Freedom Unqualified
Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2017 3:12 pm
Freedom Unqualified
The idea of a single value as a basis for defining society, and its alternatives, is clearly absurd. It is a value that must be qualified by something to indicate what it is that is free or how that thing is free, or why it is free.
It is a the chief value that is fashionable today, mainly because it suits the tendentious and seduces the naive.
However, if it were to be used as much in isolation as possible it would still provide much the same results as a more holistic ethos.
1 A person who believes in freedom may well be considering his own freedom. In which case he has qualified freedom at the outset, with 'ego' and indeed his own ego not to say self interest over all others.
2 if then he protests that he believes in freedom for everyone, then he has qualified his own freedom by that of others, and the value is still the ego, albeit the ego of many autonomous individuals. Qualified autonomy.
3 Alternatively he may wish for the freedom of people as a corporate whole. That is to say on the basis of mutual regard and altruism. Now that is opposed to the ego. It supposes we can work best together as a society or community in cooperation not in rancorous competition for advantage.
4 If we have freedom vaunted that is none of those forms of society then it can barely be any form of society. It can only be discord and chaos.
A society as in (1) is such that it must favour the most powerful, fortunate, and ruthless. Globalised tyranny at worst.
A society as in (2) must be the least pragmatic, with a distinct lack of empathy and concern for anything.
A society as in (3) must sensibly be opposed to the values, or lack of them, that denotes the other social forms. It should at its most complete embrace all forms of life, which is not to say everything is equal in some mechanical way seen today in the law. It must believe in diversity, from the grass roots upwards, as between societies. A multicultural world as between semi-autonomous societies or nations.
Britain today is a hypocritical amalgam of forms.
The idea of a single value as a basis for defining society, and its alternatives, is clearly absurd. It is a value that must be qualified by something to indicate what it is that is free or how that thing is free, or why it is free.
It is a the chief value that is fashionable today, mainly because it suits the tendentious and seduces the naive.
However, if it were to be used as much in isolation as possible it would still provide much the same results as a more holistic ethos.
1 A person who believes in freedom may well be considering his own freedom. In which case he has qualified freedom at the outset, with 'ego' and indeed his own ego not to say self interest over all others.
2 if then he protests that he believes in freedom for everyone, then he has qualified his own freedom by that of others, and the value is still the ego, albeit the ego of many autonomous individuals. Qualified autonomy.
3 Alternatively he may wish for the freedom of people as a corporate whole. That is to say on the basis of mutual regard and altruism. Now that is opposed to the ego. It supposes we can work best together as a society or community in cooperation not in rancorous competition for advantage.
4 If we have freedom vaunted that is none of those forms of society then it can barely be any form of society. It can only be discord and chaos.
A society as in (1) is such that it must favour the most powerful, fortunate, and ruthless. Globalised tyranny at worst.
A society as in (2) must be the least pragmatic, with a distinct lack of empathy and concern for anything.
A society as in (3) must sensibly be opposed to the values, or lack of them, that denotes the other social forms. It should at its most complete embrace all forms of life, which is not to say everything is equal in some mechanical way seen today in the law. It must believe in diversity, from the grass roots upwards, as between societies. A multicultural world as between semi-autonomous societies or nations.
Britain today is a hypocritical amalgam of forms.
