Are you currently told to wear a mask, stay home and wait for release from house arrest?
Are you being told how you can gather with your family and your church?
Are you being told that you will need a vaccine passport so that you can travel and participate in society once again?
Has your business license become a noose around your neck?
Do you feel free to make choices about dealing with COVID-19?
Do you feel free from coercion? From arbitrary power?
Are you being told how to live your life by those who do not know you?
Do you agree with the following?
“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors–are essentially those on which the of an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.” (emphasis mine)
― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Collectively decided to be good is principle the 18th century Swiss philosopher and French Revolution muse Jean Jacques Rousseau was after: the “general will”, as penned in his 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Some equated Rousseau’s “general will” with an agreed upon rule of law that would ensure freedom and equal treatment in society. This, at first glance, appears to be beneficial for society. Yet, freedom can be quickly disposed of when the “general will” becomes a demand for obedience and conformity to its rules and laws. Dictators and totalitarian leaders – Democrats, specifically – and their media amplifiers have no problem creating a “general will” and dispensing with your freedom.
As you have witnessed, the Democrats/Left define and perpetrate “general will” in their own ideological (and theological – “social justice”) terms. The Left has no desire for input from anyone else.
The Left’s concocted “general will” is hawked by the predominately Leftist corporate media as the generally accepted will of the people. And, since the lie is in the NYT and on MSNBC, CNN and now on Fox News, people get the impression that what they are being sold is the real deal. The critical race theory based “1619 project” is just one example of what is being peddled. Mask wearing is another. Salvation from COVID-19 by vaccine is another
Those who do not abide by the “general will” Groupthink are rubes, “bitter clingers”, “deplorables”, “racists”, and not worthy of a social media voice in the controlled “general will” narrative.
Does any of this sound familiar in light of this past year of politics playing medicine, of mandates, lockdowns, the stolen election, and the stolen “general will”? Freedom – everywhere in chains because of the imposition of “general will”.
Collectivist’s lies may make you feel like you are in sync with the “general will.” Therein, you may feel safe. Collectivism talks of multiculturalism, of humanism, of a “better world for everyone.” Individual freedom is of no importance to collectivists.
If you care about your freedom, then throw off any attachment to the collectivist “void”. Put to death the collectivist impulse once and for all. Resurrect the human that is you. I return you to the words of Friedrich Hayek.:
“Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s own conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.”
And
“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”
******
The opening sentence to Rousseau’s The Social Contract:
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”
Rousseau, like many since, assumed that man is by nature a free and innocent being. He would tell you that man is not the problem. In The Social Contract he stated “Men are not naturally enemies”. He pointed to social institutions as the problem. Fast forward. Remember Barack Obama talking about the “fundamental transformation of America?”
Such a distorted vision of man is behind the ruinous ideology, i.e., Marxism, which has devasted and destroyed the lives of millions. In the effort to produce equality of results, the only equal result has been death by ideology.
Such a distorted vision of mankind is also behind the ad hoc justice being dispensed to today as “social justice.” Accordingly, people are not to be held accountable for crimes against another because of their social situation – environment is the problem, not the man. Yet, as anyone can see under ad hoc justice, a socially “just result” for the criminal does not produce an equally socially “just result” for the victim. The Left cares for one result but not the other.
As I write this, more and more of American institutions are becoming corrupted to serve the coming globalist collective. Man, who is “born free”, is willingly taking on the “chains” supplied by the institutions of the globalist collective.
To learn more about the “unconstrained vision” and before you read anything else this year, read …
David K. Clements, a business law professor at New Mexico State University, presents a cogent and courageous response to an emailed letter from NMSU President John Floros. Go and do likewise.
Added 1-28-2021:
I will not take the vaccine. Here’s why …
Dr. Dolores Cahill, professor of molecular genetics, School of Medicine at University College Dublin, and chairwoman of Irish Freedom Party:
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.’
‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,” he said.”
This conversation between John the “savage” and Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe, takes place in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian science fiction novel Brave New World.
Mond had explained to John the World State’s system of castes, control and consumerism established to create order, stability and happiness. Under the World State the world’s population, economy, technology and culture are made to serve the mission statement: “Community, Identity, Stability”.
John, reared on the Savage reservation and raised on Shakespeare, rejects Mond’s world as described here:
Everyone in Mond’s society belongs: nobody experiences the pain, loneliness, and rejection that has been part of John’s character formation. Nobody in the World State ever suffers any material want, such as hunger or overcrowding. Everyone lives in a clean, new, sterile, sanitary, and bright world with lots of things to buy. Everybody is conditioned or drugged to be happy…
To John, those elements of life Mond has jettisoned are exactly what make us human. Life for John is not worth living without the possibility of deep relationships and intellectual exploration and discovery.
