What is freedom?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the first half of the last century, world civilization, having survived revolutions and wars, having survived monstrous attempts by force to establish the necessary order for someone, introduced freedom as one of the fundamental and inalienable values that must be observed by all regimes, all peoples, all social groups. People most acutely felt the need for freedom and its lack during the period of its suppression, for example, during the occupation of Europe by the Nazis. Indeed, if you run the risk of ending up in a concentration camp for reading the wrong books or for helping people of the wrong nationalities, if you are not entitled to defend those moral norms that you have always considered unshakable, if you are told that as a person, you are nobody and must subordinate your life is in the interests of the Reich, then it is difficult to perceive freedom incorrectly and it is difficult not to appreciate this thing, not to be ready to defend it to the end. However, although it acutely survived the lack of freedom in the catastrophic conditions of its lack, civilization has by no means demonstrated its commitment to this value in practice. Freedom turned out to be of no use to anyone. Most people have not experienced and do not feel in many ways so far the desire for this value in practice, do not seek to achieve this thing as an end in itself and protect it from outside encroachments, and do not even have a clear understanding of what it is at all. In the absence of demand from the majority of people, freedom in the post-war consumer society, in the society of the West, in Soviet society was deformed, the concept of freedom was distorted, it began to be used in a completely different way, it began to be exploited by those who, hiding behind it, like an idol, used arguments about achieving freedom to achieve his personal selfish and dark goals. Freedom as a human value began to be replaced by its own separate narrow concepts, such as freedom from the ruling class standing above you, freedom to engage in entrepreneurship, narrow national freedom, when in your country you can freely humiliate people who speak another language. It is necessary to expose the juggling of this concept and figure out what freedom is and why it is actually needed.

Today, in the overwhelming majority of variants that speak of one or another freedom, freedom is understood in a flawed manner. It is assumed, for example, that you are free when you can do business, and the state does not interfere in your activities, or you are free when there are no masters, landowners and capitalists over you, etc. All such ideas about freedom presuppose the presence of some one criterion, the fulfillment of which determines the difference between freedom and non-freedom, it is assumed that a person wants to have some kind of opportunity or right, which is well known to him in advance and, presumably, desired, and, having acquired this opportunity, he becomes completely free. In fact, the concept of freedom is formulated by analogy with a completely different concept, which has nothing to do with freedom, but the concept underlying the value system of modern civilization - the concept of need. There is a certain need, as long as you are deprived of it, you are not free, but you will satisfy - wow! you are free! In modern civilization there is no concept of freedom as a universal concept, as a concept, the meaning of which is determined by the inner essence of a person, and the state of freedom is fixed not by external criteria, but by the personality itself.

Let's figure out what freedom is. In the simplest approximation, freedom is the ability to make a choice. If a person does not have the opportunity to make a choice, he is not free. Perverted interpretations of freedom imply a completely definite choice, already made in advance, moreover, the choice is only in relation to one criterion, one thing. Perverted interpretations of freedom, telling a person that he will be free only by choosing a market economy or something else, in fact, are aimed at just depriving a person of freedom. What are the main prerequisites for a person's ability to make a choice? The main prerequisites are by no means that someone gives him different options on purpose and ensures their feasibility, or the absence of any difficulties in the implementation of certain options. The main prerequisite is, first of all, a person's idea of what he gets or what he loses, choosing one or the other, and, based on this, decide what is best for him. If, for example, the Nazis are trying to force you to do something that is unacceptable to you, you can weigh all the options and decide that death in the fight against the Nazis is a better choice than submission. If you have a poor idea of how one option differs from another, then the choice between the one and the other and, accordingly, the realization of freedom is difficult for you. Thus, on closer examination, it is quite clear that the main restraint of freedom is the internal restraint. The main enemy of freedom in a person is ignorance, lack of clear ideas about things, lack of convictions, lack of desire to find out the truth. A person can turn from the path leading to freedom, under the influence of fear or any obsessive desires, but the main obstacle on this path is, of course, dogmatism, laziness and ignorance. The striving for truth and a reasonable perception of the world and the striving for freedom are inextricably linked things.

