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Freedom means less than Peace
As much as civilisation tries to reconcile the two, all it does is create moral hypocrisies.
We like to pretend we fight for freedom. Yet, we fail to realise that true freedom means that laws and even civilisation as a concept should be destroyed. True freedom is chaos, and instead of recognising it's beauty, we hypocritally see it as a source of evil while simultaneously preaching about freedom.
Furthermore, the general standard of humanity is selflessness. We praise those who sacrifice themselves in name of the inoccent; this is the notion of the modern hero.
Yet, freedom is essencially selfish. It is indulging in what our heart desires. How can we so viciously attack selfishness as a concept when we apreciate it?
Since I am very much of the opinion that people should care for each other, I fall on the order side of the equation. Order and peace have the side effect of opression, of extermination of freedom and ultimately free will, of the group over the individual.
And frankly, I'm fine with that. All attempts at reconciliation are pathetic failures, so either we go all the way, or we don't. Being an hypocrite about this is morally wrong.
Comments
Ah, false dichotomies. Gotta love them.
Who is this Gigantala, BTW? Joined two days ago and that's the first post.
The concept of freedom as interpreted through the auspice of US history largely refers to freedom from British rule, and I think most people misunderstand, thinking of it as freedom in the most broad abstract -- the freedom of choice, lifestyle, and all that stuff. Except those fighting for the freedom of the colonies from British rule were in a slave-owning culture; for comparison's sake, even feudal Europeans considered slavery to be distasteful.
But the essential fact of the matter is that freedom today comes at a fiscal cost, much like the rest of history. To narrow that down, I'm arguing that actual freedom is an untested concept, because most people have always been constrained by financial and political limitations, and that holds true today. A peasant in the Middle Ages technically had many of the same rights we do as average citizens of the First World today, but the practical circumstances of their lives prevented them from exercising those rights. It's a pattern that hasn't changed.
Furthermore, peace is also a largely untested state of being. In a world where warfare is often conducted through the stock exchange and the acquisition of resources, we use the term "peacetime" to refer to a time when soldiers of our nation are not deployed on foreign soil. That doesn't necessarily mean much when every nation is locked, constantly, in the same economic struggle -- the very same that infringes upon the testing of freedom, as mentioned above.
What needs to happen for freedom or peace to become reality is the generation of public wealth over private wealth. Public wealth can contribute to the lives of a multitude of people, freeing them from economic constraints the infringe upon their freedom. And without international competition (the struggle for additional wealth), then there is no incentive to behave aggressively towards other territories, nations or lands, be that through economic means or the literal deployment of military forces.
In short, a non-existent entity cannot infringe upon a different non-existent entity. Both have to be tested, sincerely, in unison before that judgement can be made. And as the way of the world stands, both freedom and peace are abstracts rather than measurable realities.
As of the country's origins, this is entirely true. Within living memory...not really, no.
That said, I think that having perfect freedom or perfect peace is impossible as long as more than one human exists, and also think that the concepts aren't necessarily opposed unless you insist that they have to be perfect or they don't count, which is just silly.
Given that slavery wasn't abolished in the USA until the mid-late 1800s, I find it difficult to accept that nation could have stood for generalised, abstract freedom at any point until that time. Even then, though, black citizens of the USA had less rights than whites until about the 1960s. Not to mention that the USA's brand of freedom has always been attached to capitalistic enterprise, which is kind of like feudalism, but where blood is replaced by money.
I mean, the USA began as a British landgrab, natives be damned, which then imported abducted slaves from a different continent who didn't have the same lawful rights as white citizens until the 1960s. Adhering to any definition of "freedom" that isn't directly related to rejecting British rule when talking of historical US culture seems bizarre.
Yeah, I pulled the date out of my ass. I edited it out for that very reason.
My main point was that claiming that the country is still focusing on trying not to be taken over by Britain just struck me as...kind of silly. Like, saying that Australia is still a prison colony silly.
The point is that the original idea behind the freedom stuff in the USA was in context of British rule and tax evasion, which has since been misunderstood and applied more broadly by US culture at large. So while it's true that modern US culture certainly interprets the concept of American freedom through a broader auspice, it's not exactly an entirely honest or correct interpretation.
Yeah, if you count stuff like the right to life, or to own property, then I'm sure there'd be many. But I just didn't notice the last time I had to till my lord's fields, you know. Last time I checked, having to work didn't exactly equate to being a landed serf.
I'd also like to throw in some two florins over that idea of freedom as opposed to capitalistic enterprise. How else do you see it? If I am free, I can give money to some other dude, in exchange for him putting together some shit that I sell. If I am forbidden to do it, then my freedom is limited. As I see it, non-capitalist anarchism can only work if the mindset of the entire society is different, or when somebody enforces it. And the latter case isn't really that anarchic-level free.
Yeah, that's entirely fair. I do think it had its modern meaning well before the civil rights movement; it just wasn't very well-implemented at that point.
There actually is a modern equivalent: wage slavery. It's a position wherein the wage slave has little to no excess money after paying for the necessities of their life, and don't have a job where promotion is likely or even possible. So they are "locked" into their position, almost all of their income going into someone else's hands by law, with no way to both escape from the situation and survive.
The difference is that the serf gets plenty of sunshine, a healthy diet and develops excellent physical fitness.
Money is a limitation on freedom, as a lack of it prevents one's access to "life", to varying degrees. For instance, say I had one million dollars, and I chose to invest that in a property, and then rent out that property. Let's say I chose well and the value of that property increases over time, and in addition, I receive regular payments of rent. That one million dollars has become a self-replicating source of wealth rather than being a mere dollar value. With the money gained from this enterprise, I'm not at risk of financial collapse if I'm out of a job, because I can, at worst, sell the property for over one million dollars. But even then, I probably won't have to, as the rent income is likely to cover my costs of living.
So merely by having wealth, one can excuse themselves from certain responsibilities -- such as having a job. In addition, such wealth could afford me superior medical care and better representation in a court of law, not to mention a variety of luxury goods. So wealth provides me with a greater quality of life.
Compare and contrast that with the wage slave above, who, on top of having nearly no spending money, has less free time, less general life security and will have to work for longer before they retire -- if indeed they ever retire. So wealth disparity creates an inherent form of servitude, the same way it always has, making capitalism a restriction on practical, personal freedoms. And taking the wealth example above, consider the possibility that I have a child, who I teach to do the same, and I give them my wealth to do so. If my wealth had appreciated to even just two million dollars, they now have twice the wealth with which to generate additional wealth, widening the gap.
So such wealth becomes hereditary, meaning that the same bloodlines continue to inherit the world's limited supplies of resources. And then you have truly huge corporations like BP buying up stocks in renewable energy, because renewable energy is likely to create an economic revolution that moves us towards a post-scarcity society. A corporation like BP won't have that, though, so they take the initiative in order to retain economic control by the means of enforcing artificial energy scarcity.
And this is why capitalism sucks. While, politically, it may have ended the inequalities that come with feudal and monarchic power structures, it still adheres to the economic structures that contributes to the inequality of eras past. So we've only thrown off those shackles half way, because private individuals can still impose widespread economic control and then pass that control down to their children, and children's children, and so on. A lot about society and power structures have changed superficially over the years, but the essence remains the same.
Tell me the last time when people were by law forbidden to leave their dead-end jobs, or learning was a subversive activity. BTW tell me how many are there cases of such jobs, even a factory drone can get promoted to a foreman, I'd guess. And you know what, it can be argued that your Medieval fascinations sometimes cloud your judgement, I remember people "proving" this way life was infinitely better for a XIX Century factory worker than to a modern person.
Of course it is. Money is the expression of means to do something, if I may sound so philosophical. You can't just snap your fingers and appear here to speak to me in person.
Which is bad exactly why?...
I mean, there may be erected measures to prevent it for one reason or another, but don't tell me that the fact I can't do it is FREE-DUHM!, hweh heh.
BTW, if I may get snarky, you should be fond of such a method of gaining wealth. Just if I make sure the owner is into fencing and equestry.
Yeah, and is it a duty to have a job?
BTW, as far as I remember, Marx called for the creation of "industrial armies", id est, to group workers in units that to leave one would be desertion. FREE-DUHM!
But is it written anywhere in the laws? No. Last time I checked, at least; perhaps you have studied law extensively, I did not. You may call "a restriction on practical freedom" the very laws of physics, I mentioned it above, so I'd avoid throwing around the terms like "inherent". Some say taxes are inherently a form of servitude, thus inimical to freedom. Last time I checked this sort of crap went on to the full extent only it the company towns in America, and those cases were kinda played by some specific rules.
Plus, if the work is outside, then you get serf's levels of exercise and sunshine.
You suck.
...
...sorry, I just wanted to say that for some time now. ^_^
...so, ahem. So much of playing Rothbard for now. My point to begin with was, if you randomly ban things, then you put limits on freedom, and if strive for ultimate freedom that you derive from some sort of first principles, you'll probably end up with some sort of anarcho-capitalism. You can however try to define it as the ability to do anything you want, as opposed to the right to do it (if that dichotomy makes sense), which you do by the way. Then we can end here by asking how are you going to grant everyone holidays in Egypt. Where's the border. And then, when you grant everyone free food, water, and housing, how do you get the people to do anything. Force them? Then it's not freedom, they can't do what they want over a significant portion of a week. Change them, into a different, very altruistic mindset? Sure, but that was the other part of my point.
Which is why, again, freedom as defined by the possibility of exercising your whims is not compatible with the very notion of civilisation.
That's not the point. The point here is that we consider ourselves to have exceeded the boundaries of historical people when it's not the case of all. We live in an era where the medieval periods are considered barbaric and crude, sometimes for good reason, but the reality often is that we haven't moved on in any practical sense. I use the comparison because it's the non-modern era I know best; I can tell you how people live today and I can tell you how people lived in the Middle Ages, but I couldn't tell you the basics of everyday life in a Celtic tribe of Classical Antiquity, nor the basic patterns of behaviour of a peasant under the Ming Dynasty.
Basically, I'm not trying to prop up the medieval periods here. I'm explaining that, in many ways, our modern society has failed to move on. And I'd like us to have moved on in those ways that support a more egalitarian society.
Because it imposes wealth disparity solely on the basis of subjective evaluation. Plenty of tribal societies of ages past didn't even conceive of the concept of land ownership, except perhaps for temporarily claiming a small, private space until the tribe moved on, or having a small space of one's own with the rest of the village being collective tribal property. This pattern can be observed from Africa to Europe and from America to Australia. It simply seems that the concept of land ownership inherently comes with class and wealth disparity, which is a system of authority that requires a power system to be imposed on a population.
The concept of land ownership, in context of Western culture, is essentially a Roman and Greek holdover, being alien to the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic tribespeople who ended up inheriting the continent of Europe after the fall of both empires and thereby set up the foundations of the modern West. It could be said that land ownership is a tool of power consolidation, as the most striking difference between an empire and an alliance of tribes isn't technology, intellecualism or anything like that, but cohesion, and it's this cohesion that solidified Roman and Greek military power and allowed them to suppress the more egalitarian tribal communities of Classical Antiquity.
In short, land ownership is a concept that empowers a small group of people at the expense of many others for no reason. The concept of owning land doesn't even occur to all cultures, and under an egalitarian world perspective, why should it? Owning land brings with it the benefit of dictating what can and cannot be done with it, and who can and cannot use it, which are pointless distinctions when resources are used for human need rather than individual profit.
When the alternative is poverty and homelessness, there don't need to be laws. It's still a closed economic circle.
In a truly and literally post-scarcity society, labour is almost entirely obsolete. However, while fiscal capital might be obsoleted under a social or communist state, other kinds of capital can be used to dictate where one's privileges lie. No-one has this entirely worked out, because no-one promises a utopia or all of the solutions. But what we can do is work towards a society with fewer pointless imbalances. It might be that everyone's holidays to Egypt are granted after a certain amount of working time, so your measurement of labour becomes the capital that earns you privilege. And it may not necessarily be that much labour, either; with capitalistic competition eliminated, less resources need to be spent on placing a large variety of competing products out there. Instead, wasteful industries can be converted into industries for human need, freeing up lots of industrial power for other purposes.
Consider it this way:
Let's say we have a product. Toasters. Corporations A and B both make toasters, but the abstract value of toasters required by the populations they support is 5. Each corporation individually makes a value of 6 toasters, however, meaning that there is a value of 12 toasters on the market for a population requirement of 5, ultimately producing 7 toasters in waste. That's however many toasters wasting steel, wiring and plastic for a purpose most people don't care about that much. This situation exists because of capitalist competition; both corporations place toasters on the market, and not necessarily to sell that many, but to compete with the other corporation. And every sale the other corporation doesn't get reduces their standing in the capitalist metagame. This essentially means that practical resources are being wasted on abstract business games, which is pretty heinous in a world where a significant portion of the human population is undernourished, undereducated, unhoused, unmedicated or any combination of those.
^^Well, here's the thing: freedom as defined as the possibility of exercising your whims can never not exist. Anyone, anywhere, could just randomly decide to go on a killing spree at any time for no reason. But they don't, because they know how what consequences that will have.
Now, if you'd claim that freedom doesn't count unless there are no consequences for actions, then the notion of freedom is simply not something that exists in this universe or any other universe with causality, so I don't think there's much use in that definition.
But I'm fairly certain that isn't what people generally mean when they say "freedom." Or at least, I hope not.
Alex, I'm pretty sure you noticed planned economy didn't really work in the end.
Are you familiar with fuzzy sets?