What brought this novel to mind is the Left’s concerted effort to produce a similar globalist World State via the Great Reset. The “public health crisis” and the (illegitimate) 2020 election are the Left’s “gain of function” mutation of our rights and laws to bring about a World State.
Leftist professors, politicians, media provoking agents, Progressives, and even the Pope would have us believe that differences of class, race, income or XYZ can be resolved and that equality and freedom can be won by “A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.”
“It it has been said many times and my response has always been that, if anything, it is the communists who think like Christians. Christ spoke of a society where the poor, the weak and the marginalized have the right to decide. Not demagogues, not Barabbas, but the people, the poor, whether they have faith in a transcendent God or not. It is they who must help to achieve equality and freedom”. [emphasis added]
So, are we to believe that communists think like Christians (based on the communist seizure of Acts 4:32)?
Are we to choose to live under a flag of “Community, Identity, Stability”, where the people, the poor … achieve equality and freedom, and then (theoretically) be free of worry, material want, hate, isolation, disease, and would then be happy!?
I have tried to understand the heuristic behind those choosing freedom and those choosing to be free of freedom and desirous of living in a communist state. The Brave New World suggests to me that there are those who choose fail-prone freedom over happiness and those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom. These two views are at odds. I see the difference going to the very nature of what it means to be human.
As we heard in John’s response above and from your own experience, you know that freedom involves choice. And, being able to choose goes to the very essence of being human, does it not?
A material object cannot choose. Artificial Intelligence cannot know the sense of adventure and surprise inherent in the act of choosing. Objects and AI cannot know a sense of failure or of happiness or of worry or of hope that a choice may bring about.
For those who choose fail-prone freedom, life is tragic, romantic and the sum of all human potentialities. Value is created through freedom and choice: love, goodness, charity, etc. These, taking the initiative freely, will say, “I see what needs to be changed, and it starts with me.”
(Now, you don’t want to make the same choices John “the savage” did. You’ll end up in a very dark place. But you get the gist of what I am saying.)
Those who choose fail-safe happiness over fail-prone freedom, it seems to me, trade their freedom and choices for a doled-out life of (theoretical) material security and certainty. These lay the burden of responsibility for their happiness on the World State. You can see this in the growing welfare state.
These seek to avoid pain and suffering and any effort that might bring about pain and suffering inherent in a choice. These seek the material comfort and surety promised by socialism’s “workers’ paradise.” These, lacking the initiative to choose, will say “I see what needs to be changed and it starts with you.”
For, those who choose fail-safe happiness over freedom, in order to obtain fail-safe happiness, go on to coerce, cancel and control the lives of those who do not conform to the manifesto of the World State of Happiness.
Tragically, fail-prone freedom outliers are considered less than human by the World Staters and are sent to internment camps. You either live in the ‘civilized’ World State of the ‘enlightened’ ‘real’ people or you live as barely human on the Savage Reservation.
There are no families and no religion in the World State. Babies are engineered and hatched in the World State. Babies occur naturally within families on the Reservation. There is a syncretic religiosity on the Reservation. Those of the World State voyeuristically watch the savages and worship the assembly line developer Henry Ford.
When the World State requires you to give up your freedom along with your rights and your property so that it can mete out happiness in the form of physical well-being and solidarity with others in similar chains, what will happen to you? Years ago, I wanted to understand the World State of Happiness, aka, communism, and the threat it imposed on humanity.
During the early eighties I read the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s’ The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. (I doubt that Pope Francis has ever read these accounts of the devastation to human beings under communism. He prefers messaging that affirms his Marxist World State religion.)
As I learned from my reading, communism dehumanizes. And, as humans are wont to do, Solzhenitsyn rebelled against the imposition of inhumanity – a communist rule. The rule had begun as an ideology to put things right and ended as an institution of purges, mass murders and gulag camps.
“Communism is as crude an attempt to explain society and the individual as if a surgeon were to perform his delicate operations with a meat ax. All that is subtle in human psychology and in the structure of society (which is even more complex), all of this is reduced to crude economic processes. The whole created being—man—is reduced to matter. It is characteristic that Communism is so devoid of arguments that it has none to advance against its opponents in our Communist countries. It lacks arguments and hence there is the club, the prison, the concentration camp, and insane asylums with forced confinement.”
