Freedom's just another word for everything to lose

When one becomes of an age, one can no longer be sure that common knowledge of his earlier years is still common knowledge. Some forty or fifty years ago Kris Kristofferson wrote a poignant song about loss and the meaninglessness of life titled Me and Bobby McGee. One line in that song that resonated heavily in those days was "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose;" hence, the title of this post.

"Freedom" has been the watchword of the political right in this country designed to carry a massive burden of deception and destruction. It is high time Progressives start dealing with this term instead of shying away from criticizing such a foundation term for Americans.

Freedom has many meanings and those meanings are derived from the context in which the term is used. Absolute freedom in the real world verges on being a contradiction in terms. Absolute freedom would be the freedom of the jungle because this is the world of predator and prey in which only the predator is free. Only the tiger is free, every other creature's freedom is conditional upon not meeting up with the tiger. Does this remind anybody of corporate capitalism? It was this fear of more powerful animals that first encouraged humans to band together for mutual protection. Society was born of the effort to avoid absolute freedom; however, humans living in groups soon found that they needed rules, frequently in the form of taboos or religions. These rules, given the perversity of human nature, had to be enforced, hence the beginning of government. Thus human freedom has meaning only in the context of a society held together by some degree of force. With this understanding of the necessity of government, the next question is how much government. Mankind has fought violently over this issue. I think a useful way to address this issue is to go back to freedom's evolutionary roots, namely, mutual protection.

Mutual protection places a primacy on the group. A fundamental fallacy of the regressives is that one can have freedom without the group. This view, I believe, is considerably a consequence of technology's beneficent impact. In an earlier age, when the frontier was vast and wild, a few people ventured forth, but they formed communities as soon as they could and most people remained in cities and small towns. Go back three or four hundred years and most people in Europe were living in villages and towns. Go back to the Crusades, when most people lived in villages, these societies were so small and compact and fear of wandering too far from the village and its protection was so pronounced that many crusaders never found their way home. The point is that technology has permitted humans to live in such large groups and with a seeming independence of other humans that people now believe that the group is no longer necessary for their protection. In place of the mutually obligated group they now hire the police or arm themselves for individual protection to the detriment of the group. This is one of the ironies arising when humans become their own worst enemy.

One needs, however, to expand the awareness of threats to humankind to see the continuing need of group primacy. We have a planet of increasingly limited resources with a population of seven billion and counting and in which mankind has become its own worst enemy. The threat is enormous, so enormous that we must now consider all humans on this planet as part of a single group, sometimes called a global village. Freedom needs to be defined in the context of this group just as the first humans defined it within the context of the clan. We need the rules which will allow this global village to protect itself from itself. This, needless to say, is a new experience for mankind. It is why some people have argued that to avoid killing ourselves as a species we need an external enemy because that is what societal protection has always meant. There is no external enemy. The enemy is us as Pogo so observantly said.

The regressives have tried to divorce freedom from society and society's necessary governance. The logic is not there so they have used the emotional connotations of freedom to motivate people against their own government. A modicum of thought would quickly reveal that it is not the government that is the problem, despite Reagan's declaration to the contrary, it is who is controlling the government. Our War for Independence was not fought to turn people loose in the jungle as prey, but as the Constitution declares, to form a more perfect union. We wanted a society in which the people had a say in how they are to be governed, but governed they would be.

What does all this mean for Progressives? We must, I think, clearly and repeatedly demonstrate that there is no human freedom without government. We must measure a society by how much freedom is available to every citizen in the society, not just the affluent. We must understand freedom in much clearer terms than is currently the case. Freedom from fear is as essential now as when humans first formed their mutual defense against predators. Freedom from want is as necessary as freedom from assault, because severe want generates violence, not to mention the adverse impact on human development. In short, FDR's Four Freedoms should be added to our Constitution as rights of this country's citizens. There is, of course, no freedom if a single person, i.e. the tiger, is capable of destroying any and all others. Fear is a fundamental enemy of freedom, eclipsed only by the destruction itself. People feared Hitler and his Gestapo and military machine. What they feared was what millions experienced--death. This is why a dictatorship cannot have free citizens. We must make this clear to people

As noted above, we no longer have to fear predation by lions and tigers. We face corporate predators. The casualties of their predation are, in the popular mind, mainly "losers" not casualties. It is doubtful that early humans considered a clan member devoured by a lion a "loser." This is an indication of how grossly we have let corporate and wealthy America distort the popular perception. The corporation, now deemed a person, is the primary predator loose in our society. We must use our society to protect us from this predator as did our ancestors to protect themselves from their predators.

Bob Newhard