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| PeacefulWarrior |
| It is surprising that although most of us are opposed ot political tyranny and dictatorship, we inwardly accept the authority, the tyranny, of another to twist our minds and our way of life. Are we free simply because we have a "choice," or the ability to choose? |
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| Verona^My |
| quote: | Originally posted by PeacefulWarrior
It is surprising that although most of us are opposed ot political tyranny and dictatorship, we inwardly accept the authority, the tyranny, of another to twist our minds and our way of life. Are we free simply because we have a "choice," or the ability to choose? |
freedom is created through order... Imagine for a moment a society with no laws... you would live in fear just as you would if you were living under an oppressive dictatorship. Probably more so even, people need government to protect people from themselves, otherwise you have no freedom what so ever.
Now think about big cities & living on streets where you wouldn't dare tread because the crime is so high in certain neighborhoods. I ask an important question, how free are you when you cant walk the streets at night because you live in a crime ridden neighborhood. It's probably just as bad in some cases as living in a dictatorship.
I haven't lived in a dictatorship, so I'm not one to judge, but nor have I lived in a crime ridden neighborhood. But I can imagine living in either one, and seeing the potential problems that would arise for myself living under such oppressive conditions. So yes, I accept for myself, the necessity of the thin blue line, the necessity of governments to create order & conditions for a successful nation. |
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| Renegade |
Verona^My:
Yes, but there's a difference between security and freedom.
In the example you give, even in the most crime-infested society in the world, you are still free to choose whether you wish to walk outside or not, and free to decide when this is going to be. In a free society, no-one can stop you from going on a suicidal 3am fun-run.
The flip-side is that one could live in the most crime free society in the world, but they may have had to have given up your freedoms to achieve it. Perhaps the government has implemented a 9pm curfew, preventing the majority of crime, but also taking away our freedom to walk around after dark. Order and freedom aren't necessarily the exact opposites, having said that, but depriving us of the ability to make specific autonomous choices can - on occasion - give us security and order at the expense of freedom. Only someone much smarter than I can say which is the more important goal.
| quote: | | Are we free simply because we have a "choice," or the ability to choose? |
Prepare yourself, this is going to get very Satre-esque:
Freedom isn't about making a choice or being able to make a choice, it's about being condemned to make a choice. The free man has no other option but to make choices, for even not choosing is a choice in itself. However, mans freedom to choose becomes a responsibility to choose in a free society and this, I would suggest, scares him. He cannot escape the fact that he alone is responsible to decide his own path in life (and, by extension, the path of all man-kind) and feels angst towards this responsibility to choose.
But then, faced with the full scope of his freedom, man is prepared to sacrifice some of his choices to avoid some of his responsibility - and freedom and responsibility are one and the same in this case..... when one's freedom is deteriorated, so to is one's responsibility to one's fellow-man. Thus, man is prepared to delegate his ability to choose to government, prepared to sacrifice some of his freedoms to defer his responsibility onto someone else. Now, when something goes wrong in his life, he no longer needs to blame his own choices, but those of the government to whom he has delegated his responsibility to choose: "I lost my job, I blame the economic mismanagement of the Bush administration". All of a sudden, much of mans choice is out of his hands, yet he feels comfortable with this, for he is no longer responsible for the ills of his society, the world or of his own life. For as long as we can accurately trace the patterns of civilization man has continually used religion and politics as a means of deferring his responsibility to choose - and we can see it still, even today. The more "ill" a society is - the greater the desire for the population to absolve themselves of the sense of responsibility for the current state of the society - the more likely they are to be driven towards religious and political extremism. When one is prepared to sacrifice their freedom to the church or a government who's ideologies lie on the extreme left or right of the political compass, they are merely deferring their social responsibilities out of fear - namely that of the fear of choice and the fear of freedom.
Perhaps it's a vestigial instinct inherent within everyone of us - perhaps harking back to the days of our primate ancestors who, if modern primates are anything to go by, lived in very heirarchical societies - but if history has shown us anything over its millenia of turmoil, it is this: man is scared to be free.
And I need another drink. :eek: |
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| Izzy |
| what a great post renegade! |
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| TranceGiant |
So, renegade, you actually conclude the total contrary to Marx' theory of the everlasting fight between classes FOR freedom? Actually when looking at the history of civilization u see a gradual increase of personal/political freedom. From strict hierarchies in egypt, to Athen "primitive" dircet democracy, to the Roman stae of laws (which guarenteed more freedom to the indivdual) to the magna carta, the invention of parliament as an insitution to represent the people's will to constituionalism which limited the state's monolpoly of violence to socialism etc. etc. Sure there have always been setback such as feudalism and fascism or the extreme socialism, communism. But at the end of the day people have at least gained more rights. The extent of one's use of the given rights determines one's freedom, I think. Furthermore I wont accept ur statement of the religion as an invention to defer responsibilities and consequently, to weaken one's freedom. Buddhism and Christianity for example both served as movements of liberation in their beginnings. The common people saw them a gift, a set of rules and personal freedom (everyone was equal, everyone could find salvation and enlightment, tolerance of the others etc. etc.) they didnt find in the societes they lived in up to that point. On the flip side religions have also been misused to spread the exact contrary, namely a dogmatic fundamental world view excluding all tolerance and navigated by the greed for power.
