5/7🌎Only Freedom Wins

States do not arise by chance. They arise where people gather around certain values, laws, and a shared territory and are able to defend this order against external threats. The prosperity a community creates automatically awakens covetousness. That is why securing internal and external peace is the true core of every form of rule.

Those who participate in this rule and share responsibility become citizens. Those who merely obey remain subjects. This distinction is not merely historical. It continues to determine the long-term survival capacity of states to this day.

Subject States: Stability through Hierarchy – or through Fear

The classic form of the subject state is the feudal system. It rests on hierarchical bonds of loyalty, blood ties, and religious legitimization. Rulers marry among themselves, forge dynastic connections, and hold the community together through a small elite. As long as the ambitions of the powerful can be contained by easily controllable economic resources and religious authority, the system remains surprisingly stable — similar to a large mafia clan in which all participants know that open betrayal endangers the common enterprise.

This model is, however, fundamentally incompatible with dynamic, innovation-driven societies. It stifles intellectual and economic development because every change threatens the existing hierarchy.

In the modern era, competing autocracies take its place. Here the power base is so narrow that only the ruling caste itself counts as a serious rival. The broad population is not truly needed — neither for legitimization nor for defense. Such systems can survive in a static world. But as soon as economic and technological development begins, pressure builds: the ruling stratum must broaden its power base or risk falling behind.

Even more sophisticated are coordinated autocracies. Rulers secure one another through hostage-like mechanisms — formerly through the exchange of princes, today through economic interdependence or nuclear deterrence (the MAD doctrine). No one openly attacks another because everyone knows that their own downfall would accompany the opponent’s. Yet even here the inner drive persists to reduce one’s own dependence and achieve superiority. Sooner or later, the coordination collapses.

Citizen States: The Power of the Many

The citizen state (or system state) functions on fundamentally different principles. It is comparable to an egalitarian military encampment in which people voluntarily gather around values they are willing to defend together. Because it can never be ruled out that robber bands will form elsewhere and attempt to seize what has been achieved without consent, defense capability must rest on a broad foundation.

These states are characterized by the interplay of three power factors:

1. Worldly Power

It is based on the interest in creating and securing prosperity. Continuity arises from a shared commitment to the property order. It gains legitimacy through general and symmetrical readiness to act — that is, through citizens’ willingness to stand up for the community because they themselves benefit from it.

2. Spiritual Power

It shapes expectations and offers promises of salvation or protection from harm. It operates through consent (conversion) and representation. To do so, it requires identity — whether religious, national, or ideological. In its most radical form it reduces itself to pure loyalty to a leader and hostility toward an enemy. When group-dependent status erodes due to economic shocks, this power can swing into radical decadence or, conversely, into radical order — a sign of weakness, not strength.

3. Intellectual Power

It is concerned with development, research, and knowledge. It is the force that generates new technologies, better weapons, more efficient economic forms, and medical progress.

A natural tension exists between these three powers — but also a natural tendency toward symbiosis. In the long run they flourish or degenerate together. In the short term one power may dominate the others. Yet any lasting supremacy weakens the community as a whole.

The Deadly Danger of Post-Citizen Autocracies

Post-citizen autocracies arise when one or more of these powers are monopolized or excessively concentrated. They systematically undermine the state’s resilience. Military defeats in such systems are often not random battlefield losses but systemic defeats.

The unnecessary erosion of freedom is therefore not a harmless domestic dispute. It is an act hostile to the state — a modern form of high treason against the community’s long-term capacity to survive.

Examples of dangerous imbalances:

Excessive concentration of worldly power leads to extreme inequality without corresponding collective readiness for defense. The few who profit from universal security gain disproportionate influence and eventually tend to appropriate the accumulated prosperity for themselves. History shows this in late feudal societies, where a small elite outsourced defense to mercenaries — until the mercenaries seized power.

Censorship in the name of spiritual power produces escalations of ignorance. When certain truths are tabooed for opportunistic or ideological reasons, the capacity to respond is paralyzed. Society becomes unable to react appropriately to real dangers. Examples range from the systematic denial of military threats in the 1930s to contemporary cases in which economic or security realities are ignored to protect political narratives.

Uncontrolled intellectual power without ethical and political embedding can demand disproportionate human costs — for instance through ruthless technological developments that are no longer subject to social steering.

Why Large Autocracies Lose in the Long Term

According to Montesquieu, large empires tend to develop in a feudalistic or autocratic direction. They are structurally at a disadvantage against smaller but free republics. The reason lies in defensive readiness. Autocracies struggle to generate genuine mass mobilization because the broad population has little to gain and little to lose.

Technological advantages cannot be permanently insulated. What tanks and aircraft are today were once cannons and longbows: they neutralized the advantage of armored knights. Technology cartels lead to stagnation. The decisive factor for victory remains the human factor — motivation, initiative, and willingness to make personal sacrifices.

Freedom is not a pleasant extra in this context. It is the prerequisite for combat morale, which becomes decisive in an era of non-hoardable means of warfare (i.e., almost all modern conflicts). A system that relies on fanaticism hinders intellectual power and cannot permanently substitute for the masses’ interest in economic success.

Historical evidence abounds: the Greek city-states withstood the Persian empire. The Dutch Republic defied the Spanish world empire. The Allies prevailed in the Second World War not only through materiel superiority, but through the higher motivation of free societies.

Conclusion: Freedom as an Existential Necessity

Political freedom is not a moral decoration. It is collective proving power against the opponent. It rests on a balanced relationship between worldly, spiritual, and intellectual power.

Collective defense capability depends on the socio-economic constitution of the citizens. Without citizens — that is, without people who have a genuine stake in the community — there can be no competent and motivated warriors in the long term. And without competent warriors, there is no security in the long term.

Public debate frequently denies this connection and promotes an infantile concept of freedom: freedom as a pure right to consumption and self-realization without any reciprocal obligation. In reality, freedom is a necessary concession so that citizens are willing to contribute to securing the community.

It can also be expressed this way: freedom is the consequence of security costs that must be borne. These costs can only be shouldered collectively if a common identity exists. A viable identity, in turn, presupposes a certain degree of economic participation — and such participation is only sustainably possible on the foundation of free intellectual and scientific development.

Therefore: Only freedom wins. Not because freedom is prettier or morally superior, but because it is the only form of rule that, in the long run, generates the necessary defensive strength, innovative capacity, and loyalty of the population. All other systems may appear stable or impressive in the short term — in the long term, they succumb.

🗞️News

Go Social Libertarian!

Support

Die Zukunft des Westens

Movement

Engagement

engage@solmo.org

© 2025. All rights reserved.

The Future of the West