prey of panic.  But he has the vote.

As the above examples should show, it is quite feasible to suggest that – even if we reject the “moron” label – that a society governed by direct democracy can, in many instances, be less successful that a society is which is more restrictively governed. Today’s successful Western “democracies” resemble direct democracies very little – there are often only two major political parties with any hope of being elected, and the elected represenatives usually vote in line with the wishes of their party leadership, rather than in line with the wishes of their electorate, with the result that “democracy” really more often boils down to a choice of which of two dictators the population wishes to subject themselves to for the next few years. Beyond this choice, the average man of the street has actually no input into the decisions of his government whatsoever, and with populations running into the millions even that choice actually means very little in practical terms.

As Crowley continues:

The men in power can only govern by stampeding him into wars, playing on his fears and prejudices until he acquiesces in repressive legislation against his obvious interests, playing on his vanity until he is totally blind to his own misery and serfdom. The alternative method is undisguised dragooning.  In brief, we govern by a mixture of lying and bullying.

A political party wishing to attain power in a Western “democracy” does need to obtain a popular vote, and does so by “playing on [the] fears and prejudices” of the common man, and the actual political decisions made will often bear little resemblance to the “false claims and broken promises” made by the aspiring politicians. Yet, the question of reality forces us to question whether a the kind of libertarian alternative proposed by many Thelemic commentators would actually be more desirable.

Crowley’s attitude to the “common man” (all Thelemites like to think of themselves as “Kings”, but the stark fact is the vast majority of them would fall squarely into Crowley’s definition of the “sections of the social organism which are not its brains”) was extremely condescending, and he echoed similar ideas. He stated that “ordinary morality is for ordinary people” in The Confessions, along with the following remarkable extract from the New Comment to AL II, 58:

We should recognize the fact that the vast majority of human beings have no ambition in life beyond mere ease and animal happiness. We should allow these people to fulfill their destinies without interference…We should have no compunction in utilizing the natural qualities of the bulk of mankind. We do not insist on trying to train sheep to hunt foxes or lecture on history; we look after their physical well being, and enjoy their wool and mutton. In this way we shall have a contented class of slaves who will accept the conditions of existence as they really are, and enjoy life with the quiet wisdom of cattle. It is our duty to see to it that this class of people lack for nothing. The patriarchal system is better for all classes than any other.”

following this up with his practical scheme, again in The Confessions:

The bulk of humanity, having no true will, will find themselves powerless. It will be for us to rule them wisely. We must secure their happiness and train them for ultimate freedom by setting them tasks for which their nature fits them…it is our duty to maintain the order of nature by seeing to it that his orbit is correctly calculated.

Clearly, Crowley’s vision of Thelemic politics bears little relationship to democracy, which he regularly decried. To return to the examination of self-determination, a direct democracy would almost certainly be unworkable. If every government decision were voted on by every member of the population the resulting collection of legislation would likely be enormously self-contradictory and impractical, if those decisions could be made at all. If two proposals were on the table, one to grant universal healthcare, the other to raise taxes, then it is likely the first would be passed and the second rejected, but if the first requires the second then the decision will be impotent. It is reasonable to suppose that any collection of organizational decisions must be coordinated or they will not be able to implemented, and it is also reasonable to suppose that if every decision were subject to majority vote that they would not be coordinated. In other words, delegation of executive power to a small body of representatives who have the ability to make decisions which are contrary to the wishes of the majority may be necessary for a well-functioning government, and as we have already seen a well-functioning government may be necessary for the economic well-being or the very survival of a society.

Secondly, direct democracy will almost certainly be inequitable. In a simple direct democracy, a 51% majority could persistently dictate to a 49% minority. Anyone who claims to support the idea of pure democracy should ask themselves whether, if 51% of the population want to exterminate the Jews, for instance, they would support the implementation of such a plan of extermination, because if they would not support that then they do not support the idea of pure democracy.

