I read somewhere how we basically have no freedoms at all, going all the way to our births, being born without our consent and all that follows.
Does that mean that death is the only true freedom then?
——————
Now thinking about I don’t even know what freedom even means in regards to both life and death.
However there is a strange and beautiful clarity when you realise that the road ahead is much shorter when you’re older than longer when you’re were young.
It’s like a fog lifting and the first time you see the world as it is actually is, not as you were taught to see it.
You see that capitalism with profit seeking algorithms, are continuing to produce a system that is becoming more and more politically bankrupt, leading to the Esptine files.
These algorithms are destroying what’s left of freedom, making decisions in every part of one’s life, spreading selfishness at the core of their functions.
Even death these days feels forced and doesn’t feel like freedom cause as soon as we’re dead it’s not like we exist and be free to do whatever cause we’re dead.
Nature treats death with indifference.
To see death as natural, banal, and even unremarkable is not to dismiss its emotional impact — but to restore it to its place within life, not above it.
It is not death that defines life, but how we live knowing it ends. The noise around death is ours, not nature’s.
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Both feel like a prison we can’t escape.
Because we’re slaves to our needs.
We’re slaves moreover to the means that get us the things we need to survive, and to the people who hold them.
I think the only freedom we really get is the ability to free our minds and be able to observe what happens to us and around us with some level of detachment.
Unfortunately that’s a double edged sword as the more you understand, the more you realize how utterly blind, deluded and helpless humanity is as a whole.
What does it mean to survive — and at what cost?
Money limits our freedom of movement.
In a world where medical technology can prolong life indefinitely and where suffering often outlasts hope, the simple act of staying alive has become ethically complex and extremely expensive.
So the capacity to choose one’s attitude — the last of the human freedoms.
From an evolutionary perspective, survival is not a moral choice, but a program.
However we’re standing on the verge of a world without freedom, which like life is very fragile, fickle and in need of protection.
There were always choices to make.
“ Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.” (Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 86-7).
Clearly this is freedom to give, which is freedom to be human in the higher sense of the word.
Thus, you are free when you are a subject, not an object, when you are self-determining, not determined. You are not attached, coerced or dependent on anyone or anything else. You are your “very self.”
On the other hand, we do also need our instincts, including our instinct for survival.
Instincts serve a good purpose providing they serve us and we don’t serve them.
There is a difference between mindless following and mindful consideration of need. In the first case you give up control. In the second your common sense is clearly in charge.
The freedom to choose your own way has to emerge from an inner freedom to be who you are not an algorithmic freedom.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
“Who are you?” What are you? Where do you come from? Are you contagious or not?
Freedom in modern society has come to become a loaded term.
The current covid pandemic is showing us that we are living in an infinitely
connected world and most of us are using biometric technologies every day.
However, the whole concept of authority when it comes to freedom seems to
be in conflict with the principles of self-determination.
As a result, Biometric technology is now going beyond human ability and will be used for many more physical and behavioral characteristics to identify them.
The implementation of digital IDs/Passport systems carries far-reaching implications for individuals with access to services and livelihoods so the question of what is meant by freedom is now in the hands of Artificial Intelligence.
Mostly we don’t notice these limitations because we’ve been programmed to not even think about being released from them.
It turns out that our freedom to make even the simplest of choices may not just be more limited than we think—it may not exist at all.
You could say so what! we are already tracked.
I have no prejudice to those that are, but no pass should assume everyone is because society takes that as one meaning only.
The part of our minds we identify as “us”—is now powerfully influenced by technology.
It really is an indignity to have to carry a document that explains the difficulties one might have. Proving one’s identity is one thing knowing where you are in another sort of measurement without the same level of reliability.
The difficult truth is that “we” aren’t free even from our unconscious selves.
The argument is that Biometrics is the most suitable means of identifying and authenticating individuals in a reliable and fast way through unique biological characteristics. But the question is.
Should people be informed about the use of these technologies as a biometric template is a representation of an individual’s unique traits?
As biometric characteristics are immutable, when a biometric template is stolen, that characteristic is compromised for good.
Biometric templates cannot be updated or renewed.
Biometric identification is a computer-controlled analysis that identifies an individual by measuring some biological traits scanned by sensors and matching them with the data stored in a database.
