For the Fourth of July: on liberty
[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited version of a previous post.]
The Fourth isn’t just about barbecue, although I defer to no one in my regard for barbecue.
It’s about liberty. As the years go by, I appreciate that fact more and more, and sense that our liberty is more and more threatened from within as well as without—and by “within” I mean not just those among us who would destroy it for others, but something in the human heart and mind that means not everyone cares very much about it until they have lost it.
In fact, there’s something in many human hearts and minds that leads some people not to care about liberty even after they’ve lost it, unless they’re the ones in the Gulag.
For whatever reason, I’ve always been very sensitive to liberty, very touchy about it. For example, even when I was quite young, I would pay extra for a health insurance policy that gave me total freedom to choose my doctor. This may seem like a small thing, and at the time I didn’t connect it with any abstract principle such as “liberty.” But I had a horror of being boxed in by a government or a business or an agency telling what I could or could not do and where I could and could not go.
That’s not to say that I was some trailblazing, independent, courageous spirit, cutting an adventurous swath through the world. I lived a pretty ordinary life, I thought. I had a husband and a child. And even later, when I went through my political change, I had no idea where it would lead, either socially (estrangement from quite a few people, mostly mild but sometimes severe) or in terms of what I do with a great deal of my time (reading about politics/history, and writing this blog).
One doesn’t always have any idea where it will lead when you take a step, and then another step, and then another, and pretty soon you’re somewhere you never, never ever, thought you’d be.
When I was young I used to assume that a lot of people, the majority of people, felt the same way I did. Not just about liberty, but about a lot of things. For example, I thought just about everyone loved poetry—what’s not to like? I was in my thirties before I became aware that love of poetry was a relatively rare thing. Another thing I assumed, when managed care started taking over the health insurance world, was that more people would hate it and complain bitterly about it—and, if they could do it, would pay extra to get away from it. But I was surprised when so many people I knew didn’t seem all that offended by it, and even those who could have paid more in order to have choice often decided against it. They couldn’t be bothered, and were happy to save the money.
Then, when I was going through my slow political change between the fall of 2001 (post-9/11) and 2003, I was living a rather isolated life in a place when I hardly knew anyone, newly separated from a husband I’d been with for 30 years. I was also recovering from a very painful arm injury and surgery. So the change experience was a solitary one, and I didn’t start mentioning it to people until after it was pretty much complete some time in 2003.
I had somehow assumed that other people had been going through something similar to my political journey, although perhaps milder. This now seems to me a rather humorous thought, not to mention profoundly naive (you might even call it stupid), but that’s the way it was for me. I was truly shocked to be on the receiving end of a significant amount of hostility from a lot of people when I mentioned my positions on various issues of the day, and this sometimes involved friends and acquaintances I’d known for decades and with whom I’d never even discussed politics before or had a single disagreement of any substance.
Talk about an eye-opener.
Now I have a different way of looking at all of this.
I have come to believe that, although there are many elements that go into the reasons people differ on these issues, the most essential difference is the comparative importance people give to liberty.
Since this is the Fourth of July, a holiday on which we celebrate the birth of our nation that was (as Lincoln said) “conceived in liberty,” I though I’d re-publish a slightly-edited version of an essay on liberty that I first wrote in January of 2014:
Commenter “DNW” has a question:
How in the world could these [liberal and leftist] others not value liberty and voluntary association as the very premises that made human life worth living? But they obviously don’t…
We now have a situation wherein the classic justifying predicate of this polity and our civil association – the preservation and enhancement of personal liberty – has been officially abandoned by one major party and a large portion of the electorate, in favor of a fascist scheme of state enforced social solidarity and life-energy redistribution.
I can’t speak for all liberals, “progressives,” or leftists. Nor do they even speak for each other, because there’s a great deal of variety among them in how far they want to go to stifle liberty, and how much they value liberty.
In my own family of origin, for example, there was quite a variety of points of view on that score, especially if you included distant relatives. My own father and mother were garden-variety liberals (“liberals” as defined back then, which was nowhere near as leftist as now). But the very-extended family included leftists various and sundry, including those who were Soviet-philes and even a few later on who were Maoists.