What is certain if you choose fail-safe happiness over freedom: your claiming the right to be happy will not be heard. For, you will have been “reduced to matter”. Your human nature will be eradicated in your quest for security and stability, aka, happiness.
The things I had read in Orwell’s 1984, I deemed were true in a world of facile resistance.
Orwell’s 1984 has become Orwell’s 2021.
If you watch the mainstream media you would get the impression from the case numbers, positivity rates, death tickers and PSAs it presents that the Pandemic apocalypse is upon us. You will also get the impression that you had better do what you are told – stay home, don’t gather, wear a mask, get a vaccine – or else you will die or cause another’s death or be arrested or fined or your neighbor will turn you in and the COVID Stasi will come to your house and take you away.
The doctors in the videos below present a powerful antidote to the hype, misinformation and fear-mongering that is being used to remove our freedom and to control us – “the virus of truth.”.
“The lockdown has caused more harm than the virus.”
“Stand up to the Satanic theory imposed on the world.”
“No need for fear”
“You can take off the mask.”
“We see no evidence of a medical pandemic… .it looks like a plan-demic.”
“…remove the politicians who are doing more harm than good.”
“Somebody’s worried because we are telling the truth.”
Thanks to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) their bioweapon “gain of function” experiment was released in the world. The CCP is responsible for the lives lost.
Pandemic, Wuhan, Dr. Yan
Globalists (big-tech oligarchs, big pharma, corporations, Wall street, media, etc.) are taking advantage of the pandemic. Their “gain of function” experiment with a Public Health Crisis is meant to produce the Great Reset of economies and social and world order.
‘The Corona panic is a play. It’s a scam. A swindle. It’s high time we understood that we’re in the midst of a global crime.’ Dr. James Fetzer (You will want to read what’s on this link.)
You will want to see the video at the link below. You are being warned by medical doctors against receiving the vaccine. Doctors are being intimidated and arrested for speaking out.
[Dr. Ari] Joffe has authored a peer-review academic paper titled COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink that finds the repercussion harms caused by the COVID lockdowns are ten-times greater than any benefit that can be perceived.
Have you seen the movie Independence Day? If you have then you would know that aliens have invaded our world. There are aliens in the air and, you might agree, there are aliens on the ground in the form of the cast.
A blurb about the movie from the IMDb website: “The aliens are coming and their goal is to invade and destroy. Fighting superior technology, Man’s best weapon is the will to survive.”
Man’s best weapon here may be to laugh off this farce. I like sci-fi. I think Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey and the original The Day the Earth Stood Still directed by Robert Wise are some of the best in that genre. But this movie is epic as pathetic slap-stick sci-fi. Of course you can’t take it seriously.
Will Smith’s pre~Men~In~Black typecasting of silly No Fear bravado and Randy Quaid’s dad~is~crazy~but~somehow~his~zaniness~endears~us~to~him role adds fuel to this trash can fire. The role of President Thomas Whitemore is played by a stiff whose part would have better played better by a teleprompter. Jeff Goldblum as David Levinson portrays an MIT educated-computer expert~chess playing~environmentalist~satellite tech~you~name~it~he’s~got~the~answer~for~you~kind~of~guy who ‘triangulates’ the four corners of this going-nowhere movie.
The movie’s special effects won an Academy Award and I’ll never know why. The effects are third-rate at best. (I thought Twister should have won that year). The movie does, though, offer something for the political observer ~ a perfect realization of the Obama presidency.
The dark, foreboding and humongous space ship hovering over Washington D.C. is a perfect archetype of the Obama Administration. Out of the bottom of the ominous alien craft come lethal rays: Obamacare taxes and immigration fiats. Cities and people’s lives are instantly destroyed. America is under attack.
There is no reason given for why this is happening other than America is America and the aliens say that America must die. So it is that Eric Holder, an onerous chief alien, sits in the mother ship’s ivory tower directing America’s destruction with reserved glee.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it.” At least for America as we have known it.
…The space ship is hovering….
Constance (the President’s Press Secretary):“Now what do we do?
President Thomas Whitmore:“Address the nation. There’s gonna be a lot of frightened people out there.”
Constance:“Yeah, I’m one of ’em.”
Wow! Someone save us from the dialog! Thankfully the brave and ‘wacky’ heros played by Will Smith and Randy Quaid) come to America’s aid and help bring an end to this distraction of a movie.
Using viral computer ‘implants’ and sexy aircraft maneuvering the alien ‘death’ ship is decimated but only after hundreds of minor skirmishes with the pesky alien ‘gnats’ (the larva born in Obama’s ideological intransigence or perhaps in Jeff Goldblum’s The Fly movie).
