Quote:
Originally Posted by Camerama  Surviving death is not achieving life and absolute freedom is not avoiding censure. You say "there is no pinnacle of freedom, if you have it you have it," and I can agree with that. The inconsistency lies in whether or not you believe we have achieved freedom. I, for one, do not. Freedom is an ideal to strive for, a luxury that under present societal circumstances is not feasible. However, it is an ideal worth achieving, and anything worth achieving is worth the effort. The notion of achievement presupposes the worth of that being achieved, rationally thinking according to the premise of that which is beneficial(i.e towards a greater good) is worth achievement. The purpose of the government should be an incremental progression towards true independence and freedom. What it is, is stagnating the decay of the American dream laid down by our forefathers. Our present statist rule cannot possible satisfy the conflict of interests between millions of Americans. Our govt. is a variant of collectivism, simply collectivism of majority. It subordinates the individual to the majority. It holds the "collective-society, community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.-is the unit of reality and the standard of value.[In this case, the majority.] The individual has reality only as part of the group, and only insofar as he serves it." (Ayn Rand) Every time the govt. appeases one minority, it is at the expense of another. What it refuses to recognize is that the most basic, indivisible minority is the individual. It is this minority that has been neglected throughout history. In a truly free society the individual is the only standard of value. In a truly free society, man's value is not the claim of another man, group, or organization. His only duty is to himself and his only value is his own self worth. Any charity he provides for his fellow man is of his own rational, and volitional choice. NOT CONSCRIPT FORCE. That is rule by the point of a bayonet, and that is the essence of taxation. |
Freedom is one of those thing people talk about because the must have enough of it, and they usually do, and more often do not use their freedom... Even most slaves have had some degree of freedom, and each has some democracy because they choose life which means slavery, and some people have not, but accepted death in preference to slavery... It is by consent that people are made slaves, and by consent that they reduce their freedom and democracy to the point that if they do not die, then the society dies around them...We are not free when measured by any abstract ideal of freedom, but we often have enough, and more than we actually use...We are inhibited in our use of freedom, and it is cultural because we have learned to live by law and cannot recognize when law is not delivering justice, when as a form it has been turned against us because we do not have the power through our institutions to demand justice... We see that some people claim they are conservative... Since all people are conservative, and want to hold on to the good we know while advancing toward better, no one can claim to being more conservative...Those who define themselves by their conservatism when it is hardly a virtue are avoiding their true label, and that is a reactionary, as that is justly considered a vice...The victory of the slavers, the rich, and the reactionaries is poison for society...To have wealth they spread poverty...To have power they spread impotence...To have their defense they leave us vulnerable...To have knowledge they propogate ignorance, and instead of asking how free we can safely be, we are asking how much freedom can we live without...
An ideal, even the ideal of freedom is what we know it by, and recognize what we have, or want...We never have the ideal of anything, but we think with ideal...Our reality which we recognize by the ideal is always a practical value... We do not need the ideal of anything, and that is always a moral value anyway, and not a reality... But; we think of ideals because we find the values they represent as essential to life...People can have so much freedom that it is destructive to society and so little freedom that it is injurious to them... What everyone need of the qualities we find essential is a mean, which is enough...If we look at the process leading up to the execution of an individual it is one removing a person from their rights step by step until they can be legally killed... Anyone who can be killed with impunity has not enough rights...
That randroid stuff does not cut it with me...For the individual to exist society must exist, and for society to continue individuals must be social since procreation is not simply a sexual act between dieocious individuals, but is also a social act...Humanity has had social intitutions for thousands of years before it ever arrived at a definition of a legal individual...This does not mean there were not unique individuals in all ages in spades... Rather, as always, people were individuals in the society which defended them and protected their rights to be themselves...Even today we see unrelated people joining together in unnatural communities because that is the only way they can effectively defend their rights...That is the purpose of parties, and clubs, and communities, like the black community, or the hispanic community, or the gay community... Democracy as the best defense of rights is the way a people gives voice to their needs, as a group...Look at the rights of Europe... These were often community rights defended by communities that were inalienable by individuals and it is out of these rights that individual rights were conceived... It is because rights were possessed by nations that individuals had rights... Natural law grew out of the Roman law of Nations, it being for all practical purposes the same word as...
When the commons were closed, rights and capital that had been accumulated over hundreds of years, and given by way of inheritence from one generation to the next because they could not be alienated were either stolen flat out, or put in the hands of financial distressed individuals to be sold off from under the next generation... That is where poverty first became an issue for western society because sheep were allowed to drive the Irish and Scotts from their lands, and whole generations of people fed their lives to the industrial revolution to keep meat on bones...The individual conception of rights has not protected the individual, but has put the greatest power in the hands of those who would make a legal individual out of many people, with the power of many, and an eternal life... That legal individual is a corporation which has survived from Roman days, and no true individual can stand againt it...So people organize for the defense of their rights, and that is the purpose of government, to hold rights inalienable and heritable, and to defend together what no individual can defend alone...
11-26-2009, 05:24 PM
Similar Threads 