Talk about fun! Family gatherings involving this larger group (which occurred quite infrequently) usually featured—after a few hours of conviviality—a degeneration into shouting matches over politics. I wish now I had paid more attention to the details of the content. But even as a child I heard enough to be both vaguely entertained by these arguments and repelled by them. The latter emotion won out, in part because of the arguments’ repetitive nature (nobody ever convinced anyone of anything) and in part because what the leftist branch was saying seemed so dogmatic, unreasonable, and manifestly wrong to me.
Those of you who lump together leftists and liberals may be surprised to hear that the arguments between the two wings of my family were so bitter (there were one or two conservatives, too, who had married in). But the liberals and the leftists were at loggerheads, the liberals believing in liberty, capitalism, and that the USSR was a totalitarian slagheap of a police state up to no good in the world, and the leftists believing that the true liberty (or goodness, anyway) lay in defeating capitalism, and that the Soviets were the greatest thing since sliced bread.
That was in the 50s and 60s, of course, and a little bit in the 70s as well. The mainstream of the Democratic Party, which my parents then represented, has moved to the left over the ensuing years. Some of the liberals I know have moved to the left with it, but some have not. And in the last couple of years, as the assaults on liberty have cascaded, I have noticed that the liberals I know seem to divide naturally into two camps: those who love liberty and to whom it is important, and those who do not and to whom it is not.
I don’t know the relative size of the two groups, because I don’t seek out political discussions with my friends and family; I don’t want get-togethers to degenerate into the useless, repetitive, unproductive arguments I witnessed in my youth—which they easily could, with me now as the sole conservative. But I know that those two groups exist, and I think that what differentiates them are (a) the person’s need to control others and/or society; and (b) the degree to which the person thinks he/she can do so effectively and get the desired results.
Among most of my friends their motives are “good”—that is, they want people to be happier, healthier, and in general just better. Some leftists I know have the same motivations (I would add that most of the people who think they are doing good are also motivated by the need to feel that they are good people for wanting that). But many leftists—we’re talking about quite a few of the leaders of the movement, and certainly people such as Stalin—have a different motivation: they are motivated almost purely by the desire for power and control.
There is an unholy alliance between the two groups. The first is the much-larger pack of would-be do-gooders who believe that liberalism is the way to go about it, whose minds are formed by a combination of their families growing up, present-day peers, the MSM, eduction, politicians, literature, the entertainment business, and in some cases their “progressive” churches and synagogues. The second is the smaller (although not small) and extremely influential group of leftist activists, some proudly out as unrepentant “progressives,” and some just quietly going about their business, some motivated by the desire for power/control plus the idea that they’re doing “good,” and the rest just wanting the power/control part.
Back when Mayor Bloomberg of New York was heavily engaged in banning Big Gulps, I had some discussions with a couple of liberal friends about it. Some were offended by what Bloomberg had done, although others were in favor. That was one of the strongest demonstrations I’ve seen of what I have come to consider a very important and somewhat invisible dividing line between those liberals who love and value liberty and those who do not. You might call them the non-statists (or perhaps the less-statists) and the statists. Don’t forget, too, that there are statists on the right, too, although in my experience there are far far fewer.
But it was the Sarah Conly book that really crystallized things for me. Remember Conly, author of Against Autonomy? I can think of no better demonstration of the statist impulse plus the supposedly do-goody one combining to create a vile synergy. And who better to explain it all but Ms. Conly herself:
I argue that autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated – that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are. We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others – and in particular, of government regulation – to keep us from going wrong.
If you want to know how a person can justify such tyranny to themselves, that’s how. How they can be so stupid as to believe it a good idea (assuming that Conly does believe it rather than merely mouthing it in order to get a lot of publicity and maybe even power one day) is another, more mysterious question. It’s a question I have yet to answer to my satisfaction, actually, but let’s just say that I’m beginning to think the desire for liberty versus the desire to control others might just be something innate.
The sad thing is that even those liberals who love liberty are for the most part voting for people dedicated to ending it.
The desire to control others has clearly paranoid roots, and humans are very susceptible to paranoia. Free will of any other person inevitably is perceived as imminent and clear danger for himself by a paranoid person, and there are good reasons for such perception. That why they seek for some omnipotent protector, and a tyrannical state or dictator personally is a good candidate for such role. Personal safety always trumps desire for liberty in such people, and they fail to understand what a danger to themselves any tyranny is.
Those liberals that love liberty I believe haven’t thought out their position. How do you support Big Government and believe in liberty?
