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LadyEllen -> RE: Is ***FREEDOM*** A good Thing to be TAKEN from You? (6/6/2009 7:44:28 AM)
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define freedom
much is made here of personal responsibility et al, liberty and all that; very often applied to the idea of being able to stand on your own two feet, and often as an attack against the apparently indolent and just as often as an attack against the idea of social welfare provision.
yet consider; taking a job, working for someone else to provide for oneself - this is not freedom or liberty, but a limited form of bondage whereby one gladly gives up one's freedom in order to eat. Neither is this personal responsibility - it is actually an abandonment of personal responsibility to sell oneself to another; it is the employer that has demonstrated personal responsibility in founding a business.
Yet even this paragon of apparent virtue is no such thing, for he is often indentured to the banks and always indentured to his customers - in fact if he has a family depending on the business he is even less virtuous than the employee slave, for he sells not only himself but his family into bondage. and by extension so do the bankers and the shareholders.
We can only conclude then that this freedom thing is an elusive quality in all this, and so it is because we are all, whether we like it or not, interdependent social animals. And we all trade our independence for something more pressing, without much consideration of higher philosophical principles, recognising that we are only each free within the context of the limitations of our situation.
The problem we have is solely when it is others who are deciding what freedoms we should give up for the benefit of those others. This is what is occuring in the EU right now (including Ireland, who are being asked to vote to give up freedom again, having made the "wrong" choice the first time) and what is occurring in the wider western world as our glorious leaders redefine our freedoms without reference to us, yet seem to go unaffected thereby.
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