So should we have the power to apply for the Canceling of Biometric ID that allows us to revoke a compromised biometric template as if it was a stolen password?
__________________
Biometric identification schemes and “immunity passports” are already being rolled out.
Programs for tracking tracing and surveilling the entire population are already being beta-tested and the digital payment infrastructure; the system of financial exclusion that will allow governments to turn off our access to the economy at will is being put into place.
This is not about the world that we are living in but about the one that we are being thrust into.
Biometrics perceives human beings as subjects of biometric data collection, which offends human dignity. Not only dehumanizes the person, but also infringes bodily integrity, leading to human indignity.
Biometrics severely infringes privacy.
It is way more complicated than tracking your online activity or placing cookies on your phone or computer. Business organizations have already been collecting biometric data of their users and the fate of this data remains uncertain.
Biometrics is a technology-based identification and authentication approach, which may require several other systems to work together to stay operational. Despite all technological advancements, downtimes and system failures are still a reality.
If you have made it this far, it is incumbent on you to help inoculate those around you against the corrupt ideology of morphological identifiersbefore our ability to speak out against this agenda is taken away for good.
Morphological identifiers are another thing altogether and time is not on our side.
Why?
Because not everyone in the target population can be fit for biometric identification, which will lead to discrimination and exclusion.
Morphological identifiers will be used to find out subconscious emotional structures behind everyday human experience and behavior.
95% of all purchase decisions are made subconsciously deep down in customers’ minds.
——————–
Both forms of ID will result in discrimination on a global scale.
What would you do if being in a continuously authenticated state is a necessity?
The day is not far when your car and even the refrigerator will be able to identify you as you hold the handle to open the door.
To quote Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor from his book The Happiness.
Hypothesis—needn’t only be made to do “our” bidding against its will, but that we can also train it to want what we want. Perhaps then the greatest potential for freedom lies in creating as much unity between our conscious and unconscious selves as possible.
So, you may be asking yourself at this point, “well if I can’t choose for myself how to live my life, how am I free?”
In answering remember that freedom and opportunity are not the same.
We cannot properly assess the quality of our freedom until we have established whether and to what extent the choices we make are based on adequate understanding.
Freedom is something we say we want, but what sort of freedom would be worth wanting?
Take freedom of movement for instance.
With a growing disregard for individual and collective abilities to properly understand those choices and their broader context by allowing the introduction of Biometric identification schemes we are in fact allowing the erosion of whats is left of Freedom.
Liberty means being free to make your own choices about your own life, that what you do with your body and your property ought to be up to you. Other people must not forcibly interfere with your liberty, and you must not forcibly interfere with theirs.
Across the years of wars around the world, no single issue unites people more than freedom and no other issue is more important but it remains hard to see just what freedom a human being is supposed to possess.
No matter. There is one certainty and that is a world without freedom is too cruel to live in. Of course, freedoms aren’t absolute.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
People think they’re free, but in reality, they don’t even understand freedom.
To live a free life, you must first be free.
Rousseau notes that the real mystery of freedom is how we can be in chains and still regard ourselves as free (Rousseau: 181).
And Kant’s argument provides us with a formidable justification for assuming that freedom is the necessary and indispensable condition of human existence given that man has the capacity to act upon the commands of reason: that is the categorical imperative.
If the will is subject to extraneous circumstances or influences it ceases to express itself freely in our actions. In this scheme of things, freedom can only be preserved if the moral laws that individuals endorse and accept as their guidance are such that they can accept them voluntarily (Kant: 57-58).
Just how true in the world of Algorithms, Data collection, Social Media, Search Platforms, Track and Trace, Potential Covid Passports, Smartphones with around-the-clock electronic surveillance to name just a few, remains to be seeing.
In fact, there is no such thing as freedom.
Is there a statement more likely to provoke consternation from people than to submit that there is no such thing as freedom?
I think not.
The modern political theory holds that “freedom” is something available to all but in the technology world and post-pandemic world, there is no such thing as freedom in the absolute sense since everyone views freedom differently.
Can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be?
The dictionary definition of freedom is; The power or right to act, speak or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint and the power to determine action without restraint.
In other words, we have full control over the things that we choose to do.
This is simply not true.
A democratic constitution will not state that each of us is free, what it says is that we have the right to certain freedoms which the constitution is supposed to protect.
