evaporation of hope that accompanies the loss of freedom from want almost always produces despair. This means that for individuals, families, communities, and sometimes entire countries, violent and aggressive choices rest comfortably on the “nothing to lose” foundation that despair so easily constructs.
While war and crime have many causes and complex determinants, an examination of the levels of “want” or relative poverty in places like the Congo, Guatemala, Eritrea, Mali, North Yemen, Chad, Somalia, Gaza, and Afghanistan speaks eloquently of the impact of relative poverty and the eradication of hope as consistently present causal spark plugs for violent options. And even in our own Western communities — in places like Belfast, Londonderry, Chicago, Los Angeles, East Vancouver, and Brixton — whatever the explicit “spark” for any violent outbreak, be it religious intolerance, alleged police brutality, or the death of a local hero, it is the foundation of despair and the absence of hope that helps fuel the conflagration.
Police rarely spend much time responding to urgent violent events in the better parts of town or among the better educated and more economically hopeful. It is the poorest 10 percent of the population, in terms of income and prospects, who fill over 85 percent of the places in prisons and make up the vast majority of the criminal and petty crime cases before the courts in Canada. The costs of despair are borne by all of society in the same way as “freedom from want” enriches all of society, even those who take their own version of that freedom largely for granted. Hope matters.
But hope is neither sustained nor crushed only by material well-being or the lack of same.
Hope is crushed when the gaps between oneself and the better-off mainstream are demonstrably unbridgeable no matter how hard one strives or works. These gaps are not always the product of economics or class, however, although these sources of inequality are endemic. Gaps may also exist because of racial, religious, caste, or gender prejudice. They may exist because of one family kleptocracy — think Syria or pre–Arab Spring Tunisia or Sri Lanka under the Rajapaksa family — limiting access to the economic mainstream.
These gaps may exist even in modern democracies, because ghettoized, recently arrived generations cannot break into the societies, which may still be shaped more by family connections than merit. Freedom from want also means freedom from this type of exclusionary prejudice. And while the political left and the right will each claim to have a better grasp on this anti-discrimination imperative for freedom from want, the truth is that neither part of the political spectrum can claim a monopoly on virtue or an absence of abuse. The riots that broke out amidst the poor underclass of recent immigrants inhabiting the suburbs in Stockholm underline how even the most civilized and humane democracies are not immune.
Margaret Thatcher’s disdain for the aristocracy and often stated preference for a society where individuals succeed by “lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps” reflected her own frustration with a landed gentry that previously excluded people of the wrong colour, religion, or gender in favour of those who did not have to strive since they were able to inherit, regardless of merit. Teddy Roosevelt’s attack on “the trusts” that controlled so much of America at the end of the nineteenth century was his way of confronting the same oligopolistic economic ruling class. Lenin and Marx’s engagement against the tsar and the poverty with which so many Russians were oppressed pointed to a similar revolutionary zeal.
But tracking their path also tells us the story on the other side of the ledger. The belief by some in the West that the collapse of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, beginning with the destruction of the Berlin Wall, implied the “flawless superiority” of capitalism was and remains a vain and hollow conceit. As the near repetition of 1929 that occurred due to the wild excess of Wall Street banks in 2008–09 tells us, complacent self-satisfaction on the part of the “owners of the most” is sorely misplaced. Corporate greed manipulated by investment banks is how the crises of 1929 and then 2008–09 happened.
The communist nomenklatura that arose after 1918 in Russia, reflecting the new party apparatchiks’ network of exclusion, was no better than the aristocratic or multigenerational wealthy oligopolies they sought to overthrow when it came to generating hope for the thousands of desperate Russians who had pinned their hopes on the changes promised by the new party. And even when totalitarian communism was replaced by a new, post-Gorbachev capitalism, the bright new world promised for the people did not appear. Oligopolies owning disproportionately high percentages of a nation’s wealth soon arose. Once again, power and privilege remained a protected world, a place whose domain could be penetrated only by paying corrupting dues to the authoritarian and non-accountable governments or leaders. Such a situation does little to advance hope or diminish despair. Freedom from want means a reasonably equitable opportunity to compete, to earn, to learn, and to expand one’s prospects. Its absence means the opposite — and the opposite means trouble.
This relationship between hope, prospects, and aspiration does not mean that objective and numerical measures of poverty or want do not count. They count very much. But they are not the whole story. They count because of their reputable calculus of deprivation. They describe the architecture of despair where the freedom from want dies, taking hope, aspirations, dreams, and stability with it. And they help set targets for improvement as well. When freedom from want in any society is dead, dying, or under siege, especially if the society in question has a history of little equality of opportunity, many aspects of “stability,” any principles of an ordered society, such as private property, are themselves at risk.
Francis Fukuyama reflected on the issue in this way:
In a Malthusian economy where intensive growth is not possible, strong property rights simply reinforce the existing distribution of resources. The actual distribution of wealth is more likely to represent chance starting conditions or the property holder’s access to political power than productivity or hard work. (Even in today’s mobile, entrepreneurial capitalist economy, rigid defenders of property rights often forget that the existing distribution of wealth doesn’t always reflect the superior virtue of the wealth and that markets aren’t always efficient.)[2]
So the justice, both economic and social, that is implicit in freedom from want really centres on the reality of opportunity. Socialism, in its most raw form, seeks to legislate outcomes, usually through the resource and priority allocation role of the state and its minions. The enforcement of equality of outcomes, however difficult and unlikely, requires a disproportionately large regulatory and taxing role for state infrastructure that, by definition, has to hold some people back from making all the progress they might. This is anathema to citizens who believe that human and economic potential restrained, repressed, or in some ways confiscated by a state apparatus is not only freedom denied but mediocrity imposed. Dividing and redividing the same pie will not only create a situation that is unfair, but will also usually result in a deployment of efforts better used in growing the pie. Results and outcomes are usually typically beyond any state to competently or fairly legislate, tax, or control.
And if over-legislating in the interest of equality of outcomes is a vice, so too is the excessive faith in laissez-faire economics so often favoured by the far right, since it is a destabilizer of permission to hope, which depends upon the freedom from want and a basic competitive order of fairness. Moderation in the approach to these challenges is not a weak-kneed response but the only rational instrument by which the balance of freedoms can be sustained.
When governments of the right or left try to legislate outcomes, they usually spawn a huge expansion of contraband, a dilution of foreign direct investment, and a detached and self-centred upper-income economy, with a “rentier” class that seeks gain outside the system by cozying up to the political or regulatory power structure. Of course, the ruling parties or political classes rarely deny themselves the best of what is available, which they get first, so those seeking to share in the bounty are required to seek accommodation with the political elite in order to gain access to the spoils. As a result, social democracy, rigidly imposed, frequently results in the replacement of open competition for income increases and market share with a competition for advantage in the “who you know” network that can be just as inequitable and exclusive.
The similarities between the old Communist nomenklatura of the defunct Soviet Union, the new democracy-lite oligarchy