The statist I believe just want to control others. Ironically these are people who often can’t run their own lives
We are so terrible that people are storming our borders to get in rather than out of the USA.
Those who hate this country and promised to leave if Trump were elected have not done so, and not because they were prevented by force from doing so.
Anybody who does not like the holding facilities at the southern border can simply request to be allowed to return to Mexico, but have not done so.
Strange times.
Happy Fourth of July — may our flag always fly over the land of the brave and the home of the brave.
Everybody loves to be free, but not everybody wants his neighbor to be free, too. For many people liberty is just a value among other values, so they open for some trade-off in this respect. For those who, indeed, BELIEVE in liberty, it is sacred, not a value, but a super-value. The whole meaning of American experiment was that it took liberty as a centerpiece of a political project, so all other features of a polity were subservient to this ultimate goal. This, and only this, was a foundation of American exceptionism, a radical outgrowth of Protestantism.
We were overseas, in the third world, from 2005-2009, and my husband was overseas all around the world in the years before that. He used to tell people, in explaining the 9/11 reaction, that we Americans cherish our freedom, and when that freedom is threatened, we respond. I’m not so sure that is true any more for a large swath of our population.
A thought provoking post. Over the many years I’ve been alive, I have seen many people make bad choices/decisions that resulted in harming themselves financially, health wise, and/or morally. To some people such tendencies among people is a motivation for controlling them so they don’t go astray. Certainly, most of us would like to know how to prevent the prodigal son/daughter/close relative from making bad choices/decisions because we may be asked to pick up the pieces.
Families are one thing. What about strangers? When I see the homeless in Seattle, I get angry because so many of them are there as a result of choosing drugs and alcohol over sobriety. It appears they would be better off if society took control of their lives and got them clean. But my libertarian instincts can’t fully accept the idea although I would probably support city efforts to do it. Interestingly, the progs of Seattle would never do such a thing. That kid of control is not their thing.
Over the years I have belonged to several Home Owners Associations and it has been my observation that a small percentage of the HOA will be eager to get into positions of power so they can dictate to others how to maintain their yards, what plants they can plant, what color their homes must be, and regulations for how the HOA facilities will be used. I have never been happy in places with HOAs because I feel like there are “commissars” telling me how to live. Yet, they are so ubiquitous in neighborhoods today, they are hard to avoid.
The tendency to want control others exists in a large segment of the population. They never seem to stop to think that maybe they don’t know best. The certainty that they have THE WISDOM from on high seems clear as we witness the pronouncements of our betters such as AOC. She of the certainty the Earth will end in 12 years because of AGW.
Liberty is always in danger from those who don’t value it or those who want liberty for me but not for thou. And, unfortunately, it has been the lot of most humans to not be able to enjoy its fruits. It will always be a struggle to have liberty – human nature being what it is.
Anyway, Happy Fourth of July to us all. Proud to be an American.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/daqwGRdRIsk?feature=player_detailpage
Ms. Conly, like others with her ruling class obsessions, will never be found to premise control of “us” in their own limitations. You will not read:
… the freedom to act in accordance with MY own decisions, is overrated
… that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that I am much more rational than I actually am …
… that I need the help of others and in particular, of government regulation to keep ME from going wrong.
As JJ said, a thought provoking post. JJ’s personal observataions were also interesting, as were those of g”ruqt.
In this country, it was once thought that the average person would have the good sense and discipline to learn from personal mistakes. Or as JJ observed, avoid making them thanks to the guidance of family or trusted mentors; some who could use personal example to illustrate.
To expand the Ruqt theme a bit. I am sure that Ms Conley is an intelligent person, but her statement is fallacious for the same reason the infects all Statists ideas. Namely, that the individuals who collectively make up government are wiser than the populace as a whole; or that they care more for your individual welfare than you do. I also agree with g that her ilk always seem to separate themselves, at least in their own minds, from the doddering masses.
We are headed for a tipping point as the deep state seeks one ‘ring’ to rule them all and in swamp of DC bind them. The elite thoroughly despise the deplorables who refuse to grovel before them. They don’t just hate Trump, they hate us.
It is Independence Day if we can keep it.