We are simply part of a system of rules that gives us certain rights referred to as freedoms.
So what have we got?
Free means that we freely make the choices we make and are thus are morally responsible for our choices. In addition, we may be held legally accountable for the choices we make.
Or does it mean I am stronger than you, so I will retain my freedoms at your expense by the use of force?
There is no such thing as “freedom” because it can’t be defined objectively.
Why?
Because too many people in the world live with the constraints of poverty, poor access to health care and education, and a structural lack of opportunity.
None of us were representation or were participants in the writing of the rules of the social contract of the Internet.
In the face of such a common reality, is it reasonable to speak of free will as a tool to change lives?
At the most, we might be able to argue that in such circumstances a person is constrained but not determined.
We are free to stop eating but we are not free to stop breathing.
————–
The truth is that our rights, beliefs, and actions are determined by our biology, neurology, life context, nature, experiences, and interpretation of our experiences.
In psychological terms, free will means that we understand the history of our determinedness; how we have come to be what we are.
However, the scope of your individual rights has one primary limit: it ends where the rights of another begin.
Apply that universally and you have the basis for all rights.
Instead of using the word “freedom” as an entity all in itself (which does not exist) should we be using rights?
Each culture defines rights differently based on the ethos of the various cultures.
“Rights” are simply arbitrary policies set up by individual societies to meet the needs of the citizens. Different people and different individuals differ on what they believe is a right.
Again, a subjective phrase depending on what is morally right.
It is my belief, and it is a belief shared by many, that these are rights that should be observed, and that the infringement upon these rights of any entity, whether it be government or individual, should be stopped.
So rights are freedoms with the caveat that it’s morally correct to collect Data without our express permission to do so in the first place. A Liberty which is taken for granted.
Take “Liberty” an abstract word that doesn’t have an absolute definition.
The word simply means whatever it is accepted to mean even if one’s man’s desired Liberty is perceived as infringing on another man’s Liberty.
Freedom, use to be the ability to legally do or think anything that does not infringe upon the rights of another human being whether or not the action or thought is popular or under a certain prevailing viewpoint.
Freedom does happen, in the brain but one’s perception of freedom changes when one can not see the freedom one owns. So freedom these days still exists though it may seem as though it is not all that it is cracked up to be.
Not any longer. To access platforms one has to agree with an untransparent Algorithm that runs that platform.
Is this morally wrong?
How do you define “morally wrong” when everyone has a different moral belief?
The problem is that data collection is now the holy grail and the fewer people in a country feel they have been severely limited in their freedom, the less free the country is as a whole.
“Freedom is nothing left to lose”
The current Pandemic has and is highlighting how freedoms that are taken for granted can be reversed.
As long as the masses do what the elite tells them to do, then they are free.
What then is freedom?
The power to live as one wishes. – Marcus Tullius Cicero.
The moment we let go is the moment we find freedom. – Rebekah Stephenson.
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. – Martin Luther King.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom assumes responsibility and most people are afraid of that. – Sigmund Freud.
Freedom is the power to choose our own chains. – Jean Jacques Rousseau.
It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. – Tyler Durden.
Money doesn’t buy you freedom, but freedom cannot be achieved without money either. Money doesn’t work for you, you work for money – you’re a slave for money.
__________________
The role of the internet and social media offered the possibility of retrieving a common space and a way for people to share and connect and to be free.
It was a chance to build an economy that wasn’t based purely on the extraction of resources and capital.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, digital technology is used to double down on industrialism and it has evolved in everything from the spread of terrorist propaganda to the rise of authoritarianism.
At some point, technology ceased to be a tool to help us get what we want and instead became the only thing we actually want.
Technology is everywhere, and we’re all more or less dependent upon it — so how do we escape the pitfalls?
We’re talking about algorithms here. They live with us, even if we don’t see them.
We stopped using technology and it started using us.
We’re all hostage to our technologies, or we’re simply at the mercy of this system.
We’re being steamrolled by our devices, and the result is a kind of emotional slavery turning crucial decisions about people’s lives over to machines to translate the data into action.
We now live in a consumer democracy that restricts human connection and stokes “whatever appetites guarantee the greatest profit.”
Algorithms are behind the digital services that we consult daily. They are modifying the opinion of their users based on their psychological profiles and they are increasingly being extended to all businesses.
