“They care more about control, and more of it. Their goal is to eliminate the second amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms... They hate the NRA, they hate the second amendment, they hate individual freedom.”
This is a graphic example of someone who doesn't understand the concept of freedom, who believes that being restrained in what you want to do is unfreedom and who blames, as he does later in his speech, socialists, thus demonstrating that he not only completely fails to understand the concept of freedom, but has not a clue what socialism is. You can only understand freedom from the perspective of the human being as a social being, a being who lives in an interactive and interdependent environment. If you cannot accept that then you will never understand human nature and the nature of the human collective experience. The whole individual freedom concept of the human being as an isolated atomistic individual is a nonsense and an impossibility, it postulates a being who does not, nor cannot, exist. He is right about one thing, I hate individual freedom when it is discussed in the manner that Wayne LaPierre discusses it. It is an argument to justify every heinous act, every hate and prejudice so beloved of the racist, the fascist and the would be slaver. They are the arguments we are being bombarded with in this nation by the Brexiteers in their determination to remove all of our rights and freedoms and reduce us to a slave like status. It is the argument of the bully and the authoritarian who refuses to be constrained by norms, morals and ethical behaviour. Such people think that the law is for the little people, that law and order are purely for their convenience and doesn't apply to them.
Let me return to the concept of individual freedom as postulated by Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham. I have probably posted similar to this in the past, but if I have, I will repeat it because it bears repeating, particularly at times such as this. When discussing freedom the waters become muddied as, taken literally, individual freedom is a meaningless concept. Individual freedom is indeed a basic human right, but, as I continually say, has to be seen in the context of the human being as a social animal, in that, one person’s exercise of freedom may require the restriction of another’s, and, in economic terms, one person’s use of scarce resources may mean another person’s lack of resources. That is unavoidable and simply a fact of social life. To discuss the concepts of freedom and rights in an abstract, desocialised way can be a futile exercise, and it is meaningless in the context of the human being as an atomised individual. For example, Hobbes states that:
"Liberty, or freedom, signifies, properly, the absence of opposition; by opposition, I mean external impediments of motion. A freeman is he; that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to do".
That statement looks quite impressive, but what does it actually mean? Am I having my freedom impeded by being physically and/or legally prevented from killing someone if that is what I have a will to do? Clearly this is not what Hobbes intended by his statement, but it serves to highlight just how abstract and ambiguous such a statement is, and unfortunately how it is too often taken in that literal sense, because that is exactly what the NRA in the United States are arguing. If however Hobbes really does mean that freedom is an absence of opposition, he must mean that my freedom is being impeded when I am prevented from murdering someone against my will. Bentham takes Hobbes’s principle further by arguing that “liberty is the silence of the law.” Therefore any law preventing me from murdering someone if that is my will must be restricting my liberty. Indeed Bentham states that “every law is an evil, because every law is a violation of liberty; so that government, I say again, can only choose between evils” (Theories of Legislation). He qualifies this by stating that, if, for example, government passes a law to prevent or punish me for murder, then they must ensure that the events that they seek to prevent are really evil, and such evils are greater than the evil they are about to employ as a means of prevention. According to Bentham’s criteria, preventing a murder, or any other form of crime, is in itself an evil, but it may not be as evil as the actual murder or other crime. If that is the case, then preventing rape or preventing a terrorist blowing up a crowd of shoppers in a city centre must be forms of evil. By that same argument, preventing someone from killing multiple children in a school must also be a form of evil. This a peculiar interpretation of evil, and this philosophical thinking is therefore similar to the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand who argues that altruism is evil – by altruism she means doing anything that may help or assist another if there is no benefit or advantage in it for you. It is this philosophy that is the guiding philosophical thought underpinning neo-liberalism. Another aspect of this way of defining freedom is the position taken by the philosopher Karl Popper, who argues that the state is a necessary evil and must not be allowed to grow greater than is absolutely necessary. What I will argue is that the state is neither good nor evil, but essentially reflects the policies and behaviour of the personnel in charge of it at any given point in history. The state is not a “thing” independent of human activity and behaviour; it is an interdependent set of human institutions, an administrative concept for the regulation and administration of any given political entity. People can be evil and can utilise the agencies of the state for evil purposes, but equally, people can be altruistic and concerned for the welfare of others and can therefore utilise the agencies of the state for good. The state can be large, small, intrusive or liberating; it can be whatever the people directing its activities desire it to be.
That such questions are even asked and have to be challenged in our modern uncivilised world shows the extent of the true disease of British and American society, the spread of greed and selfishness which is the gospel of the free market individual freedom argument. A dominant ideology of aggressive individual selfishness will produce aggressively selfish individuals. If there is any area of public life that displays the benefits of intervention by the state and regulation, it is in health and welfare. If empirical data displays anything, it shows that the major contributions to public health and welfare came, not from the medical profession but from politics, in the form of legislation. The requirements of legislation for the provision of sewage systems, drainage, clean water systems, public toilets, inside toilets, council housing with internal plumbing and baths, the requirement for toilets fitted with ‘s’ bends and other such regulations have done as much and more to remove the causes of disease and illness as any medical measures. Industrial legislation in the form of health and safety legislation, controlling pollution, asbestos, requiring air extraction, limiting exposure to dangerous chemicals and a host of other measures have also contributed to the health and welfare of the population. Legislation limiting hours of work, the provision of school meals and milk, providing factories and schools with canteens, massively benefited the health and welfare of working people and their children. I could go on and on, but hope that this is sufficient to show that such forms of preventative and protective regulations are incalculable in their effectiveness as a provision for public health and welfare. History records such measures, but with little comment on their effects, or little research into their success in combatting disease and raising living standards. In other worlds, real freedom for our peoples came from restrictions on other people's freedoms to do whatever they liked.
