Control, Anxiety, and Government

The case for a free society is a strong one, yet few people accept it. The standard explanation for this among libertarians is that the spontaneous order which ensures that anarchy does not lead to chaos is highly counterintuitive. The human mind evolved to facilitate individual and small-group cooperative action, and is therefore geared toward simple cause-and-effect thinking. Because of this, the fatal conceit that we can control other people’s lives and expect good results comes naturally to us. Political structures which give the individual no chance of having any real effect provide no incentive for them to reflect on the folly of statism, and most simply go with the flow.

I’m convinced that this explains a lot about the human disposition to favour coercive state action over voluntary cooperation through markets and the institutions of civil society. Tom Rees at the Epiphenom blog points to another factor which seems very important, and potentially much more malleable. He reports on research by psychologists Kristin Laurin and Aaron Kay which should be of much interest to libertarians:

What they set out to investigate was whether people who feel like they are not in control of their lives, and feel anxious as a result, turn to external supports to reduce their anxiety. In fact, what they suggest is that everybody has a preferred level of control that makes them feel comfortable. To reach that point, you can either convince yourself that you are in control, or you can convince yourself that the something else (God, perhaps, or a benevolent government) is in control.

If they’re right, then making people feel like they aren’t in control should increase their belief in and support for a benevolent God or government.

They’ve put together quite body of work in support of this. In the first paper they published last year, they showed in a bundle of related studies that this seems to be the case. For example:

They showed that making people think about events they had no control over radically increased their belief in God, but only when that God was presented as a controlling God. What’s more, this happened because people who were made to feel like they had no control actually increased their belief that the Universe was not actually random.

The subjects compensated for their loss of personal control by increasing their belief that something else (God, in this case) was in control.

Kay and his colleagues also looked at data from the World Values Survey and showed that people who think they have no real control over their lives also think that governments should take more responsibility. Interestingly, the effect disappears in countries with corrupt governments.

Making people feel like they have no control also makes people resistant to change (but only for people who trust the government).

What’s more, it also works in the other direction. Reducing trust in the government make people more likely to think that they personally can have control over their lives.

To me, there seems to be both good news and bad news in these results. First, the bad news: If we make the reasonable assumption that government gives people less control over their lives and they subjectively feel this to be the case, controlling government is likely to be self-reinforcing. Up to a point, the more controlling and arbitrary a government becomes, the more people will demand government action to compensate for their own lack of control. This will only work up to the point where people stop trusting the government, though. Unfortunately, most people in western democracies have quite a lot of trust in their governments.

The good news is that by finding ways of giving people more control over their own lives, we can reduce support for the state. Complaining about the current disempowering state may just push people to advocate a different set of rulers to give their lives a sense of control, whereas increasing the capabilities of individuals through the market and the voluntary institutions of civil society, which compete with government, can give people more control. Stressing the positive case for freedom is likely to be a more effective means of persuasion than making the negative case against government. We need to frame our arguments in such a way that makes it clear that individual liberty empowers people, rather than complaining about the fact that government disempowers them.

This best thing about this is that it makes the job of the freedom activist less depressing.