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Thomas Hobbes considered knowledge to be simply residual memory. Memory to him was simply experiences which leave a lasting impact on our minds. To deduce logically from this, knowledge is simply the rational interpretation by an individual of the various experiences he/she has in civil society. Therefore, the organisation of our society must be fundamental to how we perceive ourselves and the world around us, and it is the societal conditions that determine the elasticity of our imaginative powers. The more elastic our thoughts, the more dimensions we are able to bring into our analysis, the more flexible we are in our approach and consequently, the more accurate we are in our application. This indeed is creativity. We must strive for a society that allows us the most leeway possible to maximise this creativity, for only then our worth as individuals will be optimally realised. In what practical ways this freedom can be made the cornerstone on which our civilisation rests, I shall venture to highlight in the latter part of this essay

The established models of free societies most often mentioned are those of Western Europe and the United States. We must hereby distinguish between economic and political freedom. While France is the country that gave the world the Enlightenment and the Declaration of the Rights of Man through the French Revolution, economic activity is controlled to a far greater degree there, as in Germany, than the United Kingdom or the United States. The failure of economic policy in continental Europe to match the degree of political freedom has had an evident impact on the lives of the people there. While continental Europe has run into economic slowdown with record numbers unemployed in Germany making it the ‘sick old man of Europe’, the UK has registered impressive growth rates coupled with record levels of low unemployment. However, this is not to say that the UK and the US share duplicate economic models. The extent of state intervention in the British economy is far greater than in America. As a result, economic freedom is often curtailed through bureaucratic delays and restrictions, affecting growth and prosperity. Nonetheless, to give the broad picture, these societies are relatively the freest of all, both in the political as well as economic arena.

The societies with the least amount of freedom in both senses of the word are either authoritarian, or/and are based on religious philosophy. Examples dot the world map, ranging from Zimbabwe, Pakistan and North Korea to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria and Libya. As all of these governments are necessarily arbitrary, the result of their demented policies has hampered the lives of their citizens greatly. Poverty is the highest in necessarily such societies, and so is the level of heinous crimes and lack of entrepreneurship.

Finally there are societies where one type of freedom greatly exceeds the other. However, there is a movement towards equilibrium which seems irreversible and which makes these societies the most dynamic of all. The most obvious examples are the transitional economies, China and India being the foremost among them. While apologists of ‘controlled’ freedom would argue that China still retains a lot of political control over its citizens and has still managed impressive and sustained economic growth, we should always see the economic performance of China in light of the departure in economic policy in 1978, when Deng Xiaoping shunned some of the socialist baggage on the country’s economy. Today economic freedom is much more enhanced in China than it ever was under Mao, and there is an invariable move towards democratisation, however painful and slow it might seem at times. India represents an interesting contrast. While political freedom has never been an issue with the world’s largest democracy, the people were still cursed to poverty and stagnation due to the ‘unfree’ nature of the country’s economy. With liberalisation and the dent on poverty it has made in India over the past decade or so (13% of Indians have been uplifted above the poverty line), the result of coupling political with economic freedom is becoming evident day by day.

Now we turn to the more specific conditions that society should strive to attain to allow for the maximum freedom to individuals to harness their creative capabilities. The role of the public institutions plays a crucial role in shaping our lives. Only when we are free to determine the paths our life will take are we the most conscious of how to make the best out of it, and do not shy away from venturing into unknown territory of thought and action to achieve our goals. It follows from this that an en masse respect for private property is paramount for promoting creativity. It is only when a person identifies a certain item with him/herself that he/she will put in the maximum effort and thought needed to increase the value of the same. Thus, it not only gives creativity and originality of thinking an upward push, but also drags the productivity graph upwards. The contrast between the performance of public sector companies in economies through out the world vis-à-vis the private sector illustrates this point effectively. As they say, “When it’s everybody’s business, it’s nobody’s business”. Similarly, the economic performance of countries with the least public regulation to doing business (e.g., Australia) when compared to some of the countries where “License Raj” still haunts industry (e.g., Bangladesh), speaks volume of the impact such seemingly trivial issues related to freedom can make on the material wellbeing of their citizens.

This is not to say, however, that the state has no role in ensuring freedom in our lives. Without the state, the principles of freedom would have no binding on anyone and are likely to cause anarchy. Moreover, an important role the state can play is to ensure equality of opportunity to all its citizens. To nurture innovation and independent thinking, everyone needs to have a basic degree of education. However, the state should not use this as an excuse to stifle competition. Humans perform to the best of their ability when in a healthy competition with others. Shunning the opportunity to exploit this natural human trait to the well being of society would incur huge opportunity costs. To put such abstract thinking into real life, we need to draw attention to the policy of caste and religious reservation in India. In a bid to make the public services and public sector jobs widely accessible to India’s diverse masses, the government passed the Schedule Caste/Schedule Tribes Act, introducing quotas for posts in various educational institutions and industries. Religious minorities such as Christians and Muslims already enjoy such benefits. The result has not met the objective what so ever. Not only have India’s majority classes lost out as a result, but lack of competition for jobs has led to recruitment of below par candidates in various posts, which in turn is hampering output. The state in this case should have concentrated on using public finances to promote education and training in backward areas treating them as uncompetitive economic entities rather than stifle what competition there already was in the economy.