As Arbiter said in the other thread, religion is the gun not the bullet. |
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| zarathustra |
| Great posts/topic. |
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| ProDiGaL |
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
-Kierkegaard |
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| Renegade |
Whoops, sorry, completely forgot I posted in this topic. :wtf:
Trancegiant:
| quote: | | So, renegade, you actually conclude the total contrary to Marx' theory of the everlasting fight between classes FOR freedom? |
The Marxist dialectic, as I understand it anyway, doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do freedom. Marx explained the history of societal conflict in terms of class, and in terms of materialism (hence the term "dialectical materialism"). The lower classes haven't, in the past, been fighting for freedom so much as for equality - thus, the Marxist theory has much more to do with labour and capital than it does with freedom. In these terms then, the American war of Independence wouldn't be seen by Marx as a revolt against English oppression with the aim of increasing personal liberty, but rather as a class revolution, with the American people overthrowing the English, who they thought owned a disproportionately large and thus unequal amount of the capital. In this sense, the American push for independence (just to use an example) becomes more a revolt towards the redistrobution of wealth and power rather than the the push for enhancement of American "freedom".
But the issue of "conflict" - one of the three main tennets of Marxist economic theory - is really the one that allows you to understand why the real world application of Marxism (in the form of communism) has failed, particularly in its ability to allow men to be "free" under this system.
Conflict in the Marxist sense isn't about fighting or war, it's more about the notion of "opposition". That is, a nation establishes a system of politics/economics (say capitalism) and immediately two antitheses will be created: there will be an internal antithesis and an external antithesis. The external antithesis we don't really need to consider here (as it doesn't really effect the level of freedom in the original society), but the internal antithesis has a huge bearing in how and why communist countries so easily descend into dictatorships.
Say a country becomes dissatisfied with its political system and decides to adopt communism as its new political theory. The original system is the thesis (which could be, say, capitalism) and over time, dissatisfaction grows with the system as inequity begins to increase. From this an antithesis is formed (in this case Marxist socialism/communism) and as inequity grows and dissent among the proletariat grows in kind, the old thesis is eventually overthrown by the antithesis, and whatever new system is formed by the antithesis (as the antithesis will still retain some elements of the original thesis) a sythesis is formed when the new political system is established. So when Stalin and Lenin (among others) pioneered communism as the antithesis to the previous system (which in Russia was the Czar empire I believe?), a synthesis was formed, and eventually communism became the new thesis. However, this is where the problem arises: Stalin (especially) was aware that no political system was the be-all and end-all of political systems, so he knew - in time - that an antithesis would arise to communism. This antithesis would undermine the power he had, so he knew - essentially - that in order for the system to remain, and to remain in power himself, he would have to quash whatever reminents of an antithesis existed in his society, thus ensuring that his communistic "thesis" remained unchallenged. The trouble with communism, in this case especially, is that the people are entirely dependant on the government for the distrobution of resources, so the power held by the government and its leader in a said system are huge. In a democratic capitalistic system, there is little a government can do to reduce opposition, because the people hold at least as much power (almost certainly more) than the government does. In the USSR, however, Stalin was so aware of the need to quash opposition - and so aware of the fact that he had the power to do just this - and so was able to starve people to death upon his whim. He killed about 10,000,000 Ukrainians in one year if my memory serves me correctly, merely because he had that much power. Erm, what was my point originally?
Ah yes, my point is that Marx's aim was never to ensure freedom for the people in a given society (as we can see by how dependant the people are on the government - and hence how less free they are - under such a society) but having said that, Satre - the "inspiration" for my above post - used the concepts I was talking about, and after following them to their natural end (theoretically anyway) ended up becoming an extreme leftist who advocated the socialistic - if not the communistic - cause. But it's all much of a muchness in the end - from what I've read by and about Marx, it doesn't seem as though the concept of freedom was as important to him as the concept of equality was.
| quote: | | Actually when looking at the history of civilization u see a gradual increase of personal/political freedom. From strict hierarchies in egypt, to Athen "primitive" dircet democracy, to the Roman stae of laws (which guarenteed more freedom to the indivdual) to the magna carta, the invention of parliament as an insitution to represent the people's will to constituionalism which limited the state's monolpoly of violence to socialism etc. etc. |
Hmmmm.... perhaps. Though it all depends on how you define freedom in the end.