Take a platform like Facebook, and Facebook is using data from your past to dump you into a statistical bucket. Once they know what bucket you’re in, they do everything to keep you in that bucket and to make you behave in ways that are more consistent with all the things about that bucket.
The lifeblood of data science is turning what left of our identity into “filtered freedom” “predictive algorithms freedom” “governance algorithm” “risk reports algorithms, Google search algorithms, all effectively destroying human autonomy.
With a growing dependence on automated systems that are taking humans and transparency out of the process?
Where are our digital rights?
How to confront the use of algorithms.
George Orwell once predicted that those who control the information hold the power.
This is more true today than it ever was!
How do you win against a computer that is built to stop you?
How do you stop something that predetermines your fate?
There must be total and full transparency with all algorithms subject to auditable accountability.
I can’t control other people, but I can control my choices.
One of the things we need to make really clear about algorithms — is that they are hand-tailored to a particular decision.
Kant notes that man may come to approve of various rules of social co-operation for a variety of reasons, some of them ethically more obscure than others.
Algorithms are not just doing our thinking for us they are fucking up the world.
AI algorithms are worthless without a dataset to work on.
Because of this, the usefulness of an AI algorithm is intrinsically tied to the availability of high-quality data. In this regard, AI algorithms are fundamentally different from other types of software, whose code is valuable on its own without any additional data.
This is why you see companies like IBM buying Weather Channel’s data operations not because it wanted to know if it’s going to rain, but because climate change is going to be the number-one factor driving global GDP the data will allowing it to do everything from predicting winter energy demand to forecasting crop yields.
Google, Facebook, and others hold similar advantages in their respective areas, possessing vast quantities of consumer and social-media data that can be used to train highly valuable AI tasks, from sentiment analysis for marketing to object-recognition for photos to natural language processing for user interfaces.
For AI tech companies with large treasure troves of data, the sky is the limit, and rest assured it is not to stimulate broad societal benefits but to cash in on your freedoms.
Freedom is to remember your humanity what you do with what’s been done to you.
All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
These days our Freedoms (which so many died for) are being eroded to the point where there is no such thing as Freedom in our Lifetime.In this post I am going to try to express what exactly personal Freedom is these days.
I am not going to exam the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights which has over 30 Articles, or what is left of free speech, or the Black freedom struggle, or woman’s struggle for freedom. Or the idea of free speech which is a view of freedom that is inseparable from the
political arena, flawed in theory and politicised in practice.
⌈ Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, whatever our nationality, place of residence, sex, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, language, or any other status. We are all equally entitled to our human rights without discrimination. These rights are all interrelated, interdependent and indivisible.
Universal human rights are often expressed and guaranteed by law, in the forms of treaties, customary international law, general principles and other sources of international law. International human rights law lays down obligations of Governments to act in certain ways or to refrain from certain acts, in order to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals or groups.⌉
All of which are impossible to implement, and has never been implemented anywhere historically – not even today, in liberal societies.
The freedoms that we once had are now dissolving because of the Internet, and the need for blanket surveillance due to fear mongering politics over terrorists plots ever since 9/11.
Our every move is tracked, we are under surveillance around the clock, our buying habits are logged, our preferences are hacked, and most of us don’t raise an eyebrow.
It is a mistake to think of a search engine as an oracle for anonymous queries they can set off a chain reaction that can have troubling consequences both online and offline. All this is because being online increasingly means being put into categories based on a socioeconomic portrait of you that’s built over time by advertisers and search engines collecting your data—a portrait that data brokers buy and sell, but that you cannot control or even see.
Our background and our relationships are becoming inescapable features of our human existence.
So what is freedom.
In the modern sense freedom is achieved by one’s individual nature, or inner voice. A sovereign self – a monological consciousness that fundamentally excludes the other.
However one can still be imprisoned by an oppressive internal forced liberation from an interior force.
So how can one reconcile two seemingly opposed senses of freedom?
One sense views freedom as bound and situated, while the other sense views freedom as liberation from such bonds.
What is required is a notion of self hood that recognizes and embraces both senses of freedom – to see the self not as an isolated and detached entity from the social world, but one that is deeply enculturated and dialogical while simultaneously liberated.
These are the limits, the boundaries, of what allow us to be free and for things to be meaningful.
