They Thought They Were Free
Posted by PintofStout on June 11th, 2009
I just read a blog post at the Inductivist blog (via reiver on Twitter) talking about American exceptionalism. The point of the post was a deeper look at the characteristics that are supposedly exceptional to Americans, specifically the “freedom and control over one’s life”. At this point, empiricism in the study cited deals only with the answers to a question rather than the question itself. There are as many aspects to human freedom as there are individual human ambitions, so every person asked may be answering about a different aspect of freedom, whether it be economic freedom or dietary freedom or freedom of movement. The people answered based on their perception, but does perception translate into reality?
In the face of the amount of marketing and propaganda people face today – the very substance we live in and breathe in everyday – reality is only what any one person can be convinced of. Welcome to the front lines of an extremely low-intensity fourth generation warfare in a war between corporations (and corporations masquerading as civil servants). In this war for legitimacy, power, and profit the average citizen, worker, or even elite are not soldiers but the battlefield. In this battle, the players are all trying to convince those within earshot or cruise missile range that they have never had it better and those in control are to thank for it; or, conversely, that the citizens have never had it worse and could have it so much better if only control of the place were to change hands. In the list provided at the blog, none of the countries were officially pessimistic about their freedom. I am defining pessimistic based on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being freest, as anything below a score of five. Not one country – even Iraq and Iran – were below five. Majority rule makes the majority happy? Maybe most people are generally optimistic and think things could always be worse. Is there an apathy index companion to this survey? A people’s perception of their own freedom is not a good measure of that freedom, as the book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 by Milton Mayer illustrates. In other words, the frogs in the ever-warming pot don’t perceive themselves as dinner, but that doesn’t keep it from happening.
Freedom is a state of mind, though; it is an attitude. And that attitude is inherently resistive and suspicious – even jealous as Voltairine de Cleyre pointed out. The point of all this is simply to say that a feeling of freedom does not translate into actual freedoms.
June 28th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
I always thought the same thing when people said that we need to “create a sense of community”. Do they really mean community or just the feeling of being communal? There’s a big difference. A “sense” of community seems to convey just a psychological state, not a physical state.
July 6th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I guess a sense of community is only the start of an actual functioning community, or perhaps a result of the functioning of and partaking of real community. As you have stated, simply trying to achieve a “sense” of anything, really, is just a shallow attempt at veneer and not real substance.