The left is wrong because they believe people are perfectible if they just supply the “correct” incentives. This quest always seems to attract the very people who should never be given power. The problem is people are not perfectible nor are they interchangeably equal. Everyone is different with varying talents, ambitions and morals. That goal of Utopia must of necessity end in coercion and if carried to its logical conclusion the gulag. Libertarians are also wrong because they believe people are already perfect but there are all too many people who are more than happy to pursue their interests at the expense of others. The great mistake the founders made was to create a system where politics can become a career. Almost everyone who wants the job should not be allowed to have it.
Neo: love your blog, love your take on things. This piece, offering a very personal perspective, is also a kind of universal statement. People who allow themselves to be ruled by others are not fully people. I won’t get into the deadly stasis and inefficiency of a regime where one must think for others and direct their every act; nor the cruelty (intended or collateral) that comes from such an arrangement. I will simply applaud your journey and thank you for all you do.
Amazing article.
“When I was young I used to assume that a lot of people, the majority of people, felt the same way I did.” — Neo
I can’t add anything concise and useful to this except to say that it is a viewpoint that is common, important in its impact, and as Neo said, largely wrong.
About half way through I wondered if having an appreciation of objectivity and trying to sift and search for an accurate understanding of reality, isn’t also an important quality that tends to delineate and separate people and their ideologies.
Then Neo has that telling quote from Ms. Conly. Rationality and objectivity aren’t the same thing, but are a little similar. So she claims that people generally aren’t particularly rational. I suspect she’d claim that objectivity is an impossibility. Perfect objectivity is an impossibility, but one can be more objective if ones tries.
I like the line,
“We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends.”
It’s a perfectly reasonable and well stated line, but is it just possible that she is thinking, “… choosing effective means to the republic’s ends.”? The problem isn’t that Jane isn’t good at choosing effective means to Jane’s desired ends. (I’m relatively certain that Conly couldn’t care less if something bad happens to Jane.) It’s that Conly often doesn’t approve of Jane’s desired ends.
_____
Here’s a somewhat relevant excerpt from a classic interview:
Hey Neo,
I used to follow and comment here years ago. I don’t know if you remember but I maintained and still do that we boomers are to blame and need to exit the stage.
James
PS. I still like your stuff
Where am I coming from?
History.
Know History, know what happened in the past as a guide to what works and doesn’t—what has been tried and failed, what has been tried and has succeeded—what you should or shouldn’t do, in the present and in the future.
Things like, who were the great men and women in history—what their ideas and philosophies were, what they said and did.
Thinks like the territory around us—the geography of the world—where we are and where everyone else is; and where the great events of History happened.
Things like what kinds of qualities we should look for in our leaders, who our true friends are, and who are our real enemies.
What ideas to be wary of, and what ideas to embrace.
As that famous Orwell “1984” quote points out, the Left is about controlling what people know of history and rewriting, “transforming” what history they are taught, the “truth” they think they know.
Controlling, as well, what they can think, and discuss, can mull over and say, what words (and, thus, thoughts) are good, and what words (and thoughts) are forbidden; cattle herded and pushed down the cute to the slaughter.
Thus, “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
So, I used to think that, if people were just presented with what actually happened, presented with the truth, things would change.
But, now I’m wondering if—even if presented with the truth—many people will not want it, will reject it—much more comfortable with what they think they know, and unwilling to admit that they were fooled, that their picture of the world was and is not real, that they and it had been manipulated—and refuse to “change.”
Interesting piece here on the lust for power. An excerpt: “Of all the sources that influenced how eighteenth-century Americans viewed power and its dangers, none was more influential than Cato’s Letters, a series of newspaper articles written during the 1720’s by the Englishman John Trenchard and the Scot Thomas Gordon. …Then as now, the average person was not inclined to read weighty philosophical tomes, but the colonials did love their newspapers, and it was through this popular medium that Americans found many spirited passages about the lust for power. Here, from Letter #33, is one example among many”:
“this sometimes involved friends and acquaintances I’d known for decades and with whom I’d never even discussed politics before”
That was the case for me, too. I could have avoided a lot of pain and have built friendships more likely to last if I had carefully and subtly checked my friends’ opinions on all sorts of moral/political questions.
The ego is the natural instincts of humanity and so long as humanity continues to feed that enemy of the divine every day, so will humanity continue to descend into tyranny. Because the ego is the most insidious and hidden tyrant of all. It being on the inside not on the outside.
