What is Freedom

From Random Hipatia

I thought this was an excellent time to write something about freedom. This seems especially appropriate time to write about freedom given that, like many of you, I live in a nation where one is placed on lists and one’s freedom to travel can be taken away for purely political purposes. Like many of you, my nation needs to spy on, monitor, and collect data on who people choose to associate with. That is, like many of you, I live in a police state.

Freedom is something we often seem to speak about, but yet so very often fail to understand. Freedom is about responsibility. At one time all human beings lived in freedom in free societies. In freedom, they were empowered to be directly responsible to each other, and for ourselves. With this shared responsibility comes relationship, and for much of our existence this was sufficient. Then came the emergence of warring city states and nations, and in these disturbed societies, responsibility and relationship no longer remained an individual matter. Instead, as the state replaced the family as a new institution suddenly “responsible” for it’s new “children”-citizens, the pseudo-father figure of this new family, such as a ruler or king would become and act responsible for everyone. The population, stripped of it’s responsibility, no longer lived in a state of freedom. In fact, the people entered a state of existence we can recognize as human slavery.

From slavery, and later serfdom, emerged the idea, especially in the western mind, of liberties. This new idea replaced the original concept of freedom that human beings once universally enjoyed with mear privileges extended by the ruler or state to the people. These new privileges were called “rights” and “liberties” and are largely illusion. Since this privilege is extended by the state, whether directly or through social contracts, it can similarly be withdrawn since these rights do not actually “belong” to the people they are claimed to have been given to. So long as the state can withdraw these privileges, whether selectively, or wholesale, at it’s whim, whether for crisis that is real or wholly manufactured, this is neither real freedom nor what a free society is about.

A perfect example of this is the United States, where a number of rights have been enumerated, but these rights exist so long as the government chooses to recognize them, and can be effectively withdrawn by a claim of unitary executive authority in a manufactured crisis. Some of these so called “inalienable rights”, such as free association, can also be negated by other means, such as forming networking database of individuals and their relationships through domestic intercept.

Freedom, in a true free society, involves responsibilities that can never be surrendered to a state. In a crisis in government, this remains a problem of government, not that of taking away the responsibilities and freedom of people. The response to a crisis in a free society does not diminish the freedom of that society, and rather than rights of the people being terminated by government as needed, the right of the government to exist can be terminated by those so governed as needed.

Remnants of this basic human concept of freedom does exist today in surviving and undamaged indigenous cultures. One solution is perhaps replacing existing nations with a return to indigenous forms of sovereignty, such as Russell Means is trying to do with the Lakotah nation. However, whatever we choose to do to create and sustain human freedom, for those who struggle for recognition of their right to live as free human beings, clearly this requires abandoning or otherwise abolishing many existing nations such as the United States.

Be happy, be safe, be sovereign to yourself, and be responsible to each other.