Do people really need freedom? Do not numerous historical examples tell us, including examples from the history of our country, that even having won freedom through revolutions and bloody wars, people uselessly squander it for petty benefits? Isn't there a bunch of false experts who will argue - well, what for is freedom for the average person, if he needs freedom, it’s just as an auxiliary tool in order to join the race for power, for money, for small advantages that is much more important for him?, for a constant piece of sausage in the store, finally, which for him turns out to be more important than the right to decide how to live in his own country. Look, - the false experts will say - any revolution sooner or later ends with a dictatorship, people do not know how to dispose of freedom, people do not want to take responsibility for their actions, if you give people freedom, they will quickly get tired of it and will certainly give it up to some evil dictator. Is it not obvious that the so-called. "Order" and small benefits for people are more important than freedom?

False scholars are deluded. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of people in modern society live for the satisfaction of needs, for the sake of material benefits, for the sake of mythical "success", for the sake of the opportunity, in the end, to lie on the couch and do nothing, when all the work for them will be done by the rest. Such perverted attitudes in life are dictated by the wrong emotional perception of the world, in which a person, sooner or later, comes to the fact that everyone lives for pleasure, for the sake of striving for emotional comfort. These perverted attitudes make the main features of a person's personality, his essence, one or another set of preferences, assessments, egoistic inclinations and desires. However, it would be a big mistake to consider this state of affairs to be static and inherent initially and permanently to human nature (as I wrote already in the 4-level concept). Giving up freedom is by no means a natural human choice. The rejection of freedom is the result of the weakness of his mind, the inability to consciously choose and establish for himself the rules according to which one should behave in society, is the result of mistakes, misunderstanding on the part of others, the result of the impossibility, due to ignorance of certain things, to realize one's own ideas and plans. All this pushes the person, who even tried to be free, back into the arms of the old system of values, illusions, and emotional perception of the world. That is why the striving for freedom was intermittent, limited and one-sided, at every stage the striving for freedom materialized into a private slogan, into a separate desire to eliminate some specific obstacle that hindered a person. However, all this was only up to now.

What is the difference between the life principles of a reasonable person from a person who is in captivity of the emotional system of values and emotional perception of the world? Even if an emotional person is guided by good intentions in his decisions and actions, his emotions overshadow the mind, feelings triumph over freedom. He is held captive by illusions and his consciousness experiences a constant tendency to deviate from reality, the main object on which he focuses his attention becomes not a really existing choice, but an image constructed by his desires, something that he would like to see, about which he would like talking, and then thinking about what gives him emotional comfort. The personality of an emotionally thinking person is 99% static in relation to knowledge - he is more likely to dismiss any information that violates his inner peace, or replace it with illusions. A reasonably thinking person adheres to other life goals. Unlike a person who seeks to consume, he seeks to create. For a Homo sapiens, it is much more exciting than constant whining about his needs and desires, is the promotion and implementation of some of his own ideas. The desire for freedom, manifested in individual elementary actions of choice, for a reasonable person merges into a single process of self-realization, self-assertion, self-proof to himself that he is able to understand things and solve problems that arise before him. If an emotional person avoids difficult questions and does not try to figure out how to do the right thing in a particular case, a reasonable person takes responsibility for his decisions, he is not afraid that some decisions may be wrong, because for him the opportunity figuring out what is really true is more important than maintaining illusions. His choice, like his judgment about the advisability of this or that choice, is a manifestation of personality, there is something supported by the entire system of his beliefs and principles, the correctness of which he had previously verified from his own experience, making the same responsible choices, but an emotional person makes choice and makes judgments depending on the conjuncture, on their momentary interests, any statements about the rationality of this or that are only aimed at reinforcing his intuitive or emotional assessment. Being in constant search, a reasonable person is not one whose ideas have frozen in their development, he constantly finds something new for himself, discovers something valuable, improves, in contrast to an emotional person, uncritically attached, as a rule, to one and the same unchanging stereotypes and dogmas.

