When "Freedom" Becomes an Attack Point
Weaponized Language - Part 3
The notion of freedom is a complex one.
Is anyone truly free?
Philosophers, political scientists, religious and spiritual figures, and a myriad of other intellectual thinkers have debated and pontificated about the reality and illusions surrounding the idea of freedom for thousands of years. Without going down these ontological and epistemological rabbit holes, I would like to address the recent shift in opinion around this ideal.
First, regardless of the shortcomings of Western civilization and democracy, it is beyond doubt in my mind that individual freedoms are primary to the foundation of our society. We can debate whether this makes our society prone to narcissism, greed, megalomania, destructive self-interest, and the other potential pitfalls of hyper-individualism; however, this does not change the fact that our current Western civilization is built upon the drive for individual freedoms and human rights.
If you’d prefer a collectivist society, the East tends to lean that way more. Again, it would be a long dissertation to carve out the differences, nuances, pros and cons, and historical ramifications of these two polarities and the spectrum between. I will not do that here.
If one doubts the fundamental nature of freedom in our society, then one need look no further than national anthems - though you could refer to the constitutions, and declarations (Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence, etc.) that have formed our nations out of their more authoritarian antecedents.
In Canada’s national anthem, O’Canada, these lines are present:
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North, strong and free!
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
In the United States national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner, we see these lines:
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
’Tis the star-spangled banner - O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
As you can see being free, having a land that is free, the importance of freedom, etc. seems paramount to the fabric of these two nations. It is ironic - tragically so, in my opinion - that in both Canada and the U.S., the term “freedom” is being linked with notions of White supremacy, domestic terrorism, unlawfulness, and as the antithesis of being a good citizen.
Shouldn’t being a good citizen, by definition in these countries, include prizing the value of freedom?
By reading the anthems and the constitutions, I would think so.
As you can see above, the word “Freedom” has be questioned and devalued - at least in a passive aggressive and subtle way, if not with outright disdain. The inversions of many terms have been rampant in the last three years. My previous two articles, 5 Weaponized Phrases and How to Defend Against Them: Part 1 and How to Protect Yourself Against Weaponized Words: Part 2, have touched on this phenomenon.
It is concerning when the ‘free’ press side with government actions that suppress the constitution and could easily be equated with anti-democratic, human rights subverting authoritarianism. The role of the media is to be a check and balance to government overreach and all unjust extensions of power. This was detailed in my article, The Fourth Estate’s Betrayal.
The more we slide from the founding principles of our Western nations and constitutional rights that have made them distinct from other nations with more totalitarian regimes, (i.e., less individual freedoms), the more we betray our ancestors who sacrificed to make these gains in liberty for us.
Dr. King captures this essence perfectly in the above quotation. It is unacceptable and the media - if it is not a state propaganda arm - should be the first one to call this out.
Freedom - whether it be freedom of speech, freedom to protest, freedom to worship, freedom to assemble, medical freedom, or other forms of heterogenous beliefs and actions - will always be inconvenient to some and a challenge to those who govern. It is easiest to have complete uniformity in a population and to rule through absolute power of all. When those who desire to govern find themselves in power, I imagine it becomes very tempting to ignore the voices of the few and to rule with a unilateral fist.
This is exactly why we have a constitution! This is exactly why we must protect freedom and dissent! History, philosophy, and common sense should make this apparent to all who have a grasp of at least one of these.
If we allow government’s to use emergencies to override our constitutional (and inalienable) rights, then they will always find ways to declare ‘emergencies’ (and inalienable loses its meaning). We still have not recovered some of our freedoms from 9-11 and the Patriot Act. Do you think we will recover all the freedoms that were sacrificed during the pandemic?
I know some will say that this was done for our own good, for our safety. That is a dangerous road to go down. There have been brutal totalitarian regimes before that have utilized the phrase “for your safety” to strip people of their rights and freedoms while perpetrating horrendous deeds.
Pretending that a vaccine which is purported to keep you safe doesn’t work if others don’t partake is a subversive means of irrational bullying. The so-called covid vaccine never even was designed (or was capable) of stopping transmission. There was no logical, legal, or scientific rational for stripping people of rights and freedoms because they did not want to get this gene therapy experimental injection.
Medical freedom is more than just about bodily autonomy. It is about the ideological boundary between the state and the individual.
Do we prize individual rights? Diversity?
Or are we more inclined to sacrifice the individual for the good of the state? Will you volunteer to be sacrificed? What about your child? What about someone else’s?
These notions stand against all the progress made on recognizing the individual since the Enlightenment. I dare say we do not want them revoked. However, the ruling class has always had a hard time affording these rights and freedoms to those they deem beneath them. They are holding on to archaic ideas.
We must resist and we must NOT comply.