So instead of viewing boundaries as something that disables our freedom, we should recognize that boundaries are what might actually enable our freedom.
The received ideas of our present-day institutions are composed of the religious, philosophical, economic, and political status quo.
The goal for each of us is to break free of these ideologies and re describe our world as a whole. This sense of freedom, which I referred to earlier as freedom-within-boundaries, is what ultimately makes possible a freedom-from-oppression.
If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.
As Charles Taylor puts it, this sovereign and self-determining freedom characteristic of the modern individual “demands that I break the hold of all such external impositions, and decide for myself alone.
In this view, individuals could exercise their gifts and powers only by
participating in the common life.
That is to say, our freedom is contingent upon the greater public world.
Modern thought (especially evident in the political philosophy of Rousseau) externalized the source of oppression onto authoritative forces such as society, church, law, and government.
This is no longer true due to the indebtedness of the world.
At the expense of eliminating fundamental characteristics that make us human we are now confronting a world with unlimited new possibilities but having no meaningful boundaries.
Modern Social media come to see others as a part of – Us/Selfies.
Unfortunately this unchecked freedom is leading us to a void in which nothing would be worth doing, nothing would deserve to count for anything.
Life is dialogical by its very nature.
To live means to engage in dialogue, to question, to listen, to answer, to agree, to return to your own position, enriched. We need to identify with others in order to open ourselves up to new ways of being without forgetting where we come from to achieve any freedom.
In the past our background was essential to our identity. These days one’s uniqueness is maintained through continuous exposure to novelty in a consumer culture that thrives on the latest fad.
Is it this quantity of novelties that appears to take precedent over quality of relationships. So where do we turn for redescription of Freedom, to open us up to new and fresh ways of being human?
That can enable us to break free from our own pasts and increase our level of sensitivity and sympathy to those without freedom?
Is it severance from the status quo.
I fear that if you were to ignore you background, and try to break from your own past, “You would be crippled as a person, because you would be repudiating an essential part out of which you evaluate and determine the meanings of things. Our background, often times inarticulate and unformulated, carries the values and traditions that constitute who we are. This background is no longer not just our personal past and memories, but it may also be the lineage, tradition, and culture from which we have emerged.
Instead of dropping our historicity, we should be interested in owning up to the background and tradition that gives significance to our identity.
Meaningful freedom can only be achieved through enculturation.
Therefore, our freedom is bound in a sense, or situated in the environment that has shaped us, because that is likely to be the most meaningful environment to us.
Perhaps it is only in a bounded space that we can move about freely.
Fusion of horizons’ between ourselves and others..we must always have a horizon in order to be able to transpose ourselves into a situation.
Background is what initially provides persons with the possibility for understanding anything at all. Our background, or tacit knowledge of the world, is the horizon out of which things have meaning for us. It gives us our “referential context of significance.” A liberating freedom, which occurs when our world is enlarged not downloaded on to a data base.
Our identity is formed by the web of relationships that surround us. Therefore, it is precisely ourselves, which implies our background, that we must bring into the other’s situation.
The fundamental significance of language and conversation, and its ability to bring us closer to understanding one another is now rapidly diluted by technology.
We are not born precocial and fully hard-wired creatures.
Instead, we are born as incomplete beings, needing enculturation and society for healthy maturation.
Our biological need for one another requires certain physiological signals, that are not possible on the Web. Through facial expressions, infants learn to not only replicate another’s face, but to empathically feel what the face exhibits.
Biologists consider this skill of emotional matching to have been “crucial for escape from predation, foraging, hunting, and mass migrations” before spoken language entered our evolutionary history.
In spite of the modern liberating sense of freedom which may encourage isolation and detachment, we should also note that it can promote a healthy release from oppressive external forces. These forces can manifest in a variety of forms, everything from an abusive relationship to a manipulative religious group.
Emphasis on a socially dependent self can lead to passivity in daily life or submission to totalitarian regimes.
By being sympathetic we are capable of being liberated from ourselves.
On the other hand egocentrism shouldn’t be overcome at the expense of forgetting ourselves. So freedom is one that respects the boundaries of selfhood, instead of annihilating it.
Although we may be transported into the sandals of the Buddha, we still need to come back to our point of departure in order to be enriched.
