Freedom – Everywhere in Chains

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?

“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 18^th 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.”

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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: