Saturday, January 27, 2018

The Failure To Acknowledge There Are Two "Freedoms" One Great The Other Disastrous Is Dangerous Eventually Fatal

I don't think we can safely talk about "freedom" without being more careful about what we mean.  I think there is an inescapable distinction to be made between "freedom" as a libertarian conception, essentially anyone who can act like a self-centered, willful brat with impunity doing that and the kind of freedom which produces a moral, egalitarian democratic political system.

It's the Trumpian conception of freedom, liberty without reciprocal equality (when they inevitably don't want that) without any moral obligation to respect rights, or even rational responsibility that is dangerous.  That is the "freedom" claimed by a large chunk of internet proponents of "freedom,"  for themselves, that is, until the same species of "freedom" exercised by someone else impinges on or harms them, then they can be most eloquent in their claims that they are a victim of an "unfairness" that they were quite willing to inflict on other people when they liked the results.

Then there is freedom as a responsible adult would consider as a realistic and reasonable goal, including moral obligations, a moral obligation to act in accord with egalitarian moral stands, in accord with the truth, within limits of harm to other people and animals and the biosphere. 

Anyone who would die for the first kind of "freedom" is either not thinking very clearly or they've foolishly wasted their life, anyone who died for the second one is a saint.

I'm pretty sure that in today's degraded intellectual climate (the flower of " scientific-enlightenment rationality"don'tchano?) that it will be claimed that there is no scientific means of determining the necessary distinctions between those categories a means of making judgements in line with those two most obviously different conceptions of freedom.  But if you want to do an experiment, try living with a bunch of jerks who act in accord with the Trumpian style of "freedom" or a bunch of people who act in mutual respect of moral obligations on an equal basis, the truth being better than lies and excuses to not be able to discern that, and the rest of what distinguishes the later, dare I say democratic conception of freedom and tell me which ones you prefer?  I doubt even the superannuated brats who want the first for themselves would choose, voluntarily, to live with their own kind and I don't think that any lame-brained assertion of "fairness" should lead us to put with them either. 

Politically, legally, the price of  you being treated with respect will have to be treating other people with respect, which should always be part of the political covenant that is the basis of democracy.  The best prospect of a government which we can all live with would have to make that kind of stipulation.  There should be no room for lawyers and judges who claim that people have a right to lie, to be assholes to others , to be selfish assholes on any scale because to restrict their assholishness is some kind of violation of "freedom" or the Bill of Rights.   They are, essentially, the council of gangsters and the gangster governance of oligarchy and fascism.  There is no right to lie, there is no right to privilege, there is no right to make the lives of others intolerably miserable.  It is the legacy of slaveholding that asserts that in our legal system.   If the United States is to ever recover and secure egalitarian democracy, the rule of just law, etc. it will have to reject that definition of "freedom" and cleanse out legal culture of its vestiges. 

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