Because in recognizing the necessity of one’s interpersonal relationships, social and moral commitments, culture, tradition, memories, and of course, biology as constitutive of one’s experience of liberation.
Freedom doesn’t necessarily mean fleeing to a new land. It can also mean discovering the oceanic depth of a single, bounded situation. And this entails having new eyes. Remember, “Life is immense!”
We are free to become authentic only after we accept our boundary, which is our finitude.
Death is the ultimate boundary of human existence, it is only by facing up to this limit that we are capable of becoming truly authentic Free.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where the words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever-widening
thought and action–
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake.
–Guru Rabindranath Tagore
National Poet, Freedom Fighter
WHEN YOU LOOK AROUND THE WORLD CAN ANY OF US HONESTLY SAY WE HAVE WON THE BATTLE FOR LIBERTY ?
It seemed to me that these days the enemies of our collective flourishing are more likely to lie in the troubles of unrestrained corporate and individual appetites and the unlimited pressure to generate immediate profit without regard for human and earthly costs.
Another words the fundamental problem facing us all is Inequality of Education, Health, Wealth, combined with unequal control over assets. These include natural resources such as land, water, minerals and other fruits of nature, as well as produced productive and financial assets.
Things have reached such a pass that incremental measures are not likely to be enough: “trans-formative changes” are required, with the ultimate aim of zero discrimination.
So measures to reduce inequality have to be part of a wider economic and social policy framework to control financial activity and direct it towards socially desired goals. ( These include natural resources such as land, water, minerals and other fruits of nature, as well as produced productive and financial assets.)
Even business leaders in Davos recently identified Inequality as one of the biggest threats to the world.
But what have we got? Sovereignty Wealth Funds buying up the lot.
For hundreds of years now, humans have tended to believe that the best sort of government is one which leaves its citizens maximally ‘free’.
We’ve all come to associate good government directly and complicatedly with the promotion of ‘freedom’: freedom to worship as one pleases, to publish what one wants, to dress as one likes, to love whomever one desires.
In the meantime, those who have opposed ‘freedom’ have been presented in horrifying terms: They have been the wicked priests, the murderous Communists, demented Nazis, and Terrorists.
The painful fact is that the pursuit of what matters to us in the long-term and collectively may at times be in sharp conflict with our short-term and individual pleasures.
Promoting freedom above all other values may now be turning out to be deeply unhelpful to the long-term and collective interests of a nation and the earth as a whole.
It has grown too easy for corrupt and venal organisations to operate under the banner of ‘freedom’ in order to get away with activities that covertly run sharply counter to the public good.
Freedom is evidently not a virtue when it involves the freedom of bankers to offload ruinous financial instruments on an uneducated public, just as censorship – that bogeyman of contemporary politics – is evidently far from a vice when it prevents corporations from pushing alcohol on children or denying affordable housing to the poor.
Freedom is not a baseless word, but it is in general simply too vague, ambiguous and emotive a term to guide policy or to be an ideal around which a nation or people can reasonably cohere.
Instead of being in favor of ever falling prices for consumer goods, government should promote the notion of a just price, a floor for prices reflecting the cost of humane and decent employment and production. To get all of us into the habit of paying the just price: a price that would allow high quality goods attuned to genuine needs to be put together by workers employed at an adequate wage.
Government is the institutionalization of our long-term and collective interests. It is not ultimately responsible just for freedom, but its highest calling is to act as the guardian of long-term collective prosperity of all its citizens.
The governments of the future will have to accept that two idiots cannot remove one genius. They will have to measured and in skillful ways constantly step in to say ‘no’ to certain vested interests, without this in any way meaning that it is systematically anti-capitalist.
So what am I saying here?
Although we bridle at folk memories of police states Governments of the future with greater intelligence and democratic accountability will have to often be interested in restricting freedom.
Freedom = good/restriction = bad, has blinded us to a vital nuance with a grave potential to derail and corrupt public life:
An others words there will have to be a more important and ambitious view of what government is for than merely freedom. We are all threatened by aggressive and uncontrolled commercial interests determined to quash our peace of mind and confuse us about our real needs and we’ve overlooked that there are better and worse kinds of freedom.
The first step in the right direction is to cap Greed. ( See Previous Postings)
In this post I am going to try to express what exactly personal Freedom is these days.
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