I was still sixteen and a schoolboy in the Summer of Love, such as it was in the suburban South London we knew then.  So I was too young and, anyway, far too reserved to give myself up to the general intoxication.  By the time another year had flown by and my boyish innocence had fallen away so grass smoking and the love-in was joined in the public’s image of youth by communist-orchestrated violence on the streets and the sheer fun of defying authority.

From that, at least, I was comprehensively saved by my drug of choice: horsepower.  Four wide wheels, grunt under the bonnet, juice in the tank … yes.  But left-wing politics?  Jesus, man, fuck that.

The hippies and the reds just did their thing anyway.  One Spring evening in 1969 an Australian who was in my class - his Dad was a London diplomat, I think - went to the Shaftesbury Theatre to see “Hair”.  After the performance he went backstage … and never re-emerged.  The beautiful people and the cult of freedom had got him.  Maybe it was just a way to dodge conscription back home, I don’t know.  But he became a stage hand there and then, and we never heard from him again.

My response to his desertion was anger for the hurt he had caused his family.  If that was freedom, man, why were they less free now?

In all the years since I have never adjusted to the shallow lights of liberty.  The separation of self from service to others is unproblematic chiefly to those who cannot love, or whose love is conditional or temporary.  Often, they are the very people who make the most noise about love.  They do not know this seminal fact, of course, and cannot be blamed for their infirmities.  Nevertheless, they do tend to screw up the lives of those with whom they come into contact.  And if they are influential thinkers on the right of liberal politics they can screw up a lot of other lives, as well.

For all that, the ability to love is not the key to critiquing right liberalism’s liberty (or freedom, since I do not play the game of distinguishing these noumena).  Liberty – or freedom - appears to have firm foundations, these being choice (free will) and absence of let.  But they are not the foundations of the human impulse to be free.  That is psychological and wholly without reference to coarse externalities such as free markets and Magna Carta.  Such freedom is a state betokening the existence of will – not the tautology of “free” will but will itself.

Now, as anyone who has ever read much religious thought will know, we do not ordinarily possess will.  How we come about it is another matter.  But at least make allowance for the fact that will is not simple self-direction, and much less is it determination.  Will is the capacity to create out of the material of life … to do.  It is an attribute of inner unity and unity is a product of self-consciousness – something else we ascribe to ourselves all too readily.  Qualitatively, self-consciousness is not at all the same as ordinary waking consciousness.  Alas, our ordinary waking state cannot give us any of the products that right liberalism claims for it.

For example, the political idea of liberty is an abstraction from genuine freedom, which itself is attendant only upon a state of consciousness, unity and will quite unlike our ordinary and extremely dull and suggestible waking state.  I’ll say that another way.  Freedom is not something you can reach out and grasp in any direct sense.  It comes with the territory of something – a state of being - which we are not.  As things are, freedom is a rumour, not a fact or even a possibility in our lives.

My Australian friend didn’t know that.  The cast of “Hair” probably did not know that, though one or two might.  Libertarian philosophy does not know that.  John Locke himself did not know that.

Freedom is not a possibility.

In only one sense do we know that, almost.  We experience freedom in the breach.  We have a teleological yearning for it.  We want to struggle up towards the light.  And that desire is the foundation for political liberty, and not the trespass of authoritarianism, statism or collectivism upon the sovereign individual.  These things are just foils upon which clever, sometimes brilliant men have played their unconscious impulses.  They have taken a singular aspect of good Conservative policy and inflated it into all.

To a Conservative this is a strange obsession, for it necessarily ignores all that men really are.  It banishes Nature from their souls and the ties and capacities that Nature bestows.  It must do this, it must reduce them in this way because sovereign individualism is less than Man’s natural estate.  What, after all, is sovereignty except a psychological misreading á la freedom?  Since our waking state does not grant us unity and we do not possess will, there can be no sovereignty.  There is no sovereignty.

As for individualism, whites tend to be more individual than Chinese, blacks more individual than whites.  But to a right-liberal the strongly conformist Chinese are no less capable of sovereign individualism than blacks?  Difference must be verboten. 

But difference can’t be verboten, and individualism is merely a lie that appeals to the intellectually vain.  In large part, it is the lie of self-authorship that we have come to associate most with left-liberals.  But one liberal is much like another, compared to a Conservative.

The best place on the net to observe the extremes of right liberalism is Samizdata.  Ask yourself if these folks are really free and sovereign – or, tragically, if they are prevented from being so by the state, by racial collectivism, by social stigma etc.  Ask yourself if their freedom is true – or if it is just the freedom to shoot automatic weapons, and their sovereignty is just the sovereignty of truanting schoolchildren.  Be careful, though, not to scratch their faith in the self-authored individual or out will pour all the usual liberal chants of “racist”, “fascist” etc.

If you find their freedom and sovereign individualism compelling I have lost this argument.  If you are a one-time Australian schoolboy who went to London and latched on to “Hair” just to see Lynn Kellogg and Sally Eaton in the nude every night I’m still jealous, Rick.