| This piece appeared in www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=16890 where it was posted on June 27, 2008. There follows a fascinating discussion on, of all things, gender-neutral language. You might well find it worth reading. |
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| Knowing We Are Free by St. Verbatim |
I used to tell people we live in an Anarchist Utopia. It was a kind of IRL troll in the days I used to hang out
with activist-types. It was a lot of fun, because it is a very difficult claim difficult to argue against: we are all
free to do as we will. You can smoke a joint in front of a police station - you just have to be prepared to
deal with the consequences. You can do anything you can get away with.
It is very easy to confuse what we can't do with what we shouldn't do. It is all too easy to forget that we
have the choice. The Internet pirate, downloading and propagating stolen materials, he has the choice.
And stopping at a red light, I had the choice to keep going and risk arrest or injury.
Freedom, in this its most basic sense, seems rather constant in human history across space and time. The
only way people have managed to truly limit freedom in this sense is imprisonment of others - and this has
always been applied to a small minority, even in extreme cases where entire ethnic groups were rounded
up and confined.
So if we sense we are in a state of decreasing freedom, clearly the freedom we are referring to is not this
freedom of choice, ever so hard to truly limit. The freedoms now being slowly taken away must be subtler
ones - indeed, these freedoms must consist of our choices not being affected unduly by outside
considerations. I should be able to write what I want, when I want, where I want, without this choice being
affected by fear of retribution. Imposing this fear is a subtle encroachment upon my freedom.
But perhaps the easiest way to limit one's freedom is to make one forget this freedom ever existed in the
first place. After all, why put a man behind iron bars when you can just train him to stay indoors? If you can
convince The People that they should not do what you do not wish them to do, you save a great deal of
energy you would otherwise spend actually stopping them from doing it. If you can convince them that they
cannot do this, cannot go there, all the better.
It is good to remember once in a while that we are fundamentally free. We may have fears imposed on us
by unjust rulers. We may have to face choices no free person should be forced to face. We may have to
take great care to preserve our freedom. But we are free nonetheless, and the choice is ours. Merely
knowing we are free is half the battle.
with activist-types. It was a lot of fun, because it is a very difficult claim difficult to argue against: we are all
free to do as we will. You can smoke a joint in front of a police station - you just have to be prepared to
deal with the consequences. You can do anything you can get away with.
It is very easy to confuse what we can't do with what we shouldn't do. It is all too easy to forget that we
have the choice. The Internet pirate, downloading and propagating stolen materials, he has the choice.
And stopping at a red light, I had the choice to keep going and risk arrest or injury.
Freedom, in this its most basic sense, seems rather constant in human history across space and time. The
only way people have managed to truly limit freedom in this sense is imprisonment of others - and this has
always been applied to a small minority, even in extreme cases where entire ethnic groups were rounded
up and confined.
So if we sense we are in a state of decreasing freedom, clearly the freedom we are referring to is not this
freedom of choice, ever so hard to truly limit. The freedoms now being slowly taken away must be subtler
ones - indeed, these freedoms must consist of our choices not being affected unduly by outside
considerations. I should be able to write what I want, when I want, where I want, without this choice being
affected by fear of retribution. Imposing this fear is a subtle encroachment upon my freedom.
But perhaps the easiest way to limit one's freedom is to make one forget this freedom ever existed in the
first place. After all, why put a man behind iron bars when you can just train him to stay indoors? If you can
convince The People that they should not do what you do not wish them to do, you save a great deal of
energy you would otherwise spend actually stopping them from doing it. If you can convince them that they
cannot do this, cannot go there, all the better.
It is good to remember once in a while that we are fundamentally free. We may have fears imposed on us
by unjust rulers. We may have to face choices no free person should be forced to face. We may have to
take great care to preserve our freedom. But we are free nonetheless, and the choice is ours. Merely
knowing we are free is half the battle.
| This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. It's used by permission of St. Verbatim, but we don't know if the good saint copyrighted it or not. If you'd like to use it, let us know and we'll be happy to check for you. |
We made the wallpaper, but release it into the
public domain.
public domain.
| 'We are fundamentally free.' |
ILLUMINATI WARNING: Reading this might get you thinking about the choices you really do have. You may never be able to honestly say, 'But I had no choice' again. |
