# Biochemical Individuality **URL:** **By** Egan O'Connor **Published:** June 1, 1980 --- “This book could be of enormous help to libertarians who are actively engaged in explaining the glories and justice of liberty to nonlibertarians.” _Free and Unequal: The Biological Basis of Individual Liberty_, by Roger J. Williams. Liberty Press, 363 pp., $3.50 soft, $8.00 hard cover. This book could be of enormous help to libertarians who are actively engaged in explaining the glories and justice of liberty to non-libertarians. I wish every LR reader would invest $10.50 in three copies — one for a high school library, one for a junior high school library, and one for a public library. I wish there were a copy in every school in the country. (Some schools may indeed have it; the book was previously published in 1953 and 1964.) _Free and Unequal_ is easily comprehensible even by sixth and seventh graders, but this is not to say it is boring for adults. In California alone, there are 80,000 newly registered libertarians, and I bet that fully half of them would actually enjoy this book, while also getting from it a powerful explanation of why people desire and need liberty, and why liberty (not social planning) is therefore essential to human happiness. The book will be a particularly effective introduction to liberty for left-leaning “do-good-ers,” because it centers on what they regard as human needs rather than on deregulation or the free market — subjects which such people approach (if at all) only with a mind-crippling bias. I write from experience. I was a typical “liberal” only a few years ago. As I give away copies in the future, I will probably urge people to try “just Chapter Six,” which can stand on its own. That chapter, entitled “Humanly individuals to own, and therefore to withhold if they wish, the means of production, including their own labor. The full preservation of this bourgeois freedom would place the attainment of socialism at the mercy of property owners who could threaten to deny their services to society — and again I refer to their labor, not just to material resources — if their terms were not met \[emphasis mine\].” The “curtailment” of an individual’s “property rights in labor” used to be referred to in civilized countries as chattel slavery. But then, a volume entitled _Slavery: For and Against_ would be rather unlikely to find acceptance in the intellectual circles Heilbroner is accustomed to frequent. As Oscar Wilde observed nearly a century ago, “Now-a-days to be intelligible is to be found out.” Wanting,” will be irresistible to many people because it contains a self-quiz. But that’s only the ribbon on the package. The content of Chapter Six is the most devastating yet succinct case I have ever seen against trying to achieve human happiness through government planning. Chapter Six begins by asking, “Why is life worth living? What do you like most about it or want most from it?” and then proceeds to present a questionnaire for the reader. The questionnaire consists of 48 boxes, each “containing” one type of activity which you might consider to be worth living for — including ownership for the pleasure of ownership; routine activities and duties; riding in or driving cars, planes or boats; sex; thinking; planning; contriving; inventing; religious worship; puzzles of all kinds; odors; babies; beauty; betting; aiding people; loafing; solitude. The reader is challenged to imagine that he or she can “have” only a few of these pleasures, and to select the four or five activities which most make life worth living for him or her. The process is done in stages, so that there is a record of which potential pleasures are discarded immediately, and which are discarded more and more reluctantly. Then Williams (who is a well-respected biochemist and past president of the American Chemical Society) reports on the results when five men and five women associated with his Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute did the exercise and revealed their individual patterns of preference. “We were prepared for some diversity,” he writes, “but the diversity of patterns turned out to be extreme — far beyond what we had anticipated, especially since many of the members of the group were alike in that they had similar scientific leanings. . . . “That the differences exhibited by these individuals do not involve unimportant details needs emphasis. The preference for chess over checkers . . . is not involved; instead, we are concerned with broad, far-reaching human activities, which are closely bound with the significance of life itself.” Williams depicts (Figure A) the individual preference patterns of each of his ten colleagues graphically, with 48 activities on the rim of each circle like the hours on a clock, plus lines of various lengths (the length representing the importance-ranking of a particular activity) extending from the rim like rays from a sun. It is immediately obvious (a) that there is no resemblance among the ten patterns, and (b) that when the preferences are consolidated into an average pattern, the average wants are an utterly false guide to what makes life worth living for real people. In fact, using the average as a guide is a prescription for universal frustration and misery. It is hard for me to imagine a more convincing demolition of the myth that big benevolent governments and social planners know what will make “people” happy, and can design and deliver a “good society” if we will just surrender our rights and a large part of our incomes to them. Both before and after Chapter Six, Williams summarizes (without technical jargon) some of the evidence that: (1) Babies are born with inherited biological differences (inequalities), and these differences are not trivial. (2) These genetic differences necessarily persist throughout life regardless of education, training, indoctrination, and social pressure. (3) These genetic differences are significant (but not exclusive) lifelong determinants of what each individual can enjoy, how he can think, what he can achieve, what kind of temperament he is going to have, and what he needs to be healthy and happy; even if all individuals experienced identical environments after birth, each individual would nevertheless have a unique biochemical, athletic, artistic, reasoning, and