Freedom or control

There are two ways to proceed in life - either to embrace freedom or to embrace control. There is no 'third way' beloved by politicians and statists (those who enjoy looking to government to give them power, prestige, or simply money): there is no middle ground between being free and being controlled.

The ethos of control is simple: you as an individual need controlling by those who are bigger or more powerful than you, and you in turn will seek to control those who are small or less powerful than you. The whole system is based on power and violence or the threat thereof if you decide to walk away from the system.

The ethos of freedom is similarly simple: you as an individual have a right to pursue your life as you see fit and logically to accept that all other individuals have a right to pursue their lives as they see fit; it is a simple corollary to the argument that to impinge on another's life or to force him or her to do something that they would not want to do. In a world of inviduals, there are no 'systems' - life and its exchanges and interactions are organically based, with cultures and ethics developing and emerging through subtle spontaneous solutions: the open society is based on freedom and voluntarism. Statists hate freedom: they hate the thought that we do not need to turn to 'someone bigger' or allegedly 'more intelligent' for help - they hate the thought that we are not babies or dependents who cannot sort out our own problems.

When people claim that others must be controlled 'for their own good' or that people 'cannot be trusted to look after themselves' or that 'freedom would lead to chaos' then you are hearing the voice of someone who wants to control you - no matter what fluffy words they add to their dialogue such as 'democratic wishes' or 'reasonable legislation' or the 'public interest'. Philosophers have long taught that such weasel words are forms of sophistry - fallacious arguing that do not hold up under scrutiny.

The ethos of control has led to the rise of the state, nationalism, levels of warfare unprecedented in human history, and in education rising illiteracy and innumeracy, the mass indoctrination of whole generations of students into dull thinking and hedonistic pursuits, and in medicine the mass medication of generations of people now suffering from 'unexpected' cancers and so-called 'western diseases' such as diabetes, as big agricultural-pharmaceutical concerns lobby for regulations, restrictions, controls, supposedly for the public interest but in truth for profits and power.

The ethos of control is controlling - it seeks to impose one person's will on that of another: can there be any justification for such a violation, except in terms of self-defence and the preservation of individual liberty? No.

And the results are clear - controlling people diminishes their dignity, it treats people like battery hen chickens, it seeks to remove their individuality and their ability to think critically. Why do so many people today enjoy soap operas when their great grandparents would have read literature or attended classical concerts? There has been a systematic dumbing down of the population through mass education, mass media, mass medicalization, and mass culture that locality has been reduced to homogeneity, eccentricity shuffled off into counselling, angry people put onto drugs to keep them quiet. And isn't it convenient that millions tie their brains up each night watching a highly filtered version of life through the TV?

The power of the mass media is phenomenal - it has been written about by the traditional left wing in politics for decades and they have a point - early in the 1920s propagandists realised the power of the media and sought to take it over for their purposes. The number of local papers and papers with intellectual content that criticises the orthodox view that we all should be controlled (by whom?) from the cradle to the grave has diminished. Serious journalism can now only be found on the web, but because you have to look for it, it is disregarded as not being 'serious' - to be serious in journalism implies taking a salary, having an office in London, New York, Washington, working for some Big Paper, and engaging in serious rubbish.

How to regain freedom.

To set your mind aright - turn off the TV set for a few months; stop buying papers; don't listen to the news. Allow your mind to regain its own sense of what is right and wrong (rather than being told what is normal by the media); allow your emotions to settle and to rediscover your innate intelligence and curiosity. For a while, don't trust what people tell you to do - whether it is sticking some poison callled a vaccine into your daughter or accepting more rights infringements in order to combat terrorism, or what kind of pills will reduce your cholesterol, or what movie you simply must see or product you must buy. The tentacles of control are subtle and almost everywhere you go. Most people we encounter espouse the kind of rubbish controllers want us to hear and believe - births should be in hospitals, babies should be vaccinated, children should be sent to school, the national curriculum is a good thing, taxes are the cost of civilisation, the BBC is impartial, the members of Parliament are rational thinking people, teachers know what they are doing, doctors really understand disease, TV is really funny - you really should watch it.

source: theamericansheeple.com

Find your own mind by closing such channels down for a few months. You'll mature, your brain will develop, your insight into your own life with progress - you'll remove the bombardment of controlling thoughts that seek to keep you dependent, dumb, thoughtless, and pliable - by companies as well as by governments. You'll start to think more for yourself, more about your family and what values are, you'll begin to appreciate the freedom to govern your own life and to assert your own values, and you'll begin to look askance upon those who blindly and thoughtlessly accept what others say.

And you'll find that you're less stressed. The mainstream media works on creating an atmosphere of fear: you fear your neighbour, the terrorists, the unseen diseases, the lack of health care, the lack of education, wandering perverts. Fear creates dependency - when we're worried about what 'they could do to us' then we fall into the dependency trap of believing that we need a strong, courageous, heroic government to take care of us. Of course, there's no such thing as strong, courageous, heroic government: government is built on power and power not only corrupts, it attracts those who are corrupt and who would wish to corrupt us all in turn. Of course, that's not taught in the schools.

Freedom is a highly fragile state; it is easily lost once we give our minds to others to tell us what to think and what to do. When you're through being mentally dependent on news sites, soap operas, films, adverts, magazines, and junk mass media publications (most of them), then you'll be intellectually stronger and healthier.

Pursuing freedom is like pursuing a healthy life style - it requires a discipline of purpose, an inner strength to avoid temptation, a perserverance to trust one's path and to avoid those who would have us fall back onto the crazy path illuminated so comically in the above picture!

The path to freedom involves recognizing that your efforts to live your own life are intrinsically valuable. When you are addicted to mass media, medication, poor diet (intellectual and culinary), and mass education, it is difficult to see how your life has a value in itself rather than as a value for others to use you - as a pupil, an employee, a husband or wife, a parent or a child. We should not be using each other, we should not be seeing each other as means to our ends, when we do we immediately enter the world of control and controlling mechanisms.

Schools are probably our greatest barrier to realizing freedom. Most of them, there are exceptions, teach dependency and control: rarely do they rise to the challenge of educating for self-confidence, moral strength, individualism, and critical thinking. No, they are institutions of dependency, moral turpitude, group identity, and slavish thinking. No wonder that our culture is in decline and the glory of freedom that was once heralded in the Enlightenment has all but been forgotten.

Article to continue -(added, August 2010)

Dr Alexander Moseley (c) 2010

February 17, 2010