^^ That's not an excuse for the ridiculous wastefulness of our society, though. Certainly, it's impossible to provide, precisely, for the specific needs of people without waste. Some degree of excess is preferable to a lack. But it's one thing to accept that and another to indulge in our current extreme, wherein millions or billions of people suffer each day because corporations spend large amounts of resources on products that aren't designed to even be sold and used, but to compete.
When this attitude meets territories that are less bound by law or less heavily policed, the abuses become even worse. Sweatshops are the obvious example, and we all know how many big-name clothing brands have employed those outside the sensory range of conventional law enforcement. But then you get things like MMO gold-farming criminal enterprises, where people are forced to play MMOs in order to produce a high yield of a virtual product, which is then sold to people with real money to spare. China has a big problem with this at the moment, for instance.
But I think the biggest point in my favour is one simple scientific principle: something cannot be said to work, or to not work, until it has been thoroughly and repeatedly tested. Alternative economic structures have not been thoroughly tested in a practical sense because alien powers continue to interrupt them. Lenin's Soviet Russia, while being far from perfect, was making good on its promises of socialist society until Stalin staged a coup and used propaganda to flat out lie and insist that he was still operating under socialist principle. This coup, along with US Cold War propaganda and China's false claim to communist society, has created a massive social and economic bias against alternative styles of economy that persists to the current day.
Ah yes, the benign philosopher Lenin, and Evil Chancellor Stalin. Who overturned Lenin's work by... uh... re-collectivising the, uh, private enterprise (yuck!) allowed back by Lenin's New Economic Policy? Naaah. Move along, comrade, surely you don't buy this imperialist propaganda... By the way, this ditch on Kolyma ain't gonna dig itself...
...I'm out, don't feel able to carry on.
OP's rant would be bad writing even for a videogame villain. Back to the drawing board.
Have it your way. For future reference, though, I advise against speculating on another's arguments or generally being sarcastic or snarky. I've done my best to be open, sincere and honest in this discussion and largely I observe the same of others in this community. It's one of the things I like best about this place. There's a time and place for shenanigans, but a debate like this isn't it, and you often fall into debating strategies that are counter-productive towards discussion.
It would be exceedingly dishonest of me to threaten mod action on my own behalf, me being a moderator here and everything, but I generally don't like to see anyone using those kinds of tactics against anyone else's arguments. I suppose that grants you permission to get snarky and sarcastic with me in a srs bsnss discussion context to a certain extent, but when someone else tries to engage in discussion with you, I don't want to see you -- or anyone -- disparage another's points through means like you used in the last post.
I don't mean to come off as aggressive here, mind. I like a good deal of your posts and I'm happy to have you as a member of the community. But in this particular kind of context, I'm against anyone punching below the belt, such as it is. For clarity's sake, all your posts until your last one were fine.
There is a difference between relative freedom and absolute freedom. You will never have the latter unless you were invincible, like jumping off a cliff and expecting to live.
Most of what Alex says is true, I gotta give him kudos for that.
Anyway, OP, you seem to forget that order exists outside of state structures and fall into the classic Hobbesian fallacy of equating a lack of state and formal laws with "war of all against all". That is untrue. Humans are social beings, with a natural instinct for cooperation and building communities. Compassion and altruism have evolved from natural mechanism for the preservation of a group - they have been there since the first humans, and are visible even in the behaviour of animals. There is order without the state, and there are unwrriten laws which exist in the minds of every human being.
You keep talking about civilization. Yes, civilization has brought us many benefits in the quality of life, but at a huge cost. Primitive societies were perfectly egalitarian and democratic, and it's interesting to note that it was extremely rare for people in them to misbehave or commit "criminal" acts. With civilizational and technological advancements, breaking that egalitarianism was needed for purely pragmatical reasons, because somebody or something always has to carry the weight of progress. Thus, various oppressive and unegalitarian structures like the state, slavery, patriarchy, nuclear family, economic inequality etc. sprung up. There was a fairly constant trend in the strengthening of those structures until the Enlightenment. Since then, those structures have slowly been eroding, and I believe that the ultimate goal is returning society to its primitive state while preserving the benefits of civilization. Think of it as a cycle where you keep going down, only to end up going up and returning to the point you started at.
Yesquote
My puny immature baby brain can't handle this thread.
You can just read this, and summarize the rest of the thread with capitalismwankery.jpg and socialismwankery.jpg if you'd like.
Nova, saving the day once again.
I simply have to spout some leftist wankery now and then, and I haven't done it in a really long time. This thread was the perfect opportunity. :P
Besides, shouldn't
be .txt?
.txt would imply that one could read it if they were sufficiently motivated, rather than just staring at it in a vague attempt to decipher what it means.
capitalismwankery.png thank you.
I like my wankery high-quality.