The next time you watch this movie listen to the dialog. It deserves a Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot of Mystery Science Theatre over dubbing!
We can turn a movie off when the Hollywood kitsch gets to be too much or when the credits (and debits) finally roll. But we can’t turn off government when it makes no sense. Except if you and I begin voting it out of our lives.
Do you want freedom from annihilation by Obamacare taxation? How about “Fighting for our right to live ~ to exist” without own government’s tyranny, oppression and persecution? How about freedom from government’s intrusion of our privacy and its coercive mandates? Will the middle class now go quietly into the night now that it is being taxed into oblivion?
America’s Independence began when it resisted taxation without representation. Now we have representation that doesn’t represent our best interests and that mimics King George’s taxation edicts. Let’s throw off the shackles of tyranny and vaporize the black cloud of government that overshadows us wherever we go. Vote Obama and the Dems out.
It is confirmed. There is alien life out there. They are living among us: Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Holder, Napolitano, Durbin, Charles Rangel, Barbara Boxer, Elizabeth Warren…
My pursuit of happiness is being restrained by the Health Care Mandate Law. I now see myself as an indentured slave under the oppressive masters of the Health Care Mandate and the massive debt burden created by our so-called representatives. My children and I are now being shackled to the enormous costs of mandatory health insurance and a gigantic Federal and State tax burden. Government grows at the expense of its people – rich or poor.
Every time activist congressmen and judges stretch the meaning of our very concise U.S. Constitution to fit their unconstrained social agendas it costs the taxpayer money and liberty. Soon neither will be left. It is no wonder the Obama-ites want the rich to pay more – most of the American people and small businesses are tapped out.
For me, happiness is not an expensive health insurance policy written with thousands of pages of small print as a federally mandated law, a law written out of Stage One thinking – without a thought of the damaging repercussions, a law enacted by representatives who hadn’t even read the bill before passing it (Nancy Pelosi: “We have to pass the bill to find out what is in it.“). If you think this is happiness then I also have some insurance that you should buy.
BTW: It’s all OK, isn’t it? Just keep using your democracy to vote away your life, liberty and your pursuit of happiness in exchange for stacks of noble-sounding demogogically derived bureaucratically tyrannical securities. In so doing you are choosing dependence over liberty and therefore, loss of choice.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep…his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” C.S. Lewis
Vanity Fair, May 2011 issue, under the heading Five Things the Lamestream Media Won’t Tell You About the Constitution:
“2. The phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the Constitution. It was coined in 1975 by William Ayers.”
*****
Here’s something to ponder: a golf game is more important to Obama (who learned about compartmentalization while being around Ayers) than attending church with his family.
Obama has no problem deciding whether to play golf. The economy, Lybia and…? These issues don’t require faith or prayer or even a decision. For Obama, these things require golf (and campaigning for 2012).
2012: send Obama back to wherever he came from. Somewhere there is a community that needs his golf experience!
*****
In stark contrast to the morally filibustering Obama is the integrity and forthrightness of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan:
On the opposite side of the fence (or state border) from Obama is Wisconsin’s Rep. Paul Ryan. In the Sunday, April 17th, 2011 Chicago Tribune there is an article about Ryan titled Wisconsin’s Ryan is thrust into spotlight: Conservative’s plans put him at odds with Obama.” The article discusses some of the details of Ryan’s The Path to Prosperity budget plan. There is also this quote:
“Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, in the news for his own budget battles, is an ally (of Ryan). “There are two types of people in politics, people who want to be somebody great or people who want to do something great,” he said Paul is among the latter.””
And in the article:
“House Republican Peter Roskam (a Christian), of Wheaton (Illlinois), called him (Ryan) well-prepared and said, “He doesn’t overstate or oversell and he’s clear – that’s a gift in this town.”
And:
“”He’s very devoted to his family. He flies back for parent-teacher conferences,” said Janesville attorney George Steil Jr. who practiced with Ryan’s father.”
At the end of the article:
“Joe Van Rooy, who teaches government at Janesville’s Parker High School…takes his students to Washington every year and they meet with Ryan. He said the congressman, now in his seventh term, knows their families and remembers their names. Ryan lectures them about political civility.”
“He noticed, though, that one year Ryan was fingering prayer beads while taking student’s questions. The teacher asked why.
“He said, ‘I am so stressed out about the country.’”
(emphasis mine)
*****
It appears that for Obama, faith is just another tool to leverage himself and his constant campaign. He is more interested in power than in principle.
