Tag: freedom

People may love freedom, but they don’t always love the responsibility that freedom demands

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859) was a French diplomat, political philosopher and historian, best known for his works ‘Democracy in America’ and ‘The Old Regime and the Revolution’.  According to Mani Basharzad, what Tocqueville teaches us was echoed in Sir Roger Scruton, the torchbearer of conservative thought in England in the last century.

Using Tocqueville’s philosophy, Basharzad explains how freedom is lost through the lack of taking personal responsibility.

The Psychology of Freedom

The following is an extract from the article ‘Psychology, Security, and the Subtle Surrender of Freedom’ written by Mani Basharzad and published by The Daily Exonomy.  You can read the full article HERE.

Tocqueville’s special contribution lies in showing us the psychology of freedom. For him, liberty was not only a matter of institutions and individual rights, but also of the deeper attitudes that hold everything together and make freedom work. On this basis, we arrive at one of the most disturbing parts of Tocqueville’s thought: freedom can be lost in democracies through democratic means. It is not only overthrown by revolutions, coups or violent movements; it can disappear in a calm, civil and apparently legitimate way.

The shift of consciousness Tocqueville described is this: people may love freedom, but they do not always love the responsibility that freedom demands. They look for someone else to bear the responsibility that comes with freedom. And what better candidate than government? Do not trouble yourself about the uncertain future; we will decide for you. Do not worry about the consequences of your choices; we will absorb them. We will shield you from danger.All we require is a little more power, a little more of your decision-making capacity. In this world, governments do not seize liberty; people surrender it voluntarily – a ‘Brave New World’ where people love their servitude, a painless concentration camp in which, as Huxley wrote, people “in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.”

This undermines one of liberty’s strongest safeguards: community. As government replaces community, people lose the habit of solving local problems themselves and they begin to surrender their agency, expecting the state to act in their place. Eventually, they reach the condition in which, as Tocqueville wrote, “they can do almost nothing by themselves.” If citizens forget the art of cooperating with one another, of pursuing common goals and solving their own problems, Tocqueville warned that “civilisation itself would be in peril.” Citizens grow weaker, more dependent and less capable. This is not the result of brute force, but of their own choice to substitute state power for individual autonomy, community and responsibility. They give up their freedom and allow others to choose for them, lulled by the illusion that life will be easier.

At its core, the loss of freedom is psychological. It is rooted in the failure to act, the failure to exercise personal autonomy, the failure to participate in community and the constant deferral of responsibility in the hope that someone else will solve our problems. The result, Tocqueville feared, would be “an insupportable tyranny even without wishing to.” A tyranny no one wanted, yet to which everyone contributed, step by step. Freedom is lost in the same manner Hemingway’s banker went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.

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12 Simple Things That You Can Start Doing Right Now To Become More Independent Of The System

The more dependent you are, the less free you are.  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about how our system is designed to beat us down and make us weak and dependent, because when we are weak and dependent we are easier to control.  Most of us don’t even realize why the majority of the population is so sick, exhausted, depressed and confused much of the time.  Our bodies, our minds and our spirits are constantly being poisoned by the system, and those that are in control of the system know exactly what they are doing.  If you do not choose to break free, you could end up under the oppression of their system for your entire life.

Of course for many people inertia seems like the easiest option.  It is just so easy to keep doing what you have always done, and that is especially true once you get older.

But what are you going to do once the system that you have become so dependent upon starts to crumble all around you?

Over the past several years, our world has been getting increasingly unstable.  Major wars have erupted, the cost of living has become very painful, pestilences have been raging all over the globe, and historic natural disasters have been hitting us one after another.

The chaos that we are experiencing now is just going to intensify in the months ahead.

So what will most people do when the system that they depend on for their survival is shaken to the core?

The following are 12 simple things that you can start doing right now to become more independent of the system…

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The Many Roads To Liberty For A More Ethical Society

Most readers of my weekly column already favor a libertarian society, with either a strictly limited government or no government at all. They realize what a disaster the state has been. What are the philosophical foundations of this outlook? There are many possible answers, but in this column, I’m going to discuss three of the most important of these, the way Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe address this issue. I’m not going to take a stand on which is best but just set forward the different views and leave the choice to you.

I’ll begin with Mises, as most readers will find this the easiest to understand. Suppose you want to do something, e.g., go for a drive in the country. Why do you want to do it? There are any number of possible answers to this. We can continue to ask why you want this goal, but we can’t go on forever. Eventually, you will reach a goal which doesn’t aim at achieving anything else. You just want it. Mises calls this “an ultimate value judgment.” According to Mises, there is no way of arguing about such judgments. I can say that what you want won’t get you that value, but then your judgment isn’t ultimate.

This seems to leave us in a quandary. Do we just have people reiterating their ultimate value judgments? Mises has an ingenious answer. Regardless of their ultimate value judgments, almost everybody needs peace and prosperity to achieve them. We can all work for peace and prosperity, and Mises goes on to argue that this is through establishing and sustaining a free market economy in which the government is strictly limited in its functions to the legal system and defense.

The need for a free-market economy to secure peace and prosperity is easy to make. There are only two possible ways of organized a complex economy—capitalism and socialism. No third system is possible. And socialism, Mises’s calculation argument shows leads to complete chaos. Introducing a government intervention into the economy won’t work. It will fail to accomplish its purpose. A minimum wage law, e.g., will cause unemployment. New interventions will try to cure the problems of the first intervention, but these won’t work either. If this process continues, full-scale socialism will soon result.

Rothbard agrees with Mises’s argument, except that he thinks there are some people who don’t value peace and prosperity. They live for the moment and don’t care about whether the long-term consequences of attaining their momentary goals can be sustained. But most people aren’t like this.

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The Supreme Court’s Complicity in Our Loss of Freedom

After the Constitution had been drafted, it was submitted to the states for ratification. It had quite a few opponents, called the Anti-Federalists. They argued that the proposed government would have too much power and would become a danger to the people’s rights. Most of their fire was aimed at Articles I and II, which created the legislative and executive branches, but some Anti-Federalists also expressed fears that the judiciary in Article III could become a menace. Seeking to allay all such fears, the Constitution’s proponents wrote 85 essays known as The Federalist Papers.

In Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton defended the judiciary, calling it “the least dangerous branch” since it would have neither the legislature’s control over spending nor the executive’s power of enforcement. Hamilton argued that judicial review, the ability of a court (in this case the Supreme Court) to invalidate legislation passed by a legislature (in this case Congress) posed no threat to the rights of Americans, but was essential in protecting them against possible encroachments by the political branches.

So how has judicial review worked out?

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Dictatorship in Disguise: Authoritarian Monsters Wreak Havoc on Our Freedoms

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live

We’re living in two worlds.

There’s the world we see (or are made to see) and then there’s the one we sense (and occasionally catch a glimpse of), the latter of which is a far cry from the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors, including the media.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from reality, where economic inequality is growing, real agendas and real power are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak and corporate obfuscation, and “freedom,” such that it is, is meted out in small, legalistic doses by militarized police and federal agents armed to the teeth.

All is not as it seems.

Monsters with human faces walk among us. Many of them work for the U.S. government.

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, which was released in November 1988 and remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.

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