As human beings, we strive for self-determination – freedom is the word that sums up this aspiration. Uniformity, blending into the crowd, indistinguishability, dependence on others – these are the terms that describe the opposite of personal freedom and independence. Anyone who wants to make us all the same is met with fundamental outrage; they want to violate our basic human rights.
What applies to individuals also applies to states. Poland has just elected a new president who would like nothing better than to lead the country out of the EU. Where to? To complete national freedom and independence, of course! The country should no longer lose a large part of its sovereignty to the supranational monster based in Brussels. The new freedom fighters in Hungary and Slovakia, but also their less successful party colleagues Le Pen in France and Alice Weidel in Germany, base their aspirations on the president of what is still the most powerful and influential nation in the world, Donald Trump, who wants to free his country not only from all restrictions, but also from all considerations toward the outside world. Complete national sovereignty – in other words, complete national self-determination and freedom – is his declared goal. Trump not only has the Americans‘ sense of freedom on his side, he even has the majority of the population behind him. And not only that! A look at history also seems to prove him right. The reference to freedom plays a prominent role in many national anthems – independence and self-determination mean the same thing.
The glorification of personal and national freedom raises an interesting question. How can it happen that individuals surrender their independence to a collective, that nations cede their freedom and self-determination to a confederation of states or – as happened a century and a half ago – that all those former small German and Italian states surrendered their sovereignty to a united Italy or Germany? Why does Switzerland not break up again into individual regions? Why did the former East and West Germany have to come together? Wasn’t a loss of independence the inevitable consequence each time?
A great British thinker of the 17th century – not coincidentally the century of European civil wars – gave us an answer to this question. The pursuit of absolute freedom and self-determination turns individuals into wolves toward their fellow human beings as they have nothing but their personal advantage in mind.[1] Why should they, when it comes to maximizing their freedom, pay attention to the advantage of others or even to their right to exist? Thomas Hobbes drew a universal conclusion from this insight: without common and binding rules of conduct, everyone would become unpredictable to their neighbors – in other words, a wolf. Civil wars and chaos would then be the inevitable result. The British philosopher believed that only a kind of dictator at the head of the state, which he named after the mythological monster “Leviathan,” could put an end to this unpredictability by imposing laws that were binding on all and guaranteed by force. Hobbes was wrong on this point; the terrible conditions of his century had kept him too much in suspense. In fact, there is a spontaneous willingness in human beings – already evident in children’s play – to submit to common rules of behavior, thinking, and, of course, communication. The spontaneous invention and adoption of common rules or laws forms the origin of every society.
And this is where reason comes into play. Feelings can be whipped up at will with fine words such as freedom, independence, and self-determination; with the right slogans, it is easy to stir the masses to take to the barricades. But reason shows us the indispensable prerequisites of freedom, which always consist in our simultaneous renunciation of freedom, or more precisely, of absolute freedom.[2] Communication, i.e., a common language, is the prerequisite for all knowledge and progress, but it implies the renunciation of absolute freedom. Those who speak and think in German do not speak and think in Inuit, Bantu, or Japanese, because each individual language can, of course, only be a tiny excerpt from the cosmos of all existing and imaginable variants of language, thought, and emotion. A newborn child has nothing more urgent to do; it is even genetically programmed to give up its plasticity for all possible languages and ways of thinking in favor of just a single one in the first three years of life, the language taught to it by its parents and the community around it. No reasonable person would think of this as a loss, even though it means that humans give up absolute freedom. By adopting a particular language, they are inevitably programmed in a certain way. But there is no other way to achieve the level of freedom that is humanely possible. The child’s brain, a blank slate at birth, simultaneously absorbs language and the cosmos of emotions, prevailing views, and, of course, the usual behaviors of the environment to which it is exposed.
Reason teaches us that freedom is a relative concept, always has been and always will be. A peaceful social existence is only possible if neighbors give up part of their freedom by taking equal ways of thinking and behaving – equal rules – for granted. If I believe in the Pope as God’s representative on earth, while my neighbor sees him as an emissary of the devil, then a thirty-year war will break out between us – as actually happened in the time of Thomas Hobbes. If my neighbor considers people who eat pork to be inferior and unclean, while I, on the contrary, consider it to be a particularly healthy food, then it is better that we live in different countries, because otherwise there is a danger that the slightest provocation will be enough to turn us into irreconcilable enemies. In other words, there is a risk of bloody civil wars when people live together in close quarters but are programmed to have different worldviews. Freedom and self-determination can only flourish on a foundation of unquestioningly accepted and state-guaranteed common ground (in the past, this was usually a shared faith; in our time, it can be a constitution accepted by all). If this foundation is strong and stable enough, then our neighbor can have black skin, believe in four-armed Shiva, or be a devil worshipper. He will still be one of us, someone we trust in our daily interactions. If, on the other hand, the foundation of unquestioningly accepted commonalities has become fragile or shaken, even minor differences in appearance, thinking, and behavior are enough to thwart peaceful coexistence.