Herein lies the biggest danger to freedom and human enterprise- state led planning. In his “The Road to Serfdom”, Friedrich Hayek argues that increase in socio-economic planning is proportionally correlated to a fall in individual freedom. He explains that the aim of all planners is to meet a certain “aim” as stated in the plan, an entity which is usually static and does not change with time. Moreover, this “aim” can never be reflective of what the society actually perceives its goals to be, because a small number of planning body officials can never reflect the cumulative effects of spontaneous human actions. Therefore, they have to “play off” one interest against another to stick to the plan, raising the obvious question that ‘what right do they have to do so?’ Examples of plans going sour are easy to find. We have only to go back to the “Great Leap Forward” of the 1960s in China, where fixation to increase the output of steel (a single commodity in a country of over 700 million then) led to widespread overproduction of the same and under production of grain, culminating in around 30-60 million deaths due to famine. In more recent times, the cry over the need to plan the movement of the outsourcing industry in the western world is another such fallacy. By trying to subsidise the companies in a bid to stop them from outsourcing is a blatant waste of public money, when the companies by outsourcing can get their hands on better quality and cheaper products for the American or British public. Moreover, outsourcing also tends to push the labour market in the developed world up the value chain, resulting in better salaries and higher standards of living.

Similarly, one of the key components in political and economic freedom is the freedom of expression and access to knowledge. The ‘local knowledge’ plays a critical role in determining individual actions. This flow of information is also the cornerstone of Hayek’s famed explanation of how the price mechanism works. It is the producers, sellers and buyers that know the best about pricing a commodity or service, since they often base their estimates on local factors such as competition and purchasing power. Tampering with such spontaneous action of individuals can be exceedingly damaging both to freedom as well as to the material well being of the individuals concerned. For example, by keeping the price of Commodity A too high apparently to give the producers a ‘fair deal’, a state body is lowering the disposable income of the consumers of A, which consequently can quell demand in general, harming producers of Commodity B and C, ultimately harming producers of A as well. From the political dimension, freedom of expression brings new and diverse ideas on the table and therefore leads us to explore unorthodox avenues of thought, which could lead to innovative solutions from individuals or group of individuals to pressing social problems.

Given the nature of human enterprise, maximum freedom would naturally translate into maximum experiments from individuals striving to be creative. This could lead to short term upheavals, but should not persuade us to overturn the allowance of freedom. We should keep in mind the notion of ‘creative destruction’ put forth by Joseph Schumpeter. The Pyramids were not built in a day, nor were aeroplanes or any other creative ventures by man for that matter. By suppressing ‘trial and error’ we would be suppressing progress. The destruction of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs in Britain during the Thatcher years might have seemed reckless then, but today it has translated into a vibrant service sector economy the UK has become, with better quality jobs preserved at the expense of artificially maintained ones that drained public money in the form of subsidies.

Opposition to liberal policies of promoting individualism and originality has often been cited on cultural grounds. That Islam is not suited for democracy, or Confucian beliefs are incompatible with capitalist ideals are commonly heard arguments. However, we must note here that no culture worth preserving is static. If it were the case, then profits would still be banned in the Christian world, entrepreneurial minorities most notably the Jews would still be banished and merchants would be at the least respected rung of the Confucian social ladder in China. The role of culture in today’s society should essentially be to encourage individuals to find their hidden talents and aspirations, and work towards those in earnest and with zeal. Indeed, cultures which have moved on with time the fastest have seen progress come the fastest too. Illuminating contrasts can be drawn between Japan and Britain on one hand (keeping in mind the static nature of their cultures in the pre-industrial age), and Iran and North Korea on the other, where culture refuses to budge.

To me, an individual has certain qualities that distinguish him/her from the next person. However, the extent to which these differences are brought into light and used to develop one’s character and career depends largely on the type of society they live in. I have highlighted above the various conditions that need to be justified in a society to maximise the usage of the potential of an individual. Here in the concluding passage I argue that society plays the most important, if not the sole, role in character development. For example, the overseas Indian community, especially the one in the North American and European societies, has far exceeded the performance of the Indians living in India. It is intriguing that a mediocre student in India becomes an excellent performer when he/she ventures overseas, and a person with similar qualifications will occupy far greater positions in the West than they can generally aspire to reach in India. This is purely due to the individualistic nature of the Western societies, which give more careful attention to catering the education/training to the nature of that person, and pay greater heed to the particular qualities he/she possesses rather than relying more on a general syllabus/job description. Thus, the organisation and structure of a society is of paramount importance in influencing the creativity of the individuals who reside in it, and simply put, the freer the society, the higher the residents aim for and achieve as individuals.

Aruni Mukherjee

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