Amerika

Nothing quite turns off the freedom brain as much as unbounded terms such as freedom, liberty, independence, equality, and goodwill. These have no limits and no off-switch, so they are blank cheques under which one can justify/rationalize anything they want.

For example, if you tell me that it is bad for me to sprawl drunkenly in the central plaza on Saturday morning, I turn around and tell you that you are limiting my freedom. If the system demands taxes, you claim it limits your independence. When the border patrol stops foreigners at the entrance to the city, you claim that they are at liberty to enter, and it is fascism or tyranny to oppose them.

We have trouble arguing against crimes that end the agency, or ability to choose his or her path through life with natural selection as the only limit, of others: murder, kidnapping, rape. Then the independence of the perp and the freedom of the vic clash in glorious paradox over our heads. Many of us include theft there: to steal from someone is to partially limit her agency, since she may have needed what you stole.

But let us look at agency. In the modern sense, it is unbounded: people can do whatever they want, no limits except on stealing the agency of another (murder, kidnapping, rape, maybe theft). In a practical-realistic sense, it is limited by natural selection and reality, meaning that unrealistic acts receive a hard slap of cold reality when they fail and the person may die. In an eternalist sense, agency is limited by destiny, and so you have the “freedom” and “independence” and “liberty” to do whatever gets you closer to that destiny, and no one should interrupt that.

The eternalist view however asserts that freedom, liberty, independence, equality, and goodwill (FLIEG) is relative to who you are and what your purpose in this existence — which has an order based not on purpose, but on logical reaction to the fact of reality itself; life seeks to perpetuate how it must — and therefore not unbounded. You have the right to the life that fits who you are, but since none of us are equal, there are limits to what each of us should be doing.

To some degree, at least until recently, we accepted these limits but insert the endurance testing of education as a means to justify them in an egalitarian system. Not everyone can be a brain surgeon, speaking in terms of the abilities required and the genetics needed for those, but instead we put them through thirty years of education and testing to make sure that this is the equal person who won the lottery to be a brain surgeon. We at least used to have qualifications for truck drivers, plumbers, carpenters, and electricians; we still have these for lawyers. As education falls apart, since the Leftists turned it into a loyalty-subsidy system like everything else they touch, future tests will be based more on real-world demonstrated ability.

A monarchist system recognizes inherent relative limits to independence. That is, a serf cannot be a king, or really anything but a serf, so he makes few choices. He is able to choose the really big stuff in the cosmicist view, like his partner, his philosophy, his spiritual beliefs, and what to do with his free time. He is not able to make economic, political, or social decisions because he is inept at them, and his participation will limit the agency of the civilization, for whom direction is best chosen with those who have the innate ability to have agency in that area.

You will encounter the blank cheque many times in this life. Any productive activity will be met by cries of “but my freedom” and “my independence.” This is the wailing of the individualists, who oppose change simply because it forces them to change their mental state, and the mental state the individualist desires is one where he imagines himself to be a god and everyone else to be a tendril of his consciousness. You get them on both Left and Right. But the sensible approach is to realize that independence, like everything else, is relative to the parties involved and, like all things, relative to the whole of the cosmos as well.

Tags: equality, FLIEG, freedom, goodwill, independence, liberty, monarchism, relativity