This results in a correction that reason must make to our easily inflamed emotions. If we rave about self-determination and individual freedom, then we should be aware that this is only a narrow zone of freedom – freedom above the massive foundation of unspoken assumptions or state-imposed givens without which functioning societies cannot exist. The Babylonian confusion of languages, as already known to the Bible two and a half thousand years ago, shows what happens to people who do not understand each other.[3]
This applies to individuals within a state, but it also applies to individual states in relation to one another. Which means that we must again raise the question already mentioned above: Why do smaller units merge into larger ones in the first place? Individuals must give up some of their freedom because common rules for coexistence are a prerequisite for any functioning society. But why do human communities not separate themselves permanently so as to uphold their individuality and independence, or why do they defend both with armed force when they come into contact with each other? In fact, most cultures around the world have separated themselves as much as possible and, when this was no longer possible, defended their individuality with armed force. Even cultures with shared borders, such as Germany and France, spent a thousand years asserting their uniqueness and sovereignty against each other with war and weapons, repeatedly defining each other as mortal enemies. Why did they nevertheless unite in the twentieth century and sacrifice part of their sovereignty and thus also their independence? After a thousand years of wars that flared up again and again, did they suddenly discover a love for each other that had been hidden until then?
The question may be formulated in the broadest historical terms. Why do we observe a pattern in human history that we must describe as a “quasi-law” because on the entire globe it follows the same direction? Families became clans, clans became tribes, tribes became principalities. In addition, at certain points, groups of people gathered to form cities, from which the first small states emerged. These united to form larger confederations of states, and from the latter, the UN finally emerged – intended as a world government, even if, for the time being, only a caricature of such. There is no doubt that there have always been, and still are, successful separations: the result of separatist movements – think of Brexit, for example. However, these counter-movements have never been able to break the general trend. If there is one historical tendency that has prevailed from prehistory to the present day, it is the unification of smaller human societies into larger ones.
Why? Thomas Hobbes did already hint at the correct answer. When people become so dangerous to each other that they threaten to destroy one another, the only way to escape this danger is to unite – voluntarily or through the coercion of a “Leviathan” – by adopting common rules, because only such commonality makes them predictable to one another.
They sacrifice part of their sovereignty, their self-determination and freedom, but they gain the most precious commodity of all: security, when they agree on common rules – in this case inter-national rules. Thomas Hobbes clearly identified the socio-psychological reason for the surrender of sovereignty in the interests of secure survival.
Wolves that tear each other apart become a larger pack that provides security for all its members. But the great British philosopher did not show us why, in the course of their history from hunters and gatherers to today’s Homo technologicus, humans have become so dangerous, and indeed increasingly dangerous, to each other. For it is this development that explains the compulsion that they can only escape by joining together in ever larger units. And it is this inevitability that explains why we encounter a law here – not a law of nature, as physics finds it in relation to inanimate matter in nature, but a historical quasi-law in the relationship between human beings.
This quasi-law is not based on our feelings; on the contrary, it originates from human reason. Reason has enabled humans to develop ever better instruments and methods for controlling the nature that surrounds them and their fellow humans. Ape-men still fought each other with stones and sticks. These then became bows and arrows, and with the invention of bronze and iron, they became knives, sabers, and swords. Then came guns and cannons, which, with the help of seagoing ships, soon reached even the most remote islands and continents. Until the fifteenth century, the indigenous peoples of Central and South America believed they were alone in the world, but suddenly incredible creatures descended upon their lands – centaurs – consisting of horses and riders, the likes of which they had never seen before. These creatures also possessed far superior weapons: steel swords, guns, and cannons. Such clashes with other, technologically far more advanced peoples are attested throughout human history and have always led to the extermination or subjugation of the technologically inferior population – and thus to the emergence of larger entities. Technical progress in the mastery of man and nature – the very domain of practical reason – has made the globe increasingly smaller, as it has simply overrun the previous boundaries between peoples. In this way, the steady gain in practical control over nature – commonly called “progress” – became the real driving force behind the above-mentioned quasi-law. The Indians did not become Christians because they suddenly despised their own religion, but because they could only ensure their survival by joining forces with the rulers. After the devastation of World War II, the French and Germans did not suddenly discover a love for each other, but rather realized that only by uniting in a larger entity could they prevent mutual extermination and that only in this way could they stand up to their common enemies in the form of the Soviet Union and, today, Putin’s Russia and an economically powerful China. In such moments, critical reason prevails over the hot feelings raised by national populism. But if it is true that alliances between states and nations at the outset are usually mere marriages of convenience, this does not mean that a sense of belonging cannot emerge from a new unity over time.