I think that DeBlasio summed it up quite nicely during the recent Democrat candidate’s Debate, when–after laying out a whole list of extraordinarily expensive current Democrat proposals for giveaways, for “free stuff”–he tried to preempt the criticisms that these programs would be astronomically expensive–costing far more than our country could ever really afford–by saying that “there is plenty of money in the world, it’s just in the wrong hands” i.e. it’s in your hands, not in “our” hands.
Translation=while we say that out of our love of “humanity,” and our “caring,” we want what is best for you, and that we want to help you, our real and ultimate goal is to get control of all that money, all that power, and, thus, to gain control over everything and everyone.
Under the guise of “helping you”–of providing you with all sorts of free stuff–we will make you become dependent on us and, gradually, you will lose more and more power and “agency,” become more and more helpless–in our power–and we will be calling all of the shots.
In fact, there’s something in many human hearts and minds that leads some people not to care about liberty
Absolutely right. Most humans do not care a whit for anything above minimal freedom: not being in prison or brutally enslaved. Most humans care much more about safety and security, including a certain predictability.
An educated human can care very much about freedom. That person knows what it means to be free and what it means to be in bondage – to sin, to another human, to a government or a class.
They can be educated by a liberal (classically) education system, by the examples around them, or by hard life experience.
I pray we can educate more Americans what it means to be free, and what it means to jealously, zealously guard it, and that we can do so without resorting to the second or third forms.
Ymarsakar on July 4, 2019 at 10:43 pm said:
The ego is the natural instincts of humanity
And this is why freedom inevitably leads to slavery and despotism.
Human ego begins to see freedom as license, and knowledge as “being like God,” and begins to plot and scheme to outdo God in His creation – and eventually to remake Man in xies image.
Hubris is the very first sin, and the underpinnings of all others.
“It’s a question I have yet to answer to my satisfaction, actually, but let’s just say that I’m beginning to think the desire for liberty versus the desire to control others might just be something innate.
The sad thing is that even those liberals who love liberty are for the most part voting for people dedicated to ending it.” – Neo
Such a paradox, isn’t it? We call them low-information voters for a reason.
Also, as many people said above, liberty often seems to be something mostly desired for oneself, but not for others, who need to be controlled for their own good. (Cue C. S. Lewis).
The true freedom-lovers desire it for everyone, but have to be willing to put up with all the messy human problems that accompany it.
Excellent comments, everyone — here is a picture to enjoy.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/59/dd/3d/59dd3df987aa5d11b3c4f7b317f59cd1.gif
Gif courtesy of The Conservative Treehouse comments on today’s main post:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/07/04/happy-independence-day-america-a-roughnecks-view-of-independence/
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/07/betsy-ross-and-the-spirit-of-76.php
Third picture is the best.
First time commenting, Neo.
I’m saddened by Beto campaigning in Mexico right before the 4th of July. Does this Perfumed Prince (hat tip to Colonel David Hackworth for the term) not understand the miracle of a Republic in which we live? Our country has created more wealth, personal security and opportunity than the world has ever seen, and he’s pandering to illegals in Mexico and waffling on the Nike decision to nix the Betsy Ross flag sneakers.
He should be celebrating the wonder that is our country. Same goes for all the pathetic Democratic candidates who made fools of themselves on stage at the two debates.
All of them worked the appeal to emotion logical fallacy in spades.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2019/07/04/and-our-flag-was-still-there/#comment-606558
Back before the previous election, someone asked me – ‘what side should I vote for?’. I replied: ‘Pick one of the following two statements, and you cannot choose both: ‘Government should help to solve society’s problems’, or ‘government should stay out of people’s lives’. They picked the first statement. I told them to vote Democrat.
I agree that it is a very fundamental inclination in a person’s makeup that either makes them incline towards freedom or towards control (both the desire to control and/or the willingness to be controlled). It may even be inborn.
Liberty:
I thank my lucky stars that I grew up on a small farm in South Dakota. Even at 4, I and my slightly older sister were essentially free to spend our days as we wished, beyond the control of any adult, seldom participating in “organized” activities. Oh sure, grade school started when I was six, but it was a small school, all eight grades in two rooms. Recess was completely unsupervised. We worked out our own disputes; usually the big kid won, but nobody ever ran to “tell the teacher on them.”