Don’t be mistaken. It is not the Left or Right who is your enemy. It is not those people we see walking down the street who seem so different than us but, in reality, just want to make a good living, have a home, keep their family safe, and enjoy life. While they may get led astray and turned into a misguided and angry mob, it is those who are contriving the divisions and fomenting the anger. It is the fear peddlers, scapegoaters, and power thirsty who are are nemeses.
Those who wish to silence us… and those we disagree with, are the true obstacles to peace, prosperity and freedom. We should all want to hear the words of those we don’t understand and those who push our buttons. If we can learn to understand them without necessarily agreeing with them, then we can inoculate ourselves against the historically tried and true divisive tactics of would-be tyrants everywhere.
When two banks of a river can be connected by a unifying bridge, raging treacherous rapids cannot impede the reciprocity shared.
And if Janis Joplin was right…
“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” — Janis Joplin
…then we should not hesitate to declare our freedom in the face of all they throw at us.
What good are all the bells and whistles of a kind of domesticated slavery without the freedom that our souls crave and need to sing?
Perhaps one of the most resounding remarks on freedom come from the historical character, William Wallace, which the movie, Braveheart, was based on:
Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you'll live -- at least a while. And dying in your beds many years from now, would 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!!!
And he was not alone. I believe I will join him and Camus and so many others in history who have realized how fundamental, nonnegotiable, soul-saving, and rightful inalienable, freedom is to the human condition.
Fine job you've done here Mr. Bear.
I can appreciate that dealing with this concept of freedom is like trying to take a bull by the horns only to find out that as you groped for one of the horns you've latched on to the prickly spines of some megafauna porcupine from the paleolithic!
Funny...as I was reading the text - too quickly I suppose as so often happens to us here on the internet - I mistook the word 'nation' for 'notion'. I had to back up and read the sentence again. But, because I do not yet think like the much anticipated biodigitally-converged borg* that they seem to want us all to become, I got to thinking in that messy, imaginative human sort of way that we still have access to...
When the concept of nation becomes merely a notion, freedom becomes a triviality.
It's strange and unsettling to say the least that we are in a moment of history defined by the universal slaughter of meaning. Nothing means what you thought it did. Bedrock has become vapour.
Stare in to the lights, my pretties. Trust us. Don't question.
When they trumpet "inclusion" as a pretext for furthering a darker ideology, for instance, they mean it in the sense that the warden of a penitentiary might mean it. You WILL own nothing. You WILL be happy. You WILL remain seated within the barbed wire enclosure or the geo-fenced precinct. You WILL wait for instructions. Free will is dead. Jesus is fake news and blabedy-bla-bla. If you fail to believe this, you are an IMVE (ideologically motivated violent extremist) and we have...plans...for you.
I'm not even formally or institutionally religious, but come on Yuval et. al.!
When reality becomes inverted and that inversion is mindlessly 'accepted' or not even remarked upon by the 'masses', then anything goes and nothing matters. We have entered into a territory of "normalized" mind-fuckery and cognitive sodomy. Definitions can be made up on the fly as our death cult marches along to the precipice of an extinction level event. Maybe I'm being alarmist, or possibly hyperbolic. I certainly don't look forward to a future wherein the only consolation I have left is a feeble "I told you so".
It occurs to me that we are not even being 'governed' anymore. This is not governance. This is a command-and-control structure that has jettisoned all checks and balances, all standards of decency and humanity. It's more akin to Wildlife Management or factory farming. It is a stealth and clandestine operation that has been underway below the radar of public consciousness and scrutiny for some time now. Consolidation, amalgamation and concentration have been operative instruments in our institutions for decades now. Aaron Kheriaty explains this succinctly in his analysis of the rise of the biomedical security state and what he calls "The New Abnormal" in his recent book. But we've seen this phenomenon in other domains of course as well - from education to agriculture and all points in between. We are living inside a machine. We have, to a great extent, internalized this machine. I'm not sure anyone - any particular person - meant to build it, but it has nevertheless been built. And those close to the levers and dials of power see no reason to deviate from this path and are tripling down in its service.
Anyhow, those who claim to govern are either useful idiots or actually knowingly traitorous and malevolent. I suspect it is a combination of the two. We do know beyond a shadow of a doubt that our cabinets have indeed been "penetrated". And in the words of the Kingpin of Technocratic Chaos himself, that we are undergoing a "structural restructuring" at the planetary scale. (a veritable poet he is!) . And therefore it is not just cabinets that are candidates for "penetration", but the brain-pans, so to speak, of that amorphous resource formerly known as "the citizenry" who are equally "eligible" for penetration in the form of by-now ambient lies, deceptions and propaganda.
End of rant.
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*What is the biodigital convergence? Policy Horizons Canada
https://youtu.be/YDuv63Qa8DE (8 minutes of horror on the part of dissociated techno-utopians)