What should rouse our anger is that in the UK every one of the measures just discussed have been attacked by the free-marketeers, and if they haven’t been removed or transferred to the private sector they soon will be.
The right are just simply wrong on almost all aspects of the human condition, they do not want to consider any other points of view that may mean they have to consider other people, but they are not only wrong, they are dangerous. They are in power because they appeal to every lowest common denominator in the human condition. They understand the lowest common denominators in people because that is what they represent, the lowest of the low. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
That statement looks quite impressive, but what does it actually mean? Am I having my freedom impeded by being physically and/or legally prevented from killing someone if that is what I have a will to do? Clearly this is not what Hobbes intended by his statement, but it serves to highlight just how abstract and ambiguous such a statement is, and unfortunately how it is too often taken in that literal sense, because that is exactly what the NRA in the United States are arguing. If however Hobbes really does mean that freedom is an absence of opposition, he must mean that my freedom is being impeded when I am prevented from murdering someone against my will. Bentham takes Hobbes’s principle further by arguing that “liberty is the silence of the law.” Therefore any law preventing me from murdering someone if that is my will must be restricting my liberty. Indeed Bentham states that “every law is an evil, because every law is a violation of liberty; so that government, I say again, can only choose between evils” (Theories of Legislation). He qualifies this by stating that, if, for example, government passes a law to prevent or punish me for murder, then they must ensure that the events that they seek to prevent are really evil, and such evils are greater than the evil they are about to employ as a means of prevention. According to Bentham’s criteria, preventing a murder, or any other form of crime, is in itself an evil, but it may not be as evil as the actual murder or other crime. If that is the case, then preventing rape or preventing a terrorist blowing up a crowd of shoppers in a city centre must be forms of evil. By that same argument, preventing someone from killing multiple children in a school must also be a form of evil. This a peculiar interpretation of evil, and this philosophical thinking is therefore similar to the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand who argues that altruism is evil – by altruism she means doing anything that may help or assist another if there is no benefit or advantage in it for you. It is this philosophy that is the guiding philosophical thought underpinning neo-liberalism. Another aspect of this way of defining freedom is the position taken by the philosopher Karl Popper, who argues that the state is a necessary evil and must not be allowed to grow greater than is absolutely necessary. What I will argue is that the state is neither good nor evil, but essentially reflects the policies and behaviour of the personnel in charge of it at any given point in history. The state is not a “thing” independent of human activity and behaviour; it is an interdependent set of human institutions, an administrative concept for the regulation and administration of any given political entity. People can be evil and can utilise the agencies of the state for evil purposes, but equally, people can be altruistic and concerned for the welfare of others and can therefore utilise the agencies of the state for good. The state can be large, small, intrusive or liberating; it can be whatever the people directing its activities desire it to be.
That such questions are even asked and have to be challenged in our modern uncivilised world shows the extent of the true disease of British and American society, the spread of greed and selfishness which is the gospel of the free market individual freedom argument. A dominant ideology of aggressive individual selfishness will produce aggressively selfish individuals. If there is any area of public life that displays the benefits of intervention by the state and regulation, it is in health and welfare. If empirical data displays anything, it shows that the major contributions to public health and welfare came, not from the medical profession but from politics, in the form of legislation. The requirements of legislation for the provision of sewage systems, drainage, clean water systems, public toilets, inside toilets, council housing with internal plumbing and baths, the requirement for toilets fitted with ‘s’ bends and other such regulations have done as much and more to remove the causes of disease and illness as any medical measures. Industrial legislation in the form of health and safety legislation, controlling pollution, asbestos, requiring air extraction, limiting exposure to dangerous chemicals and a host of other measures have also contributed to the health and welfare of the population. Legislation limiting hours of work, the provision of school meals and milk, providing factories and schools with canteens, massively benefited the health and welfare of working people and their children. I could go on and on, but hope that this is sufficient to show that such forms of preventative and protective regulations are incalculable in their effectiveness as a provision for public health and welfare. History records such measures, but with little comment on their effects, or little research into their success in combatting disease and raising living standards. In other worlds, real freedom for our peoples came from restrictions on other people's freedoms to do whatever they liked.
What should rouse our anger is that in the UK every one of the measures just discussed have been attacked by the free-marketeers, and if they haven’t been removed or transferred to the private sector they soon will be.
The right are just simply wrong on almost all aspects of the human condition, they do not want to consider any other points of view that may mean they have to consider other people, but they are not only wrong, they are dangerous. They are in power because they appeal to every lowest common denominator in the human condition. They understand the lowest common denominators in people because that is what they represent, the lowest of the low. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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