Thirdly, a direct democracy would not be stable. People tend to be fickle, and a fundamental law could be overturned and replaced by something different every single time a vote is taken, in theory. If the original decision was something that required a substantial commitment of resources (such as the maintaining of an army) then the resulting degree of waste would almost certainly bankrupt the government in very short order, even if it is not overturned by a competing government.

Many more examples could be constructed, but the point should be clear that a government which consistently follows the wishes of a majority of its population will almost certainly be extremely unsuccessful, and that “strong government” – with the restriction on personal liberty that implies – is perhaps a necessity for a successful society.

In the same way, certain types of freedoms may be inconsistent with societal success. Taxes are viewed by some as governmental theft, but freedom from such theft isn’t going to mean much if the collapse of the government leads to one’s death at the hands of pitchfork-wielding mobs during the ensuing disorder, or if a much more dictatorial government steps in to the void to assume control and to subject the individual to far more restrictions than he would ever have agreed to voluntarily subject himself to.

In The Golden Bough, Frazer wrote:

Thus, so far as the public profession of magic affected the constitution of savage society, it tended to place the control of affairs in the hands of the ablest man: it shifted the balance of power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a democracy, or rather for an oligarchy of old men; for in general the savage community is ruled, not by the whole body of adult males, but by a council of elders. The change, by whatever causes produced, and whatever the character of the early rules, was on the whole very beneficial. For the rise of monarchy appears to be an essential condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery. No human being is so hidebound by custom and tradition as your democratic savage; in no state of society consequently is progress so slow and difficult….The least possible scope is thus afforded to superior talent to change old customs for the better. The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and dullest, who necessarily sets the standards, since he cannot rise, while the other can fall. The surface of such a society presents a uniform dead level, so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the natural inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of inborn capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality. From this low and stagnant condition of affairs, which demagogues and dreamers in later times have lauded as the ideal state, the Golden Age, of humanity, everything that helps to raise society by opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of authority to men’s natural abilities, deserves to be welcomed by all who have the real good of their fellows at heart. Once these elevating influences have begun to operate – and they cannot be forever suppressed – the progress of civilisation becomes comparatively rapid. The rise of one man to supreme power enables him to carry through changes in a single lifetime which previously many generations might not have sufficed to effect; and if, as will oftne happen, he is a man of intellect and energy above the common, he will readily avail himself of the opportunity.

Frazer’s scholarship has come in for a lot of criticism of late, but this need not distract us from the point at hand, which is that society may reasonably assumed to be better off under strong leadership than without it. This may be true even if that leadership is incompetent, on the grounds that some central coordination is better than none. Crowley himself regularly expressed this view, for instance, in The Confessions:

We have abolished all kinds of injustice on our attention being called to them; but the result has been that we have created an artificial doctrinaire society is which nobody is really happy or prosperous…The most appalling of political mistakes is to develop consciousness in sections of the social organism which are not its brains.

In other words, Thelemic commentators who forever pine for a libertarian utopia uniformly restrict themselves – because of their sense of entitlement – to considering how they would like to live. The part they uniformly fail to consider is how they have to live, and this is critically important because – as the old saying goes – although they can shut themselves away from the world for a while, they cannot forever shut the world out. The Soviet example already quoted provides a good example – it may well be that a society where property is under common ownership seems very nice and equitable (it doesn’t to me), but experience showed (in that case at least) that it just doesn’t work. Ideals remain only ideals if they are incapable of feasibly being put into practice.

It certainly appears that relative economic freedom has been largely responsible for the success of Western economies (up to now, at least; in geological terms these societies have been around for a comparatively small amount of time, and it’s at least possible that these gains may turn out to be short-term, and that that freedom may just as well lead directly to the failure of these societies. Some commentators are prematurely – and almost certainly incorrectly – citing the current financial crisis as evidence of such a view), and we may suggest that this is because a modern economy is simply too complex to be managed at all. Innovation is ultimately, after all, undertaken by real people performing real tasks, not generally by governmental authorities, and if such innovation is what drives economic growth – for instance by improving the efficiency of production processes – then it may be that the most strategically sound approach to economic government is to foster an environment where such innovation is enabled to emerge by itself, instead of attempting to subject production and technology to stifling and inflexible central control.

It is by no means certain that social freedom may be expected to have similarly beneficial effects. Rightly or wrongly, the “Protestant work ethic” has often been held to have had a significant effect on the growth of Western economies, particularly of the U.S. and the U.K. When discussing so-called “moral issues” such as gay marriage or sexual freedom, conservative commentators often issue apocalyptic predictions of “moral collapse” and a destruction of the “social fabric” which makes a society tick over smoothly. It is not the purpose of this essay to consider the merits of such an argument, but simply to point out that it may be right. It may in fact be true that a significant reduction of social restriction actually may have deleterious effects on a society to the point where poor social performance leads either to an invasion by a stronger society with their own restrictive rules, or to mass voluntary migration to a society which, although having more restrictive rules, is nevertheless significantly more successful and provides more opportunities. It is certainly the case that up until relatively recently successful Western societies were significantly more restrictive than they are now, and it’s possible that the level of individual freedom available to us in the present time – a level which many continue to bemoan is far too little – may turn out to be a costly and expensive social experiment which ultimately has to be reversed. It may not turn out that way, of course, but then again, it may.

The matter of reality needs to be taken into account by all entitled Thelemic commentators, because the simple fact of the matter is that there are no natural rights. “Rights” are really only privileges which require continuous effort to enforce, and if the ability to enforce or otherwise enjoy those privileges disappears, then the “rights” will disappear along with it. However entitled a political commentator may think he is to a given state of political affairs, he cannot guarantee that other societies will continue to let that state of affairs exist, and neither can he guarantee that such a state of affairs will be fruitful and productive enough to sustain itself in the long term, even in the absence of external conflict. As the extract from Frazer above suggests, if restrictive centralization does indeed confer benefits on a society then a sufficiently large differential may cause the less restrictive society to collapse either from the inside or from the outside, no matter how appealing or righteous it may seem.

From a specifically Thelemic perspective, the ability to “do one’s will” may – depending upon what that individual will is – depend very heavily on the existence of such a society. To take a trite example, if a given individual wishes to assert that it is “his will” to venture into outer space, then he will have to voluntarily subject himself to a very small number of governmental alternatives in order to do that. This restriction may sound unappealing and contrary to the Thelemic “ideal”, but it really isn’t so. As we said in Interference and “Defining Constraints” that:

Any given individual can be considered to have a “natural” course of action in any given situation, regardless of what the details of that situation are, including situations where some possibilities are being withheld from you by other human beings. If you are in a room with only one exit, then without an ability to walk through walls you can be pretty sure that at some point in the near future your “true” will is going to be to leave that room through that single door. The walls are not “restricting” your will, in this case; they are defining it. The same can apply when people get in your way in a similar manner. We can draw an analogy with an electrical current; a resistor offers opposition to the flow of current, but if that current is not confined to a well-defined and closed circuit in the first place then there will be no flow at all, and no will.

and also in Stoicism and Thelema that:

If an individual is imprisoned [for instance], he is still perfectly capable of acting in accordance with how his nature dictates that he should act in those circumstances, and this holds true for any set of circumstances.

Thus, external restriction does not hamper the ability of the individual to perform his will, since his will is – in part – defined precisely as a result of that restriction. From Interference and “Defining Constraints” again:

This may at first sound like cheating, but turns out to be no more so than restricting the will to those things that don’t require, for instance, being able to breathe unaided underwater for several hours at a time, or being able to travel to Jupiter solely by the power of your own flatulence. There are plenty of external constraints out there that can not be overcome but only adjusted to, gravity being an obvious example. There’s no a priori reason to treat the interference of other human beings as a separate category to these.

