The saying is that one has freedom until it harms others. After delivering that profundity people walk away feeling Wise and self-satisfied.
The problem is hat they haven’t said anything. Those of us who inhabit Planet Earth live with PEOPLE. Our freedom is what other PEOPLE decide we have. The fellow who just delivered the above chestnut leaves out all reality.
Who decides?
The above piece of Great Wisdom is, “One has freedom until I DECIDE it harms others.”
That is the “freedom” that is granted by every Communist, every fascist, and every slaveholder who ever lived. The Berlin Wall was set up because East Germany decided that the flow of young people into West Germany harmed East Germans.
And it DID.
“One has freedom until it harms others” justifies the Berlin Wall and the Fugitive Slave Laws. When a field hand who cost a man a thousand dollars runs away it definitely harmed him and his family. In fact, the loss of that piece of property could RUIN a small slave owner. To use the Great Wisdom that justifies illegal immigration, “The man who sent someone up North to reclaim his property just wanted a better life for his family.”
That was the way slave owners looked at it. The slave’s freedom harmed his family. That was what Andrew Jackson, who lived on the edge of ruin, viewed his chasing down HIS runaways.
Here is a critical distinction:
It is not that one who says “One has freedom until it harms others” is wrong.
It is not that he is right.
The point is that he is saying NOTHING.
THAT is the reason we are rudderless today. People get paid for saying NOTHING, from the pulpit and from the lectern.
The Bionic Man is here. Genetic selection is rushing toward us. What do we get from Traditional Values preachers and Harvard Ethics professors? They warn us that this power can be misused. They warn us that these powers are dangerous and can be misused.
Well, DUHH!
There is no thing as harmless freedom. There is no such thing as harmless power.
The reason anesthesiology became a medical specialty is because ether can EASILY kill a patient. In fact, with a random spark, it could kill everybody in the operating room. If our only reaction is to outlaw anything that can harm people, every drug on the market would be banned, starting with antibiotics.
Sugar an EASILY kill diabetics. The freedom to sell sugar should end with that.
Certainly automobiles would have to go.
In the onrushing new age, all the people we pay to advise us are saying NOTHING.
They make a LIVING saying nothing.
We have “both sides” and nobody at the wheel.
#1 by Simmons on 06/15/2008 - 11:13 am
Since we are a feminized society everything will put your eye out. America is like a hen get together where some consensus has to be built by endlessly talking and feeling about something or someone. Now I don’t really understand how it all works and I have even asked why and there is never an answer. But I do know the hens being hens regardless of gender are still unsettled even if consensus is reached and they are reaching out for leadership in their cackling ways. Too bad the clown drunks are who they see behind the wheel of the chicken truck.
#2 by Dave on 06/15/2008 - 1:14 pm
For the first time in history, the general public has access to real information.
It’s additive!!! And is it ever moving fast. Ordinary (intelligent) people everywhere are becoming MORE INFORMED than the insiders. And the standard of what is means to be informed is relentlessly pushing skyward. I have seen these standards move incredibility in just the last 3 years.
The pretenders and frauds have to be very careful in this environment.
Wordism cannot stand against the Internet.
I am to the point where I think the Courts are going to fall to the Internet. And Congress cannot continue in its present form. These institutions are becoming too ridiculous.
In the 1970s the WW II generation stumbled into its dotage and the software industry furnished a coordination platform that revolutionized production and distribution.
Congress, the Courts, and the whole regulatory apparatus moved not one iota. They remain stuck in their 19th century manifestation.
The Baby Boom generation is stumbling into its dotage (it’s mentality is in the Teddy Roosevelt era), clueless that the Internet has abolished ideology in a positive feedback loop that is relentlessly pushing the intelligent segment of public skyward.
The Courts and Congress are beyond reform. Law and accounting practices, academic consulting, and the whole regulatory apparatus (with its ridiculous and relentless posturing) are increasingly becoming jokes. These whole damn arenas are just too atavistic.
Too many highly intelligent people have access to an audience unencumbered by the mommy professors, academic journals, and university press gatekeepers.
You have got to see the positive feedback loop in intellectual standards to understand the Internet. It is a mechanism for forcing intellectual standards skyward.
Political Correctness (and ideology in general) cannot stand against this. I am sure it is impossible.
#3 by AFKANNow on 06/15/2008 - 6:31 pm
Dave made come excellent points:
you wrote:
in reply:
Wordism is used to structure our perceptions of ideology, while linking this with an emotional response that controls activity – or inactivity, as the preferred case may be.
The “intelligent segment of the public” seems to be beneath the radar of the Lamestream Media, and is really moving full speed ahead away from the Manufactured Consensus that controls so much of our social fabric.
We are enhancing the vertical component of Race, even as we speak.
you wrote:
in reply:
I think this is part and parcel of what men from Drucker to Martin van Creveld wrote about – the State AS AN EFFECTIVE POSITIVE TOOL OF SOCIAL POLICY is withering away in all but a few blunt sectors, and will be reduced to a handful of functions, done poorly, for an Elite that increasingly sees itself as transnational, today, and anational, in time.
Those who are dependent upon the tender mercies of the State will discover, in less than two generations – perhaps much less, the way things are going – that they are at the mercy of the kindness of strangers.
And, those who warn us that power can be misused need only look to their own lives for proof.
Their lives should form one proof, but their future should not be at our expense.
I think a LOT more people than the media is discussing are in increasingly dire straits, and this number will grow damn near exponentially after the ’08 Election.
They believed that governmental power was being used to help them; that it has been misused is something they can not understand – yet.
They believe – like Children – that If Only They Knew, They Would Do Something.
These Children do not realize They are responsible for it, and the Children are responsible for how they see the situation, and what they choose to DO about it.
FIVE DOLLARS A GALLON for diesel?
What’s your number for home heating oil this winter, where the talk of “global warming” will seem like a cruel joke?
Bob says people get paid for saying nothing, from the pulpit and the screen.
Close.
WHY they say nothing is much more important.
They say nothing because their only intent is to keep the drones in place, neutralized as any sort of independent actors; thus, the masses can never form any threat whatsoever to the carefully balanced status quo…
Which is collapsing around us, even as we speak.