There is one more argument that false experts are ready to make against freedom. "Ha!" they will say. "Is it conceivable a society in which all people will be free? After all, being free, each person will do what he pleases and interfere with the rest. After all, every person, having received freedom, will strive to harm others and suppress their freedom, in order to get more freedom for himself. It is absolutely impossible to make everyone free. "These false theses are also not difficult to refute. Is it possible to build a society in which people, being free, will be able to agree with each other? Yes, of course. At the moment there is a misunderstanding, unwillingness to listen to each other and unwillingness to go meeting each other is the main problem for people who are distinguished by at least some intelligence. However, is it possible to consider the right of a reasonable person to dogmatically defend their opinion as a sign of freedom? Not at all. Again, this has nothing to do with freedom. Yes, a reasonable person is not strives, like an emotional person, to a compromise and does not show a willingness to trade in his beliefs (or rather, what he claims to be these beliefs), since for him defending beliefs is not a trick, not a way to achieve the realization of private momentary interests, but a life position. people should not look for compromises, but such a way to implement the set by each of them on the individuality of tasks, which would ensure the integrated achievement of their individual goals. Being reasonable and free, a person should not be inclined to ignore anything, be it some facts about things, be it some beliefs and values shared by other people. A reasonable person can say to her simply, "You know, your views are not interesting to me, please go nafig." In order to express his disagreement with the position of another person, a reasonable person must have the same arguments and grounds as in order to agree with it. A reasonable person understands that by entering into a dialogue with other people, he does not lose anything, but, on the contrary, wins, receiving, on the one hand, a more general and clear vision of those own goals, the implementation of which will be expedient, on the other, identifying mistakes and miscalculations in their position, in general - a more correct and clear idea of the world and society in which he lives. A reasonable person not only does not refuse to dispute, but, on the contrary, strives for a dialogue with a person with whom he does not agree, since he is interested in finding out the reason for these contradictions, it is interesting to understand what this other point of view can be based on, it is interesting to try to find a common the denominator for these two views. Winning a dispute (as well as recognizing success in some business), which was achieved not by a deserved victory, but by formal consent and an unreasonable concession of the opponent, cannot be of value to a reasonable person. For a reasonable person, only the true recognition of his innocence or his merits is important, which is given by people who actually understand the essence of his achievements, ideas, etc., and who have accepted the correctness of his position as their own convictions. Therefore, you can truly be free only in the society of other free people.

Liberalism

Liberalism is an ideology that presents freedom as one of its fundamental goals. This is a false ideology. Liberalism replaces the correct understanding of freedom with a private and narrow understanding, leading to confusion and the impossibility of building a truly free society on its basis.

Liberalism at the dawn of its existence, of course, played a positive role, in particular, liberals during the civil war in the United States advocated the abolition of slavery and the granting of equal civil rights to all. However, then liberalism became the basis of the anti-human concept of globalism and contributed to the spread and establishment of the shameful model of the capitalist exploitative market economy in the world. Starting from the theses about the need to provide conditions for freedom and self-realization for every person, liberals perverted the idea of freedom, linking the provision of these conditions with the introduction of private property, with the elimination of the responsibility of a person to society, with the destruction and reduction of the role of public and state institutions and the greatest possible elimination their influence on human life. In a society built according to the canons of liberalism, freedom began to be understood as freedom of manifestation of desires, as freedom, which consists in the human right to make all kinds of eccentric decisions, freedom and the right to defend their own illusions and any, the most stupid views. This understanding of "freedom", from which the most important reminder that a person himself is responsible for the actions he commits, is extremely dangerous. The liberals formulated a deception, according to which the ideal of freedom is a parasitic existence without any responsibility to oneself and to society. Liberals equated freedom with connivance with base desires, with freedom of deception, freedom of arbitrariness, freedom of denial of moral norms and relativism, both in relation to rational and in relation to traditional, religious and moral ideas. Led by liberals, Western society has entered the path of degradation.

Marxism

Marxism is another ideology that presents freedom as one of the fundamental goals. This is a false ideology. Marxism replaces the correct understanding of freedom with a private and narrow understanding, leading to confusion and the impossibility of building a truly free society on its basis.

Starting from the theses about the need to provide conditions for freedom and self-realization for every person, Marx formulated the theses about the need to eliminate wage labor and stop alienating the results of this labor, as, in a broad sense, any creative activity, from the person himself. However, noticing quite correctly that wage labor is shameful slavery and is subject to liquidation, Marx began to develop the idea of the transition to a free society, based solely on the realities of the social plan, believing that a formal change in the structure of society is a sufficient condition for ensuring freedom. Marx came to the false conclusion that the elimination of the division of society into classes will automatically lead to the fact that the principles of freedom and self-realization will become fundamental for every person. As in the case of liberalism, the construction of society based on the canons of Marxist ideology, with its one-sided understanding of freedom, came to perversion of the initial principles about the need to ensure freedom and self-realization for every person, as a result of which the USSR by the beginning of the 80s came to a similar society is a model in which a certain "elite" was at the helm, whose main concern was to ensure for itself privileges, untouchability, high status and powers, regardless of real merit. Both Marxism and liberalism at the moment are completely outdated ideologies that have not justified themselves in practice, which, even at a first approximation, do not give a correct idea of the principles of building a free society.