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
*****
“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
*****
“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
*****
“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
*****
To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
*****
“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
*****
Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
*****
If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
*****
“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
*****
“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
*****
Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
*****
“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
*****
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
*****
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
*****
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
*****
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
*****
God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
*****
From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
*****
“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
*****
One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
*****
“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
*****
God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
*****
“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
**
“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
*****
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
*****
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
*****
“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*****
This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
*****
“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
*****
Freedom – Everywhere in Chains
January 31, 2021 Leave a comment
Are you less free now than a year ago?
Are you currently free to flourish as a human?
Are you currently told to wear a mask, stay home and wait for release from house arrest?
Are you being told how you can gather with your family and your church?
Are you being told that you will need a vaccine passport so that you can travel and participate in society once again?
Has your business license become a noose around your neck?
Do you feel free to make choices about dealing with COVID-19?
Do you feel free from coercion? From arbitrary power?
Are you being told how to live your life by those who do not know you?
Do you agree with the following?
Collectively decided to be good is principle the 18th century Swiss philosopher and French Revolution muse Jean Jacques Rousseau was after: the “general will”, as penned in his 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Some equated Rousseau’s “general will” with an agreed upon rule of law that would ensure freedom and equal treatment in society. This, at first glance, appears to be beneficial for society. Yet, freedom can be quickly disposed of when the “general will” becomes a demand for obedience and conformity to its rules and laws. Dictators and totalitarian leaders – Democrats, specifically – and their media amplifiers have no problem creating a “general will” and dispensing with your freedom.
As you have witnessed, the Democrats/Left define and perpetrate “general will” in their own ideological (and theological – “social justice”) terms. The Left has no desire for input from anyone else.
The Left’s concocted “general will” is hawked by the predominately Leftist corporate media as the generally accepted will of the people. And, since the lie is in the NYT and on MSNBC, CNN and now on Fox News, people get the impression that what they are being sold is the real deal. The critical race theory based “1619 project” is just one example of what is being peddled. Mask wearing is another. Salvation from COVID-19 by vaccine is another
Those who do not abide by the “general will” Groupthink are rubes, “bitter clingers”, “deplorables”, “racists”, and not worthy of a social media voice in the controlled “general will” narrative.
Does any of this sound familiar in light of this past year of politics playing medicine, of mandates, lockdowns, the stolen election, and the stolen “general will”? Freedom – everywhere in chains because of the imposition of “general will”.
Collectivist’s lies may make you feel like you are in sync with the “general will.” Therein, you may feel safe. Collectivism talks of multiculturalism, of humanism, of a “better world for everyone.” Individual freedom is of no importance to collectivists.
If you care about your freedom, then throw off any attachment to the collectivist “void”. Put to death the collectivist impulse once and for all. Resurrect the human that is you. I return you to the words of Friedrich Hayek.:
And
******
The opening sentence to Rousseau’s The Social Contract:
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”
Rousseau, like many since, assumed that man is by nature a free and innocent being. He would tell you that man is not the problem. In The Social Contract he stated “Men are not naturally enemies”. He pointed to social institutions as the problem. Fast forward. Remember Barack Obama talking about the “fundamental transformation of America?”
Such a distorted vision of man is behind the ruinous ideology, i.e., Marxism, which has devasted and destroyed the lives of millions. In the effort to produce equality of results, the only equal result has been death by ideology.
Such a distorted vision of mankind is also behind the ad hoc justice being dispensed to today as “social justice.” Accordingly, people are not to be held accountable for crimes against another because of their social situation – environment is the problem, not the man. Yet, as anyone can see under ad hoc justice, a socially “just result” for the criminal does not produce an equally socially “just result” for the victim. The Left cares for one result but not the other.
As I write this, more and more of American institutions are becoming corrupted to serve the coming globalist collective. Man, who is “born free”, is willingly taking on the “chains” supplied by the institutions of the globalist collective.
To learn more about the “unconstrained vision” and before you read anything else this year, read …
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle by Thomas Sowell
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Here are two men who have shown “readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority” (“general will” majority):
Economist Thomas Sowell:
A word about the COVID-19 hysteria from Pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson
Added 2-1-2021. The truth about COVID-19, masks and the lies we are being fed …
This informative video is found at the following link:
Unmasking The Truth – Dr. Lee Merritt -Omaha, Nebraska
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Filed under 2021 current events, cultural Marxism, pandemic, Political Commentary, Politics, social commentary, social justice Tagged with COLLECTIVISM, COVID-19, Democrats. Millennials, freedom, Friedrich Hayek, Globalism, lockdowns, mandates, Marxism, pandemic, social justice, socialism, Thomas Sowell, vaccines