131–140 of 266 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking, I can currently go from NA to Europe today if I wanted to. But that level of technology and orchestration would not be possible in a lawless and barbaric society (at least I don't think so). This possibility offers me a lot of freedom (traveling around the world) and in exchange, I had to follow rules and work. I gave some freedom and got more in exchange. The same thing applies for many other things…
yes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm arguing against the particular definition of freedom given, not against freedom itself.
Freedom is indeed the ability to make your own choices, but you must not understand it in a strictly technical context, more like a social/legal one. It simply isn't viable to physically prevent every action society considers you not free to take, so the restriction of freedom comes in the form of later punishment, it doesn't magically stop being restriction of freedom just because technical possibility is still ther…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently you haven't read anything by Jean-Paul Sartre.
One can read and disagree (that's what makes reading philosophy hard; you want to argue, discuss, counter the narrative, take it into another direction, deny the assumption, put forward another hypothesis or explanation... but the book just sits there, static and smug, plowing ahead with whatever very specific point and perspective auther has already made up their mind on :)
Maybe it's you who has already made up their mind?
Freedom is the degree to which you are able to navigate the power process. The power process is the ability to identify and change something within a system. For example, if there is a vending machine with coke and you want pepsi. Is there a process that you can use to make that happen? If there is, then you have freedom. This of course extends to bigger things than soda. "Sovereign is he who makes the exception"
> For example, if there is a vending machine with coke and you want pepsi. Sometimes, I think that western people are so constrained by some limits in their heads. Like "freedom" is a freedom to choose Pepsi or Cola. I want neither. Or I want tea. Or the drink that is traditional for my culture. But most of the time I communicate with americans, for example, I becoming convinced that freedom for them is more like: "E…
The things you mention people valuing are very counterproductive, and I think that most people in the USA have become aware of that, even if we live in a culture that's full of advertising. I think that in every country, there's an accepted level of surface-level deception that's tolerated publicly but privately criticized. Of course, these days people often publish their private criticisms, so the lines between public and private behavior are blurring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Update: I misspoke. Hitler absolutely accused Jews of treating Christian Germans of being lesser than themselves while arguing that Germans like himself were superior to everyone and everyone else was subhuman. ------- Have you actually read Mein Kampf? Hitler never claimed the Jews were denying his humanity nor had German Jews ever denied the humanity of Christian Jews. Hitler on the other hand did indeed deny the h…
Have YOU ever read Mein Kampf? The central thesis is that Jews view non Jews as sub human servants.
That was his central thesis. The demonization of Jews was a supporting premise because all effective authoritarians need someone to blame for why they're not on top.
I like this point. To others, the statement is not a definition of freedom, but a guide on how to make decisions. If you think of freedom as a point, that needs to be achieved, defended, or maintained, you’ll act in opposition to other forces, and choose angles to defend around the past basis. If instead, freedom is a vector, your goal is positive, to expand it, to open new freedoms, and to ensure that as society mov…
>society moves forward freedom continues to grow
That's a big claim to say we have more freedoms now. We're encumbered by far more laws now than almost any time in history and watched by more authorities than anyone in history who have access to far more systems to know who you are, when you are, etc. Those same authorities also have more power than ever to execute those powers for "justice" and more power than ever to catch you. But hey, at least you have material freedoms, now you can choose Coke or Pepsi and forget about the other freedoms closing in around you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
when authoritarians get into power they can do whatever the hell they want. That's why the point is to stop that happening in the first place. Hitler turned himself into a dictator pretty much immediately after (possibly staging) the Reichstag fire and declaring a state of emergency. The whole point is to stop people like him getting in in the first place, and you don't do that by making calls to genocide viable.
Hitler was elected based on the premise that he would save the German people from destruction, the exact justification you excuse, not simply because he hated Jews.
FWIW Hitler wasn't the example I was thinking of when using that example. He didn't AFAIK explicitly call for genocide but he did dehumanise Jewish people with propaganda.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You do not extend tolerance to those who would deny your humanity. Probably a bad ethos to harbour, one that I imagine quickly rationalizes violent behavior. And I think we're all fortunate that in the US there is no prevailing force denying any specific race of their humanity. Is there scar tissue from the past? Certainly. As Snowden states "freedom is a direction" and we've certainly moved in the right direction…
Imagine you were a Black woman born in late 1865. You were among the first never to have known slavery. You witnessed the first Black folks elected to Congress and even considered it normal. Then Reconstruction ends with a whimper. Burning crosses are showing up everywhere. Thousands flee north as a reign of terror grows. Your voting rights are curtailed then eliminated. When Black folks are elected, they are driven…
lolwut
You can't call something you think is bad, and just make the conclusion its the same thing as something else you think is bad. And just make it self evident.
It's the complete intertwinement of the corporate and political spheres that leads to totalitarian regimes who view their own people as the greatest threat to their continued grasp on power and so institute highly repressive mass surveillance system, mass incarceration of dissidents and so on.
However, there's another aspect to this, in which 'freedom' is not just legal in nature, but economic and physical as well. What does it mean to be 'free' in a company town where the only employers are Amazon and Walmart? What does it mean to be 'free' when energy sources you need for survival are controlled by someone else? The Chinese model seems to be 'we will ensure you have access to food and water and energy and in exchange your total loyalty to the state is required'.
The American model I'm afraid is becoming 'we will ensure you have access to food and water and energy and in exchange your total loyalty to your corporate employer is required.'
No one is ever truly free. Maybe great, great ascetics who are so detached from the world that their freedom has become a prison of their own. When I was young, I felt every bite at my freedom deeply. Having a job, a schedule, responsibilities. Each one was deleterious to my freedom in a way that, as a young man, I was unequipped to handle. I've learned at some point in the last few years that we trade in our freedom…
I love your comment. I have a small question with this part: > What I see today is a contingent of people who don't value their freedom at all. They have no spiritual relationship with their existence as an individual - their identity is predicated on their characteristics and not their innate uniqueness. Is it possible there is some "hierarchy of needs" for freedom and that "characteristic freedom" must be achieved…
I think that our anxiety is normal, it is biological, and it is inevitable. We are not that much more evolved than we were 20,000 years ago, but the things we worried about then are almost trivial now, and the ways in which we managed those anxieties are ineffective against the anxieties of the day. You can't run away from global warming, the surveillance state, or our increasingly rewarding but terrifying relationship with our world.
We need a new spirituality to combat this anxiety - it wont go away on its own. We need mnemonics that placate the animalistic parts of our brain that are appropriate for our times, and we need to be able to identify when our anxieties are being preyed on by others.