The chaotic perversion of ‘freedom’

Division in US society illustrates the perils of extreme individualism

In an increasingly unstable and frighteningly unpredictable world, there is a great deal to be said for the announcement and main guidelines of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) — especially for the philosophy of governance underlying it.

Since the Industrial Revolution, Western forms of government have focused on transformation, change and freedom. Over the past century, the United States has risen to dominate the West, and the obsessions of American Protestantism with extreme existentialist fervor for freedom, scrapping of or unregulated norms of behavior in society have become all-consuming passions.

Only occasionally have major figures such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn had the vision and courage to warn that these forces, while apparently liberating and transformational in the short term, can prove to be nihilistic and catastrophically destructive if blindly indulged in, as has been the case in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War.

The great psychotherapist Viktor

Frankl went so far as to warn that the US needed to build a gigantic “Statue of Responsibility” off the West Coast to balance the Statue of Liberty raised up more than 135 years ago in sight of New York City.

Chinese philosophy, by contrast, is centered on the contrasting forces and concept of yin and yang. More broadly, China’s immensely long history teaches that eras of rapid change must be alternated with eras of consolidation, recovery and stability within which the enormous transformations of previous periods can be assimilated, adapted to and, when necessary, corrected. In China, Taoist teachings of living in harmony with the Tao are balanced by the coolheaded and humane teachings of Confucius.

Confucius understood two millennia before John Locke put forth a similar idea in the West that society needed sustained, two-way interaction between individuals and governing bodies. But these interactions demanded responsibility and respect from individuals and within families and groups as well. This strikingly contrasts with the raw, unfettered “do your own thing” fanaticism that has swept the US and through it, much of the world since the end of World War II.

The fruits of unlimited Western independence of mind, especially expressed within the US and by its successive ruling administrations in recent decades are all too clear. Families break down. More than half of them now have children raised by single parents, usually their mothers. Drug addiction takes thousands of lives every year.

Yet the worse things get in US society, the more fanatical becomes the obsession with condemning other countries — especially Russia and China — about “failing” to match up to some ill-defined American standard.

Even the very practice of democratic politics — a system which the US seeks with heavy-handed hypocrisy to impose upon the rest of the world — has now led to the worst political and social divisions and hatred in more than 150 years. The American people have not been so divided and at odds with each other since the 1861-65 Civil War. Russia and China have had nothing whatsoever to do with this. The Americans have themselves fanned the flames of causeless hatred against each other.

The maniac preaching and fomentation of the American concept of “freedom” has resulted instead in pulverizing entire societies across South Asia, the Middle East, the Maghreb and Latin America. Even countries allied with the US in its global “war on terror” were either destabilized and cast into civil war, like Syria, or their government was toppled and a bungled anarchy left to run rampant, as happened to Libya.

Through all of this, transnational drug trafficking and human slavery has flourished across the globe. According to United Nations figures, the number of women in sexual slavery has soared by more than 10 times in the past 15 years. This was made possible and protected by the unregulated, and other open borders so insisted upon by American liberals.

Against this background, the sensible and balanced prioritizations announced for China’s next five-year plan come as welcome relief. They suggest continuity accompanied by short-term adjustments of priorities in the Chinese government’s planning. They do not urge the abandonment of government responsibility even in the face of threatening anarchy, as so many hysterical voices allegedly for “reform” now do in the US.

In contrast to the dangerous and ever more hysterical threats coming out of the US administration and its increasingly desperate efforts to demonize China, the 14th Five-Year Plan reflects a healthy, calm confidence in the interaction of state guidance and business enterprise in further developing an economy and society that has lifted more human beings out of poverty over the past 40 years than any other government system in history.

China therefore has good reason to be confident of its system and its plans for further advancing and upgrading it in the coming years. Real success does not require false accusation and threats of confrontation and war against others.