Something happened last year that reminded me that freedom couldn’t matter more. I went to Tunisia, for a conference, where I met a group of young people from across the Middle East, all of whom were involved in the Arab Spring.
The word freedom was never far from their lips, or from their thoughts. A teenage girl whose family had disowned her for getting involved in politics, a young man whose friends had been killed in protest. It was less the hope that freedom would come that kept them going, more the certain knowledge of what life was like without it.
It reminded me that now, every bit as much as during the French Revolution, freedom is and remains a rallying cry across the world.
But look closer to home, with the debate over Scottish Independence raging, with passion and anger, whichever side you’re on. And with the future of the left hanging in the balance, it’s impossible to argue that this doesn’t matter here.
It made me stop and wonder, why then don’t we talk about it more?
Because the right does. And here’s the problem. Because the right has captured the concept of liberty it’s allowed them to define and debate freedom on their own terms.But their freedom isn’t just limited; it’s a bleak version of liberty that says as long as I am left alone, as long as nobody inhibits me from action, I am free.…
Longish exploration of freedom from a left POV.
Nothing left to lose? Liberty and the Left
Lisa Nandy
8 comments:
"Because the right has captured the concept of liberty it’s allowed them to define and debate freedom on their own terms. But their freedom isn’t just limited; it’s a bleak version of liberty that says as long as I am left alone, as long as nobody inhibits me from action, I am free.…"
Wrong. Right-wingers have no problem with inhibiting people from action. That includes so-called 'libertarians' who absolutely love rules which control and inhibit people's actions.
Inhibiting people is basis of all reaction. If a reactionary is met with a unfamiliar behavior, personality, religious belief, a non local "racial" look, then it is dangerous to the health of "traditional" community.
The reactionary mentality is a primitive irrational cognitive bias toward the familiar. It survives simply because evolutionary advantage toward extreme caution can be quite useful in certain situations.
We have stop relying on evidence and reason as it is useless in modifying beliefs and behavior... especially of reactionaries. The truth is people aren't free or at liberty to chose their cognitive bias.
It is high time we all realized the Nihilist truth about the fact human supermorality.
"It’s the Hobbesian view, based on the understanding that we’re all atomistic individuals, who collide with one another, in a perpetually competitive system. No wonder in such a world that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
It may be the Hobbes view but this is also textbook Darwinism 101....
You mean Social Darwinism.
Uhuru!
No Bill Darwinism....
Random chance mutations... leading to survival of the fittest which is natural selection....
The 'atomistic' here implies randomness (Quantum Mechanics, etc...) ... then she writes 'competition' which implies the fittest "wins"...
So this is just applied Darwinism (FD: imv...)
A bunch of people all bumping into each other and somehow "good" is supposed to come out of it "automatically" or something....
I think it is all more complicated than this Theory makes it appear... not that I can break it down much further or to my own point of satisfaction either though at this point....
rsp
There is no such thing as "good" or "bad" outcome, that implies there is some teleological objective in nature, don't conflate it with religion. Evolution is just an obvious description of what goes on in nature.
Species (species, not individuals) survival will depend on a big number of reasons at a given point in time. It is not like atomic particles competing against each other all the time, in fact most species have some sort of coordination and cooperation amongst individuals to guarantee survivability of their members (don't forget that any species is trying to maximize the number of individuals that survive until reproduction age all the time to reproduce the most), many times not only within their own species but with other species as well. Sometimes being the fittest means being the most cooperative, others it means the most egotistical individuals, and all is up to the circumstances imposed by the environment (being this a set of other species, individuals and the ambient -from atmosphere composition to climate, the composition of soil or whatever you can think of-) and it's own feedback loop. Ofc is much more complicated because it's a complex chaotic system influenced by practically an infinite number of variables and that's why we can only use simple words to describe how it goes but never formulate it in a consistent set of physicals laws described through maths, we would have to be gods to do that (and we obviously aren't).
I wish people stopped with all that pseudo-science crap to justify their own sociopathy.
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