The will arises from the conjunction between the individual’s nature and the environment in which he finds himself, and a most optimal course of action can be found in any such combination. The individual may indeed be hampered by external restriction from what he wants to do, but “Do what thou wilt” is categorically not the same as “Do what you like”, as we keep on hearing. If an individual is securely locked up in jail, it cannot possibly be his will to go frolicking around on the grass at that moment in time, regardless of how much he’d like to do that. It may be his will to try to escape, or it may be his will to otherwise attempt to secure his release, because all of these things may be possible, but it cannot be the will to do that which is currently impossible. As such, the most restrictive government imaginable cannot restrict the ability of the individual to fulfill his will in any way whatsoever, and to argue against this is to argue that gravity and the very human body in which the individual resides, to name but two examples, are equally capable of restricting his will, because there is no a priori reason for drawing a qualitative difference between restriction coming from other individuals, and restriction coming from the environment. The Book of the Law states this clearly itself:

Beware therefore! Love all, lest perchance is a King concealed! Say you so? Fool! If he be a King, thou canst not hurt him.

Therefore strike hard & low, and to hell with them, master! (AL II, 59-60)

As we said at the beginning of this essay, Thelemic “rights” – in the Liber OZ sense – are freedoms to be taken, not privileges to be granted. It would be a very weak and ineffectual “Thelemite”, for instance, who would seriously maintain that his will was being thwarted because it was illegal to take certain drugs, for instance, or to have anal sex with another man, because he has an ability to perform both of those actions regardless of what the government says he can or cannot do. If he is prepared to voluntarily refrain from such actions under fear of punishment, then that is merely his will reacting appropriately to the environment in which it finds itself.

In the scheme of things, the types of restrictions currently suffered in modern Western societies are therefore extremely trivial compared to the types of privations which may be expected to be suffered in the case of societal collapse, such as death from starvation, torture and murder by an occupying power, or even lesser inconveniences such as unemployment, fuel shortages, and restrictions upon travel. To voluntarily subject oneself to this type of privation as a result of failing to think through the consequences of establishing a libertarian utopia where “one’s ‘will’ is not restricted in any way” would be foolish, and severely counterproductive, yet this is what can happen if idealism is allowed to (temporarily) overrule reality. In Thelema, Libertarianism and Politics we saw that Thelema does not imply libertarianism even from a theoretical perspective, and the need to accept reality as it is rather than how you would like it to be – which is a need which cannot be ignored indefinitely – could make the types of society which are often suggested by unthinking Thelemic commentators dubious from a practical perspective, as well.

A final point which must be considered when discussing Thelema within a social context has parallels with evolutionary ideas. In Let There Be No Difference Made we saw that evolution “works” on the scale of the species, and the unconscious process of natural selection can – and arguably often does – result in characteristics which, while conducive to the survival of the species, are nevertheless detrimental to the well-being of the individual. A predisposition to altruism might be cited as an example, as – more controversially – might the phenonomenon of death. A species whose individuals never died might reasonably be expected to rapidly result in an overcrowded environment, easy spread of disease, exhaustion of resources, and all manner of other effects which could be detrimental to the survival of the species, so we could argue that organisms which evolve the characteristic of dying shortly after reproducing and raising young could be beneficial to the species, but obviously detrimental to the individual (as a side note, the phrase “obviously detrimental” is debatable, as What’s the point of it all? showed).

In a similar way, we have been talking about a “successful society” but it by no means necessarily follows that the success of a society must be correlated by the success of the individuals within that society. The problems of precisely measuring the “success” of a society aside, it’s easy to at least imagine the theoretical possibility of the most successful society achieving its success through imposing extreme hardship on its members – in the case of total war, for instance, this is almost necessarily true. In the same way as the wellbeing of any individual organism is not necessarily in alignment with following its evolutionarily developed tendencies, so the wellbeing of any given individual will not necessarily coincide with the wellbeing of the society as a whole. This may seem so obvious that it hardly needs pointing out, but a vast number of people fall into this elementary trap.