Along with freedom came responsibility. I was not always free to do whatever I wanted. I had farmstead chores. At ten, I was driving a tractor in the fields. I got to do the same work as grown men (to the extent I was capable). I had to earn my self-esteem.
My grandchildren are 4 and 7. I don’t believe they’ve ever spent a minute beyond the watchful eye of a qrown-up.
Our society increasingly denies our children the opportunity to experience freedom. If they cannot experience that when they are young, when they haven’t a care in the world, we should not be surprised when later they have no appreciation for it. Nor should we be surprised that when there was always an authority figure to settle their disputes, they never learn to work things out amongst themselves.
You left out Satan.
One of the threats to liberty today stems from our subversion of the natural order. No, I’m not talking about anything sexual.
The natural order is for the strong to dominate the weak. Most of what we consider civilization or progress is aimed at ameliorating the harm and abuses that flow from that natural order. But I think it is now clear that empowering the weak carries its own dangers. And for all the wickedness that can accompany strength, it is usually joined by more positive attributes like valor, confidence, direction, and ambition.
But while weakness in its natural state often exists with things like empathy and compassion, weakness combined with power tends to obliterate those positive qualities while not imbuing the weak with positive traits of the strong while embracing all the wickedness.
To put it more simply, both bad things and good things happen when the strong are in charge. When the weak are in charge, the bad overwhelms the good. On the particular subject of this post, the strong can learn or be taught to allow a great deal of liberty for others because they are secure in their strength but the weak inevitably perceive liberty as a threat.
Mike
“Everybody loves to be free, but not everybody wants his neighbor to be free, too”
Actually, I think that there are huge differences among individuals in the degree to which they value freedom *for themselves*.
In Dostoyevsky’s ‘Brothers Karamazov’, the Grand Inquisitor explains that Christ (who had returned to earth) must be burned at the stake because he placed too much importance on individual freedom…most people, he says, care more about *bread* and and are highly stressed by having too much individual choice.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/48081.html
I think it is partially how you view others around you.
Ms. Conly seems to view others as too stupid to know what to do.
I view others as imperfect, just like I am, but I know there is something I can say or do to make them better. I also believe that they have something to offer me to make *me* a better person. Support them in their weakness and rely on them in their strength.
That attitude has worked for me.
“We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others – and in particular, of government regulation – to keep us from going wrong.”
In reality, of course, there is no reason to believe that the government regulators are any more rational than individuals, or that they are necessarily pursuing virtuous ends. There is an emerging field of economics, public choice theory, which studies how government choices are *really* made.
See my related post The Scribes and the Idea of Freedom:
“It has been believed for some time that intellectuals tend to be especially supportive of freedom..but it’s not clear that this really has historical warrant, especially if we generalize “intellectuals” to “the scribe class”, i.e., people who read and write for a living, ranging from medieval clerics to British schoolmasters of the Thomas Arnold era to modern college professors. Indeed, the attacks on individual freedom and choice seem to be propagating mainly among the members of our modern scribe class. I certainly don’t think there is any kind of central Illuminati directing the propagation of these memes; however, many members of this class clearly feel threatened by current turns of political opinion, and the high degree of conformity and groupthink within this class ensures rapid transmission of ideas that are judged to be socially acceptable in their circles. It appears that the critique of choice is now such an idea.”
Neo,
Great piece. I think that leftists believe that they favor liberty. That’s why they accuse others as oppressors. It is liberty that they feel is denied to each of the “sections” in their coalition.
One area by which to make their point is sex, including gender identity and abortion. I can imagine cynical, powerful statists thinking, we will yield on sex in trade for everything else.
Your comment about your “slow political change” at a time of transition in your life, living in isolation, resonated with me. I grew up in an extended family with standard, moderate liberal politics. The benevolence and wisdom of our betters in academia and the bureaucracy, epitomized by the New Deal and the “best and brightest” in government, was never questioned. The Democrats, as my father fondly recited ad nauseam, were “the party of the people” while Republicans were the “part of Big Business.” Oh, how I wish he could have lived see how poorly that trope wore during the past 20 years.
Not until I went out into the world in my 20s, lived abroad, observed other cultures, began to read more widely than my engineering studies had allowed in college, and questioned everything I saw from first principles, did I begin slowly to remake my map of the world, as Scott Peck would say.