To be sure, the things you mentioned there demonstrate an marked increase in liberty and equality, but I think that freedom is slightly different. Liberty - according to my interpretation anyway - has to do with the recognition of the sanctity of the individual, and about the according development of human rights. Equality has to do with recognition that all individuals are - you guessed it - "equal" and deserve the same degree of "liberty". Freedom, on the other hand, comes down - primarily - to the ability to make choices. In this sense, it is possible to be entirely free but not have any liberty (in a more anarchic society, perhaps, where you can do what you like but your personal sanctity is not preserved under law) and to have liberty but not any freedom (such as someone in a western jail, for instance, who is still afforded human rights, but lacks the freedom to make many of the choices he would otherwise make). In the cases you mentioned, I wouldn't argue that freedom within the proletariat has increased from feudal days for instance (where you were basically either a master or a slave, without having much say in the matter) but I don't think that we are necessarily more free than people were in ancient Athens, say, or perhaps even ancient Rome. If you disclude our technological superiority that immediately grants us with a wider scope of choice (I could fly to Shanghai tomorrow, for instance, whereas the ancient Greeks obviously didn't have that choice) I don't think we are any more free than people were back then.
We have more liberties, to be sure, and there is a greater conception of "equality", but in what sense are we more free? We are still slaves to our situation. We still need to undertake a vocation to make money and survive, and the greater "choice" we have in this situation, as I said before, has as much to do with our technological superiority as it does our political system. For instance, I live in a democratic nation yet I am forced to vote: how much freedom do I really have? The system tells me, "you are compelled to have either this guy or that guy as your leader, so make your choice". Of course, having a choice of two is better than having a choice of one, but nonetheless my current situation has as much to do with what I am limited by, as what I am free to do.
Absolute freedom is an unatainable pipe-dream, and even the "amounts" of freedom a society has is limited and impossible to accurately measure. If someone is poor, for instance, do we say that it's a result of the bad choices he has made, or the fact that his parents couldn't afford to educate him properly, just as their parents couldn't afford to educate them? How free are we, really, when wealth is propogated in that way? Sure, someone born poor has the potential to make money, but if he remains a slave to the circumstances that remain well out of his control - his scope of choice - then just how free is he?
| quote: | | The extent of one's use of the given rights determines one's freedom, I think. |
As I said before, I think rights have more to do with the notions of liberty and equality than freedom. The only rights that determine freedom, are the rights that determine choice.
| quote: | | Furthermore I wont accept ur statement of the religion as an invention to defer responsibilities and consequently, to weaken one's freedom. Buddhism and Christianity for example both served as movements of liberation in their beginnings. The common people saw them a gift, a set of rules and personal freedom (everyone was equal, everyone could find salvation and enlightment, tolerance of the others etc. etc.) they didnt find in the societes they lived in up to that point. On the flip side religions have also been misused to spread the exact contrary, namely a dogmatic fundamental world view excluding all tolerance and navigated by the greed for power. |
Yep, I agree. Religion isn't the problem, it's people's mistreatment of it.
When I said that people are driven to religion to avoid their own responsibilities, I wasn't saying that there is some huge flaw in religion that automatically "corrupts" it followers, merely that people desperate to avoid their sense of responsibility are more likely to avoid them under the security blanket offered by religion, and in this state they are ripe for corruption.
Religions, in their pure and unadulterated form (whatever that may entail) are fine, but - I'm sure we both agree - the dogmatic interpretation of religion is a dangerous thing indeed. Note that I said people looking to escape their own responsibility are more likely to be driven towards religious extremism not necessarily just religion in itself. Under religious extremism - where views are offered as "Gospel Truth" (excuse the pun) negating the possibility of internal criticism usually offered by more moderate religions - people become slaves to their beliefs, giving away large chunks of their existential freedom in exchange for the deference of their responsibilities onto some imaginery deity. Moderate religions - I'm thinking mainly of Christianity here - in my experience, tend not to allow individuals to defer their responsibility into the realm of some other world, and instead try to preach the importance of the individuals assuming control of their own lives. I went to an Anglican school, for instance, and the Chaplain - on the few occasions we heard him speak - rarely spoke of God. It was all about being moral, ensuring that one acts as morally as possible as often as possible. Anyone can commit a sin and repent the next day as in Catholicism, but the more moderate strains of Christianity tend to support my belief that the individual must be responsible for that which he freely does.
As for Buddhism, I have never had any complaints with it. While there are Deistic denominations of Buddhism (the Hari Krshnas for one) it is a primarily atheistic religion, that preaches the value of individually realised - rather than imparted - knowledge. Under Buddhism, one is responsible for what one does, and if one acts immorally there is no opportunity to repent for it, but rather one can expect the same treatment in return. It's a worthy religion, and I think if all other religions were dropped in favour of it, the world would be a much happier place.
| quote: | | As Arbiter said in the other thread, religion is the gun not the bullet. |
Yet a bullet on its own is entirely harmless. ;) |
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