#unfreedom

[timothysnyder]

Unfreedom at the Washington Post

How an editorial line fosters authoritarianism

Jeff Bezos, who owns Washington Post, has announced its editorial line: "We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets." The use of these terms in this way demeans the concept of freedom and pushes the country in the direction of tyranny.

Freedom belongs only to people. It does not belong to institutions or abstractions -- and least of all to non-existent institutions or abstractions. The moment that we yield the word "free" to something besides a person, we are yielding our freedom.

[thehumanfront]

Money buys you freedom

Some say money doesn’t buy you happiness. But it may buy you freedom.

Zac Efron, Mark Wahlberg, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, Natalie Portman, Ed Sheeran, Tony Hawk—as we write this post scores of well-heeled celebrities are moving to Australia during a global pandemic. Australia is freer than home right now; so they are paying for freedoms most of us aren’t privileged enough to afford. Isn’t that unfair?

Well, that depends on what conceptual work we want freedom to do in our notion of distributive justice.

Many people would argue that we’re all free to get rich; but, for uncountable reasons, it doesn’t happen. No matter how we organise our socio-political systems, there is just no society in which everyone has access to all goods and services. Inequality is unavoidable.

On the other hand, there is a great deal of luck involved in people’s lives (e.g. inheritance, the neighbourhoods we grow up in . . . ). Thus ‘the game’ is rigged: it discriminatorily prices unlucky people out of things.

In Freedom and Money philosopher G.A. Cohen argues having money is like having freedom tickets (like arcade tokens), without which we’re unfree to do certain things (play more games), perhaps very important things like accessing healthcare:

‘To have money is to have freedom, and the assimilation of money to mental and bodily resources is a piece of unthinking fetishism, in the good old Marxist sense that it misrepresents social relations of constraint as people lacking things.’

But, practically, we know there’ll always be some resource inequality. Where do we draw the line? When is inequality fair?

According to John Rawls, as long as fundamental rights and liberties are protected and not ‘gambled’ through the notion of money, resource inequality is permitted—but it must benefit the least-advantaged. Furthermore, public offices must be open to all.

Norman Daniels distinguishes between freedom and ability, with the latter being more important. I may not be free to order yet another takeaway tonight—I’m too poor—but I do have the ability to.

[hyperbanal]

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Geothe

[darktomecomic]

Church & State

[pappapol]

unfreedom times Dan Perjovschi - bcn 2018 https://youtu.be/piJWoIIqe9U

[flamboyantlybewildered]

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: 'Let's establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it's true; if it's written in red ink, it's false.' After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: 'Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair- the only thing you can’t get is red ink.' The structure here is more refined than it might appear: although the worker is unable to signal that what he is saying is a lie in the prearranged way, he none the less succeeds in getting his message across- how? By inscribing the very reference to the code into the encoded message, as one of its elements. Of course, this is the standard problem of self-reference: since the letter is written in blue, is its entire content therefore not true? The answer is that the very fact that the lack of red ink is mentioned signals that it should have been written in red ink. The nice point is that this mention of the lack of red ink produces the effect of truth independently of its own literal truth: even if red ink really was available, the lie that it is unavailable is the only way to get the true message across in this specific condition of censorship. Is this not the matrix of an efficient critique of ideology –not only in 'totalitarian' conditions of censorship but, perhaps even more, in the more refined conditions of liberal censorship? One starts by agreeing that one has all the freedoms one wants- then one merely adds that the only thing missing is the 'red ink': we 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict - 'war on terrorism', 'democracy and freedom', 'human rights', and so on- are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. In this precise sense, our 'freedoms' themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom. A hundred years ago, in his emphasis on the acceptance of some fixed dogma as the condition of (demanding) actual freedom, Gilbert Keith Chesterton perspicuously detected the antidemocratic potential of the very principle of freedom of thought: “We may say broadly that free thought is the best of all safeguards against freedom. Managed in a modern style, the emancipation of the slave's mind is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself.” Is this not emphatically true of our 'postmodern' time, with its freedom to deconstruct, doubt, distantiate oneself? We should not forget that Chesterton makes exactly the same claim as Kant in his 'What is Enlightenment?': 'Think as much as you like, and as freely as you like, just obey!' The only difference is that Chesterton is more specific, and spells out the implicit paradox beneath the Kantian reasoning: not only does freedom of thought not undermine actual social servitude, it positively sustains it. The old motto 'Don't think, obey!' to which Kant reacts is counterproductive: it effectively breeds rebellion; the only way to secure social servitude is through freedom of thought. Chesterton is also logical enough to assert the obverse of Kant's motto: the struggle for freedom needs a reference to some unquestionable dogma. In a classic line from a Hollywood screwball comedy, the girl asks her boyfriend: 'Do you want to marry me?' 'No!' 'Stop dodging the issue! Give me a straight answer!' In a way, the underlying logic is correct: the only acceptable straight answer for the girl is 'Yes!', so anything else, including a straight 'No!', counts as evasion. This underlying logic, of course, is again that of the forced choice: you're free to decide, on condition that you make the right choice. Would not a priest rely on the same paradox in a dispute with a sceptical layman? 'Do you believe in God?' 'No.' 'Stop dodging the issue! Give me a straight answer!' Again, in the opinion of the priest, the only straight answer is to assert one's belief in God: far from standing for a clear symmetrical stance, the atheist's denial of belief is an attempt to dodge the issue of the divine encounter. And is it not the same today with the choice 'democracy or fundamentalism'? Is it not that, within the terms of this choice, it is simply not possible to choose 'fundamentalism'? What is problematic in the way the ruling ideology imposes this choice on us is not 'fundamentalism' but, rather, democracy itself: as if the only alternative to 'fundamentalism' is the political system of liberal parliamentary democracy.

Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

[thehumanfront]

Nietzsche on free will

(Pictured: Beyond Good and Evil, a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted here.)

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about ‘free will’ and ‘unfree will’. But what did he mean?!

Let’s start here: Nietzsche implored us to forsake material explanations of cause and effect. We do not possess metaphysical causal powers. Such a belief is ‘folly’, the ‘extravagant pride of man’, a ‘crass stupidity’ which results from the ‘desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.’

Nietzsche spoke of the will itself:

(i) The weak-willed possess ‘unfree will’. They fictionalise lives wherein they are really free—search for reasons to explain their self-contempt, interpret weaknesses, and foster guilt.

(ii) The strong-willed, in contrast, embrace their actions’ determination, their necessity. They have a mental power: ‘free will’: a ‘bell‐stroke of noon and of the great decision, that makes the will free again, that gives back to the earth its goal and to man his hope.’ This rare and exceptionally strong ‘human of the future; this anti‐Christ and anti‐nihilist; this conqueror of God and of nothingness’ will find independence in his fate.

‘It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it . . . without being obliged to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience.’

So, for Nietzsche, most humans are members of a herd, passive conduits of ideas. But some noble individuals—those honorific persons—they fashion ‘I’ from strong will to exercise a form of agency.

[thehumanfront]

Political freedom: what is it?

(Pictured: William Wallace (Mel Gibson) rallies Scottish troops during the First War of Scottish Independence with a famous rousing speech in Braveheart (1995): 'I am William Wallace, and I see a whole army of my countrymen, here, in defiance of Tyranny. You've come to fight as free men, and free men you are. What will you do without freedom? Will you fight? . . . [W]ould you be willing to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance—just one chance—to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they'll never take our freedom!')

It’s time for some political philosophy—specifically, to discuss political freedom.

In our personal lives freedom is associated with opportunity and control: a means to meet our own ends. Because of this we fight for it on a political scale. But what actually are people fighting for?

While political freedom is broadly seen as something we should be promoting, the idea that we sing from the same hymn sheet on it is an illusion: we sing completely different tunes! There are multiple ways of defining freedom that are dialectally diverse. For example, to name but a few examples of freedom’s role in ideology: liberalism is a doctrine which seeks to promote and enhance personal freedoms; anarchism represents a fight towards the abolition of overarching governmental powers; and capitalism, particularly laissez-faire economics, describes the distribution of goods and services through free-for-all private ownership.

There are freedoms, we can agree, worth protecting and fighting for. For instance, we usually concur that freedom of thought should be enshrined as a human right for as many people as possible to exercise. However, these are pragmatic agreements, not analytic convergences on what freedom actually is.

Traditionally, there are three opposed camps for this:

(i) Negative freedom: The absence and removal of obstacles which inhibit liberty. (Famous supporter: Thomas Hobbes. Example laws: A lack of border controls, physical barriers, or ‘unjust’ laws.)

(ii) Positive freedom: Self-governance and autonomy of choice. (Famous supporter: Immanuel Kant. Example laws: Self-determination of gender or sovereignty.)

(iii) Republicanism: Not being subjected to the arbitrary rule of somebody or something else. (Famous supporter: Machiavelli. Example laws: Rules for preventing powerful and wealthy individuals from putting out influential media which favours their private agenda.)

Philosophers continue to disagree (naturally). Our own notions tend to be fuzzy and incoherent and based on individual ideology. We sum up the parts we each favour, stirring up endless debate about which freedoms take precedent. [eye-roll]