emotional pattern. (4) The individual and only the individual knows directly (though not necessarily analytically) what his unique pattern is, what is the relative intensity of his various needs and drives, and what is his relative satisfaction or value from various activities. (5) When individual patterns are averaged to describe your “average, normal person,” the result is as nonsensical as it is when you average all the unique patterns for oriental rugs to get your “average, normal rug.” In medicine, nutrition, and athletics, unchangeable individual differences are better appreciated than they are by those involved in political, economic, social, and educational matters. (6) The historically recurrent agitation for liberty is—not just a philosophical preference without any greater justification than the preference for power and authority; the desire for liberty springs from the human species’ need for liberty, which is based squarely on our inherited biological inequalities and unchangeable differences. Some readers may consider this book, as I do, “the missing link” which ties together the conclusions of some important thinkers in psychology, management, economics, and politics. For instance, it is widely observed in counseling—and in the whole “self-actualizing,” “getting-in-touch-with-yourself” movement—that freely chosen goals and freely chosen methods of achieving them (not chosen by the counselor or therapist), and the patient’s conviction that these values, beliefs, goals, and plans are truly his own (private ownership), are fundamental to the patient’s progress, health, and happiness. Freely chosen goals and the distinction between what is mine and thine are, of course, fundamental libertarian values. What an irony that the libertarian movement is perceived as callous, heartless, and inhumane by the “do-gooders”! In the field of management (business, home, neighborhood club, or other), it is also widely observed that working members (including children and even the managers themselves) are extremely hard to motivate whenever they are supposed to work for someone else’s goal and/or whenever someone else’s method of achieving the goal is imposed on them. In fact, when workers feel overly controlled, supervised, regimented, and bored, they often retaliate with pseudostupidity, apparent laziness, carelessness, irresponsibility, and non-cooperation, whereas when workers are free to control, benefit, and profit from their own job-performance, talent, and skills (that is, from their own property), then they display creativity, ingenuity, initiative, productivity, and an attitude of cooperation. Workers who agitate for “more control over our own jobs” are thus showing a basically healthy libertarian streak, even though it has been perverted by lack of education about human rights—both their own and others’. The behavior of workers is a variant on the observation that the desire to choose one’s own goals and methods is part of human nature. It follows from Williams’s thesis that the reason this is so is that each person has unique capacities and satisfactions which only he can assess. Development of one’s unique combination of capacities and satisfaction of one’s unique pattern of needs require freedom from outside control. Thus, regimentation and serving someone else’s goals are destined to cause some degree of frustration, stress, resentment, bitching, diminished performance, and dissatisfaction. Abraham Maslow, who could readily be regarded as the father of the self-actualization movement, proposed that all human drives and goals result from five types of biologically based, universal human needs: the need to meet survival-requirements (food, water, warmth, rest, etc.), the need to feel secure that you can continue to meet your survival needs, the need for companionship, the need for self-esteem, and the need to exercise one’s capacities. Capacities are needs. Thus capacities create the drive for “self-actualization.” People at all levels of intelligence and talent report profound pleasure when they achieve anything “on their own.” Maslow, like Williams, recognized that the intensities of various needs differ among individuals and vary over time in the same individual, with the variation depending on both genes and circumstances. And like such other non-libertarians as Carl Rogers in psychology and Norman R.F. Maier in management, Maslow ended up by the scientific method (observation) proposing the same law: liberty is a requirement for human happiness. The great libertarian thinker, F. A. Harper—who cites Williams’s _Free and Unequal_ in one of his essays—argues that there are natural laws of proper human interaction just as there are natural laws of gravity, etc., whether or not we have discerned them. For instance, Harper observed that “all conflicts are exclusively problems of abolished liberty.” Williams takes the case for liberty to an even deeper level by explaining why this occurs: our desire for liberty is based on our need for liberty, which is based on every individual’s unique genetic endowment. Williams points out that much misery is caused by the misinterpretation of the statement, “all men are created equal,” when equal cannot possibly mean identical or uniform at birth. Among the miseries he discusses are intolerance, and self-doubt starting early in childhood. Chapter titles include “Accounting for Tastes,” “Humanly Thinking,” “Educational Assembly Line,” “When Can We Regiment?” “Find Your Own Food Fad,” “The Fallacy of ‘The Patient,” “Religious and Artistic Fits and Misfits,” “Races, Peoples, Individuality,” and “Individuals and History.” It is no coincidence that a book which makes a case for liberty will simultaneously do additional good things, like helping some readers to become more loving, humble, and self-confident. This is a first-rate book, and I feel deeply grateful to the individuals at Liberty Press for making it available. Egan O’Connor is a book editor and a graduate student in biochemistry and nutrition. She arrived at libertarianism via her tax-resistance during the Vietnam War and via the anti-nuclear/environmental movement. Morley writes that when it was arranged for his return to Philadelphia to raise money for the cause, he bade goodbye to his London Quaker friends with “mixed feelings.”