by bvonahsen » Wed Aug 16, 2006 2:26 pm
<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>I'll say this for freedom-- those who try to argue against it, REALLY have their work cut out for them. If I want to be free, and you don't agree, who's going to take that 'inappropriate' freedom away from me? You?<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>This is just rhetoric, I never argued "against" freedom". Only against the libertarian delusion that freedom equals "no resposibility". The libertarian notion of freedom is really an infantile temper tantrum, the desire of the Ego to be free of all restraints. Sorry, but we live in a limited world, a universe that places limits upon us every second. Jump off a cliff and see how "free" you are.<br><br>Yeah, I was hard on him, not because of previous debates but because of my previous experiences. I have been homeless, alone on the streets of Minneapolis. So when someone tells me that the reason social supports or other programs have been cut and eliminated is so they can be "free", I get a little pissed off. When someone says that "taxation is theft", which is the libertarian philosophy in a nutshell, I know from experience just who gets the shaft in that arrangement, me.<br><br>There has to be a balance of course, or even better, a dialectic, between personal freedom on the one hand and social responsibility on the other. I'm not arguing for a communist state. I don't understand why that is so difficult to get (actually, I do, see below). Every one of us lives in a social context and we could no more survive outside of it than a bee could survive outside of the hive. We are social beings and as a result we have certain freedoms and certain responsibilities. They are not absolutes, the only person that is absolutely free is a corpse.<br><br>All this belongs on a different board so let me try to expand the argument and see if I can't bring it back on topic. So let me switch to looking at our social nature and how we exist within a social web. That outside of that social context nothing makes much sense. Take for instance, UFOs.<br><br>What does it mean to have seen a UFO or to have experienced an "alien abduction"? How much credence ought we to give to reports of pink glowing portals to another world? What about those who claim they were subjected to ritual satanic abuse as a child? Do "the nine" really exist? Is there really some secret cabal that rules the world and manipulates every government? What should we think about such "high weirdness"? Do we just dismiss these things out of hand? Or should we accept and swallow them whole?<br><br>Truth, I would argue, is a social construct. It cannot exist without the context we give it. It dies and dissolves away if we cannot place it within a broader context to nourish and sustain it. It then becomes just another anomally that we cannot explain and hence is useless to us. Strange experiences are just that, strange experiences. They are neither true or false, right or wrong. They just are.<br><br>So how do we do that? How do we go about deciding whether or not "my brother saw a UFO" or the libertarian proposition "freedom is an absolute good" are true statements? What is the process?<br><br>It's called thesis/antithesis or "the socratic method" or just plain science, which is just another word for knowledge. We need to reject the black and white, "stinking thinking", adolescent whinning of the extreme right and recognize that reality is a continum. All things exist on a dialectic like "true ----- false", "red ----- blue" or even "freedom-----responsibility".<br><br>Our task is to synthesize those opposites and form a new dialectic from which a new synthesis is formed... and so on. And no, I don't agree with Hegel about where this ultimately takes us, but I do agree with the process and that this is how the web of knowledge is built. <br><br>The current political climate of extremes rejects that process and hence we see the destruction of knowledge accross society. "No web weavers here" indeed! What we have in libertarianism today is nothing other than the politics of the corpse. <p></p><i></i>