This has long since happened in the formerly sovereign states of Germany and Italy, and East and West Germany now see themselves as one nation. Technology, which through its “progress” makes humans increasingly dangerous to nature and to each other, is the driving force behind ever larger entities with a self-accelerating dynamic: The more successful new technical inventions are, the more they promote the emergence of further inventions. What was a small trickle of new inventions in Europe half a millennium ago has now grown into a torrent. In the 21st century, the whole world is feverishly searching for new inventions to still better control man and nature. Science and technology have become a religion that unites nations. In turn this has led to a global race in all areas of economic and military “progress.” Just how small the world has become today is demonstrated above all by that area of human inventiveness which is, as it were, given wings by the fear of states for their neighbors near and far – I am, of course, referring to weapons research and development. Today, atomic, hydrogen, and neutron bombs can be transported by supersonic missiles in minutes to any place in the world, where they are capable not only of wiping out cities and populations numbering in the millions, but also of rendering entire parts of the world uninhabitable for thousands of years. There is now no place on earth that can escape their reach. Thomas Hobbes‘ terrible vision of wolves tearing each other apart if a government does not prevent them is now a gruesome reality – and is becoming more so with every passing moment, because even tiny states such as North Korea and Israel possess the ultimate weapon, and more and more are secretly or openly pursuing the intention of acquiring it – in a world of wolves, no one can and will stop them.
The danger of apocalyptic weapons spreading across ever more countries hangs over the world like the sword of Damocles – it can strike at any moment and destroy it. In the long term, however, an initially insidious danger is just as dangerous: the transition to a planet that is uninhabitable. Everyone is aware of climate change, as parts of the world are already being roasted at temperatures between forty and fifty degrees Celsius, but as long as the race between the wolves – i.e., the nations – remains focused on short-term gains, this change will be downplayed or even denied on behalf of state-imposed stupidity. Such denial enables policies that give their own country greater advantages in this race, at least in the short term.
The development of weapons into instruments of apocalyptic world destruction, the invention of an artificial world made up of artificial products that flood nature with gigantic amounts of waste (CO2, plastic, pesticides, and tens of thousands of other toxins) – all of this benefits individual nations in competition with their neighbors, but threatens to hopelessly overwhelm the globe as a whole and ultimately destroy it. Individual nations are powerless in the face of this development. They can eliminate lesser evils, such as the destruction of the ozone layer, if none of them suffers irreparable disadvantages as a result. But the greatest evils, such as the abolition of weapons that threaten our very existence, cannot be eliminated in this way because they make anyone who takes the first step toward nuclear disarmament hopelessly vulnerable. Only Leviathan can help here, or the voluntary surrender of part of one’s own sovereignty, as Germany and France did when they laid the foundation for the Europe that today is known as the European Union. But that was only the first step toward the final one that is now essential for the survival of humanity. The quasi-law of the unification of smaller entities into ever larger ones takes on a meaning vital to survival in the 21st century. It is no longer just a question of the mere survival of certain states or nations. Today, it is about the survival of humanity, which is only possible if the existing apocalyptic weapons and the worldwide destruction of nature are subject to control by a global government.
However, one only needs to express this idea clearly to realize immediately that victory over populist irrationality is by no means certain. Germany and France could have ultimately destroyed each other in the second thirty-year war between 1914 and 1945 – this final inter-European civil war cost them their central position in the world anyway. The prospect of Russia, China, and the US starting the next planetarian civil war cannot be dismissed out of hand, and it is highly questionable whether populist irrationality can be defeated before that happens. Unfortunately, it usually takes a terrible catastrophe to put an end to populist rabble-rousing.
[1] Hobbes in “De Cive”: “quod bellum omnium contra omnes sit, … et malo quam dixi, Homo homini Lupus.” “that there is a war of all against all, … and because of the evil I have mentioned, man is a wolf to man.”)
[2] It should also be emphasized that absolute freedom is a purely theoretical construct – like the concept of infinity. We know, for example, that there are an uncountable number of historical languages, and we can conclude from this that the number of possible languages is infinite, but this infinity – and the infinite freedom it makes possible – remains an empty concept.
[3] But is the zone really narrow? In terms of the basic foundation of all social commonality, language, it might seem so. If someone uses their own words or their own grammar, they will not be understood. On the other hand, depending on their profession, they can move between different sublanguages, and new professions give rise to new terms. Language is largely fixed, but it is also always in motion and undergoing renewal – and this is brought about and carried forward by individuals. But if we consider that everyone can combine the existing elements – words and sentences – in infinite ways to create stories, myths, narratives, and novels that have never been heard before, and in this process conjure up a whole new world from the same elements, then personal freedom, although it has a foundation of the unchangeable as its prerequisite, is in reality open to the widest possible field.