Diverse Priorities

Ian Fraser Kilmister, better known as Lemmy, was a legendary rock star, in both music and lifestyle. His band, Motörhead (gratuitous umlaut and all), had a number of hits, but Lemmy's personality often outshone his (significant) musical achievements.

Some of his many memorable quips.

• A kid once said to me "Do you get hangovers?" I said, "To get hangovers you have to stop drinking."

• If you think you are too old to rock ’n roll, then you are.

• I don’t do regrets. Regrets are pointless. It’s too late for regrets. You’ve already done it, haven’t you? You’ve lived your life. No point wishing you could change it.

• That was a great time, the summer of ’71 – I can’t remember it, but I’ll never forget it!

• Integrity is everything to me. I will not die ashamed. I will live on my deathbed knowing that I gave it my best shot, and everything else is meaningless to me.

• My ethic is: ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ You can be as careful as you want, but you’re going to die anyway, so why not have fun?

And of course, one famous bit from Motörhead's Ace of Spades:

You know I'm born to lose
And gambling's for fools
But that's the way I like it, baby
I don't want to live forever

Lemmy was, legend has it, good for a bottle of Jack Daniels a day. He lived, ate, and breathed "rock and roll" up until his death at age 70.

All this, along with The Who singing "hope I die before I get old," came to mind as I penned my recent bit about harm avoidance.

As well, this John Mortimer quip.

Now, before you conclude I'm advocating a lifestyle of reckless abandon, note that I am not. Lemmy started smoking at age 11 - I've never smoked anything in my life. Lemmy drank a bottle of whiskey a day - I didn't venture past beer and wine until middle age, and two adult beverages put me to sleep. Each of us chooses our lifestyle.

What happens when someone else decides our lifestyle choices are improper or unacceptable? In a free society, we can say "**** off" and that would be the end of it.

However, we don't live in that sort of society. All around us are people who are happy with government restricting our behaviors and lifestyle choices, 'for our own good.' They blur or completely ignore the line between preventing or punishing us for doing harm to others and restricting what we do that doesn't affect others, and rationalize it by speaking in euphemisms and vaguenesses such as "societal costs."

From the creation of that metric comes the self-assumed authority to restrict our lifestyle choices. SCOTUS Justice Anthony Kennedy asked, "Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?" The similar question arises, "can you assume the burden of someone's behavior in order to restrict it?" If individual rights and autonomy are to mean anything, the answer must be "no."

This should extend to lifestyle. We tolerate certain behaviors we consider "excesses," but not others, and impose that selective tolerance by force. Unless and until an individual violates another's rights, you, me, and the rest of society have no business interfering with that individual's lifestyle choices. Nor do we have the right, if "society" decides to underwrite those choices with taxpayer money, to say "we're paying for your excesses, so now we can limit them."

Freedom lovers speak of the primacy of the individual. This is a position taken on the "individual self" vs "collective self" worldviews. The latter, sometimes couched in terms of a "social contract," subordinates individual's rights (and the fruit of their labor) to a "greater good." That "greater good" is determined by majority vote or popular will, sometimes bounded by the Constitution, but often ignoring the Constitution's strict limits on government action with a (falsely constructed) appeal to the General Welfare language therein.

Problem is, once you subordinate the one to the many, the one loses his rights, his liberty, and the fruit of his labor. His personhood stops mattering, and his freedom is limited to what others allow.

There's no philosophical middle ground here. If you feel society has the right to prohibit what it deems self-harmful behavior, then you cannot claim either a belief in liberty or a respect for others as equals in that society.

Lemmy could very well have bought himself another fifteen years of lifespan if he didn't live as he did, but he chose his way. We can disagree with his choice, we can scold that choice in retrospect. Were we friends or family, we could argue with him. And, if we want to be advocates, we could message the public about the perils of such choices. But, that's where it ends. Any sort of coercion, and we take away his right to be a free person.