It was exhilarating for me, becoming my own man, but lonely in the context of my family and friends, who were horrified. By my early 30s the transition was complete and irrevocable. It remains a lonely existence, given where I work and the communities in which I have lived. As many of us are, we’re minorities and sources of rich diversity in our communities, yet vilified because this diversity is anathema to statists. I regularly lose nascent “friends” when they discover my world view. I’ve learned to give thanks for intolerance as a canary in the coal mine protecting me from the shallow and intolerant. My own mother parroted a less eloquent version of Ms. Conly’s passage to me a decade ago, and I’ve never quite been able to restore fully my respect for her since. As for many, thinking is too much trouble and deeply threatening to her.
This process was, and remains, the most bittersweet experience I’ve had, an ongoing one at that, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It is quite literally the breath of life, this crafting of the individual.
Thank you for your blog.
if they just supply the “correct” incentives.
Many SJ despots believe that our current system is obviously illogical, and even “crazy”, with many personal anecdotes to prove their point. They are convinced, in their own minds, that their proposed gov’t regulations will make things better “for everyone”.
But while they would say they support freedom in general, in fact they want a particular better result. More control over the result. And always the “problem” they are trying to fix is so bad that it justifies ending freedom for everyone.
Samples: requirements to wear seat belts, or bike-riding helmets. Laws against drunk driving are similar but different — they punish drinkers who do endanger others.
The desire to protect others from irresponsible free people often leads to a desire to protect those “irresponsible” folk from freely choosing actions which are self-destructive.
Partial solution – we need more free range kids, and more youngsters in school with free play time, including more dangerous stuff where some kids might get hurt. And some actually do get hurt.
More freedom does mean more small, and sometimes fatal, problems and mistakes. There really are trade-offs.
I love freedom, for me and for others. But I’m trying to understand those who love security even more; unfortunately there are far too many of them, and our current K-12 gov’t schools are pretty anti-freedom, pro-order & security.
Too bad the DC fireworks last night were mostly lost in the fog and smoke, but it was also kind of cool in an unusual way. Glad Trump gave a good speech (so I’ve read about it, didn’t listen).
Freedom is great; freedom is fragile; freedom allows both good and bad outcomes.
CapnRusty on July 5, 2019 at 1:14 am said:
Liberty:
I thank my lucky stars that I grew up on a small farm in South Dakota. Even at 4, I and my slightly older sister were essentially free to spend our days as we wished, beyond the control of any adult, seldom participating in “organized” activities. Oh sure, grade school started when I was six, but it was a small school, all eight grades in two rooms. Recess was completely unsupervised. We worked out our own disputes; usually the big kid won, but nobody ever ran to “tell the teacher on them.”
Along with freedom came responsibility. I was not always free to do whatever I wanted. I had farmstead chores. At ten, I was driving a tractor in the fields. I got to do the same work as grown men (to the extent I was capable). I had to earn my self-esteem.
My grandchildren are 4 and 7. I don’t believe they’ve ever spent a minute beyond the watchful eye of a qrown-up.
Our society increasingly denies our children the opportunity to experience freedom. If they cannot experience that when they are young, when they haven’t a care in the world, we should not be surprised when later they have no appreciation for it. Nor should we be surprised that when there was always an authority figure to settle their disputes, they never learn to work things out amongst themselves.
* * *
A major premise of “Ender’s Game” by Scott Card is that the war-leader needed to save the Earth had to be developed under the eye of, but not the protection of, the guardian adults.
David Foster —
As I recall, Christ had a few uncomplimentary things to say about Scribes in His day, perhaps for some of the same reasons you suggest.
I loved this fiery speech from an English MEP in Brussels on July 4:
May the spirit of freedom, ignited in England, return to it, and spread around the world.
https://dailycaller.com/2019/07/04/british-mep-unloads-european-council-independence/
Re the secular Pharisees of the modern bureaucratic state
“AesopFan on July 5, 2019 at 11:20 am said:
Yes. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
Puts me in mind of Garry Wills’ “A Necessary Evil”, wherein he berates the old fashioned American notion that people can order their lives without the ministrations and direction of an expert class.
Many visiting here are Jewish and will have positive feelings regarding the Pharisee class, i.e., those who “kept apart” in order to remain religiously pure; and whose surviving members eventually preserved Jewish traditions in the form of the Talmud, after the Roman destruction of the second temple.
