Freedom's Virtues—Productivity

Now we’ve looked at the virtues of integrity, responsibility, honesty, and competence, and will look at productivity, here, then have only dignity and courage left.

To Produce Is Human

Every living animal has a particular nature that determines its behavior. The carnivores that hunt, and herbivores that graze, the birds that fly, and the fish that swim do those things because it is the requirement of their natures, what they must do to live as the kind of creatures they are.

The requirement of human nature is the basis of human behavior as well, but human nature does not “determine” human behavior, but sets the requirements for which behavior is appropriate to human beings, and which is not, but that behavior must be discovered, and each human being must choose to conform to the requirements of their nature or not.

Because human beings are volitional and must choose all their overt action consciously, what any particular human being’s behavior is, will be different for every human being. While every animal will have a particular repertoire of behavior associated with the kind of animal it is, like hunting, or foraging, or grazing, human beings do not have a particular repertoire of behavior, but all human behavior has one common characteristic, all human behavior is productive.

In the January 31 Daily Freedom, “Freedom Is Freedom To Work,” I wrote, regarding the fact that freedom was required for humans to be able to produce, the following:

“This is the only purpose of freedom and the only reason man needs it—his very existence and all that he values must be created and produced by his own effort directed by his own choices. The purpose of his life is that creative effort, his work, which identifies both what he is and his value as a human being.

“For the independent individualist, work is not only the means to survival and the only moral means to acquiring and achieving that which makes life worth living, his work, what he produces and accomplishes by his own effort, is the source of his sense of self-worth, and ultimately his reason for living.”

Productivity is the behavioral manifestation of human nature, itself, the fact that human behavior is determined by an individual’s own conscious choice, as directed by his knowledge and ability to reason.

Productive work is reason directed action. It is man’s intellect that discovers and identifies what any individual needs to live and enjoy his life, and that same intellect that determines the action taken to produce or acquire those identified needs.

All Virtues Required For Productivity

All of the virtues are required to be productive and an individual’s virtues are concretized in that which he has produced.

Without integrity, that wholeness devoid of contraction and internal conflicts that enables an individual to ruthlessly adhere to what he knows is true and right, no consistent and effective productive effort is possible. A disintegrated consciousness can produce nothing but inconsistent, undirected, and chaotic behavior incapable of sustained productive effort.

Without responsibility for all of one’s actions and the awareness that all one’s failures are the consequence of one’s own choices, the motivation to never evade reality, never to make excuses, and never to expect the unearned, will prevent any real productive effort. Embracing responsibility for every aspect of one’s own life underlies all productive effort.

Without honesty, one’s entire life is an evasion of reality and the truth that describes it. The chief evasion of most men is to evade the necessity of productive effort and an attempt to have the unearned by some means other than producing a product or providing a service of real value. But a human being must produce to live as a human being, or is reduced to living as a parasite on the productive efforts of others.

Without competence, nothing of value can be achieved, because competence is not an inborn “gift” or “ability,” but the result of the conscious effort to learn all one can and to develop all the skills one is able to. A lack of competence is a failure to make the effort to be all one can be as a productive human being.

You Must Produce Your Own Freedom

There is nothing of value to a human being which one may have without either producing it, or trading what they have produced for that thing which has been produced by another. Freedom is a fundamental value for human beings, but most people believe freedom ought to be supplied, which means, supplied by someone else, such as a government, and this view is held by many who consider themselves individualists or libertarians.

There is nothing of value that anyone may morally expect to be supplied by someone else, and most people understand that for most things. They do not expect someone else to supply their food, their clothing, their shelter, their education, or their health-care, if they are honest decent people. But all of those same honest decent people expect someone else to supply their freedom.

The expectation is both morally wrong and delusional. It is morally wrong to expect to have anything of value one has not earned by their own effort. It is delusional to expect anyone else to supply one’s freedom, and all those who do promise it, mostly politicians, will not supply it without cost, and that cost is the granting them power to rule, which is not freedom at all. Most people do not really want freedom, what they want is security, safety, and guarantees, and for the sake of them, what they sacrifice is their freedom.

There are many who talk and write about freedom, but think the means to freedom is the establishment of some kind of society in which everyone will just “have” freedom, although it is never clear exactly how such a society is to be brought about, and none expect it in their lifetime.

To not seek freedom in one’s own lifetime is immoral. A human bing must produce to live morally and freedom is necessary for human production. To seek freedom is to seek to live as a moral human being, and freedom, like all values, must be achieved or acquired by an individual’s own productive effort. The whole purpose of the Free Individual is to demonstrate that every individual can be free if they choose to make the effort, and to provide practical information about pursuing freedom, and encouragement in that pursuit.