For instance, many people will often voice an opinion similar to “you can’t expect society to protect you from theft if you yourself steal from others”. Well, actually, you can. As a simple matter of legal fact, any convicted thief in a normal Western democracy does in fact have the same amount of legal protection against theft as any other individual does (except for government theft of his property, of course). Moreover, any thief who successfully eludes capture can go on indefinitely enjoying the same rights as everybody else and nobody will be the wiser.

In other words, there really isn’t any reason why one should not support or even advocate a particular social convention whilst failing to abide by it oneself. It may be hypocritical, for instance, for an evangelical preacher to denounce homosexuality while secretly indulging in gay sex in seedy motels himself, but there actually is no genuine reason why he shouldn’t do it, aside from the consequences of getting caught. “But if everybody transgressed a particular rule,” you may cry, “it might as well not be there!” That’s perfectly true, but we’re not talking about everybody transgressing, we’re talking about you doing it. Even if you accept that a strong government and a rigid system of laws might be best for a successful society, it’s reasonable to assume that your own isolated transgressions are not going to instantly negate that benefit, so if you’re happy taking the risk of being caught and punished there is no “inner conflict” in transgressing.

Moreover, even if we suppose that mass transgression would lead to social collapse, it wouldn’t necessarily lead to social collapse immediately. It might be many generations in the future. In such a case, there is no obligation on a given individual to give a damn about what happens to that society at some distant point in the future, in exactly the same way as there is no obligation for a given individual to reproduce even if that (slightly) reducing the chances of his species successfully surviving. This may appear to be a “selfish” view, but so what? Thelema is inherently a selfish philosophy, where individual will is supreme, and that individual will is often not aligned exactly with either evolutionary tendencies or with social convention. It’s fundamentally no more “selfish”, for instance, for someone to undertake actions now which may result in significant global warming two hundred years down the line than it is for you to object to those actions just to give your wretched future great-grandchildren a nicer environment to live in. The fact is, if a given individual feels no inclination to be altruistic, then beyond social pressure there is really no compelling reason for him to act in such a way.

For whatever reason, the important point is that “social good” is not necessarily aligned with the good of any particular individual, and if one promotes a particular social structure one should feel free of any particular obligation to abide by that structure oneself, always provided one is accepted to face the consequences of any such action. If one has the ability to elude consequences, and if one has reason to suppose that the “unthinking masses” will provide the required benefits from such a social structure regardless of one’s own actions, then there are opportunities to thrive for anyone strong enough and smart enough to take advantage of them. Similar to Frazer’s magician-kings, some individuals may be quite well-placed to benefit greatly from total social collapse, and in such a case may consider themselves relieved of any need to consider any idea of social good at all. For the Thelemite, individual considerations must always take precedence over societal considerations, the latter having importance only when they having a bearing on the former (which, as we have described, they very often do).

In closing, the wisdom of accepting the world as it is, rather than as how one would like it to be, is of universal applicability, and the realm of politics is no exception. Fanciful notions of personal freedom do not guarantee the ability to maintain those freedoms, and no matter how aggrieved any individual Thelemite may feel about government impinging upon those freedoms, he would do well to consider whether the hard facts of reality actually do behoove him to accept those restrictions. Idealism does not put food on the table, it does not dig coal out of the ground, and it does not repel foreign invaders. We have written at length about how fanciful idealized notions about what the individual will should be very often distract one from determining what it actually is, and the same goes for the most optimal form of government. And, given our previous comments about the impossibility of external restriction impinging on the will, the Thelemite should consider how much distraction he causes himself by preoccupying himself with failings of the historically extremely permissive environment he likely finds himself in at all, if his ability to project his will is affected only marginally, and if the alternative could land him in a far worse position.