Others, thoroughly secular, and for whom words like “corban” will have no meaning or associations, have hardly any way to relate such a passage to the notion of a self-serving, hypocritical, and warped letter and loophole observance of The Law.
Nonetheless, I think that in terms of the emergent and so-called expert classes in our own society, this Christian scripture has much to say to we Americans today.
Of course, with advent of Antifa types, the Sanders’ legions, of Democrat bureaucrats who simply refuse point blank to follow the law, and their Mainstream media apologists, we may have entered a phase wherein keeping up the appearance of lawfulness may not even be an interest of the progressive class any longer.
The American Pharisees of the left, may be a species on the verge of extinction.
All the same:
AesopFan, thanks for the “America’s roughnecks view of independence.”
I spent a few years in the oil patch and that really resonated with me. That’s where I learned conservative ideas. It’s a no nonsense, git ‘er dun, pull your weight, take a chance, build something type of industry. Freedom to succeed or fail is its hallmark. And pulling your weight is its creed. American to the core.
Again, I’ll make a probably fruitless request for someone who has experienced alienation from a left-liberal or progressive relative or friend, to try and describe exactly what it was the former friend was thinking and how he was evaluating you and the situation, after he discovered you had begun to lag on the march down the road to the collectivist social justice paradise.
Meaning: Did you ever get a sense of what moral imperative they thought it was that you had transgressed, and how they proposed to defend it?
Meaning: Did they ever argue the universal moral and practical necessity of their view, and try to show you how you had erred, before labeling you persona non grata?
Now I know that these events more or less erupt, and don’t usually make for clear thinking and unequivocal resolutions. Emotions get in the way, and often you will not be able to hold a calm and systematic ‘Socratic” exchange; either because the person is unwilling or unable, or because bystanders at the exchange are so emotionally invested or triggered themselves, that they jump into the discussion with both feet, and seem almost deliberately intent on derailing any rational exchange to resolution.
Either: “How can you even ask such a question!!! Have you no compassion!???”.
Or maybe, “C’mon, this is no time to discuss this!!”. Generally uttered in an attempt to close the barn door 5 minutes after the horse of friendship has already fled, and there is nothing but clarity left to be gained anyway.
But just on the off chance, I ask.
William:
Beautifully put.
DNW–Speaking of the continually brandished “compassion” of the Left, if you hear those on the Left, and especially a Democrat politician, utter the phrase, “its for the children,” you can be sure that you have entered what the military so pithily describes as BOHICA territory.
The ‘Turing Test’ is a proposed way of determining how intelligent a computer system really is: by conversing with it, can a *real* human determine whether the entity at the other end of the line is an actual human or not? (Nice example provided by Alan Turing himself at the link)
http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/TheTuringTest.html
The ‘Ideological Turing Test’ has been proposed as follows: can a person convincingly simulate the positions and arguments that would be advanced by a person of the opposite political persuasion from themselves?
I think that in general, people on the RIght can do this better than those on the Left…but neither side covers themselves with glory in this matter.
The Pharisees found Yeshua very annoying, in the same fashion as people find others here annoying.
But there is a particular type of annoyance that results from a world challenging sage or spiritual teacher. The problem is… they can’t be easily killed.
It is like they have administration console cheats in this Maya (which they do).
Yeshua also didn’t write anything apparently, because he didn’t want himself to become a religion, although some of his disciples went against his wishes and created scripture/Bible.
Aesop, at least they vote, unlike conspiracy theorists and woowoo people (spiritualists new age).
If voting is a good in and of itself, then low information voters should automatically be accorded higher hierarchical value than non voters in conspiracy land.
But I doubt human antics is quite that simplified.
Yeshua kept telling the Pharisees how they were wrong using their own scriptures. This is incredibly annoying, because it targets the Pharisees’ strong point (memorization of the Torah and the teaching of it via male institutionalized power) and prevents them from beating Yeshua with it.
It’s like the Alt Right using ALinsky to beat the Left’s Alinskyites over the head with. Or Alinsky using capitalism to buy the WMDs to kill capitalists with: use their own rules against them.
Snow on Pine, they are telling the straight truth. It is for the children. Why do you think Planned Profit spends so much money getting post birth abortion of in tact fetus brain stems and brains/organs? Because it is Money, free money and profit, in the black and gray bio tech markets.
It is definitely FOR CHILDREN, as the harvest operations have always been targeting you human livestock…