We conservatives and American patriots declare before all the world that Freedom is the bestest thing ever.
But is it? Is Freedom really the glorious dawn that opens up all vistas?
I think that it is important for anyone promoting Freedom to recognize that Freedom comes with a terrible cost. Who better to explain that to us than lefty Herbert Marcuse?
In Five Lectures Marcuse argues, from Freudianism, that the sublimation of instinct from the repression of sexuality releases human energy to be expended in work. In other words, society dominates us by forcing us to repress our sexuality and channel that energy into work.
Now, on my reductive Three Peoples theory, the ascent to Freedom occurs at the boundary between life as People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, and life as People of the Responsible Self, city people, and that agrees with Marcuse's notion, except that what he calls Freedom I call Responsibility.
And the notion of Responsibility correctly understands that Freedom is not free. Actually it is the opposite. Freedom comes at the cost of Responsibility, and that is a very high cost, and that is why a lot of people don't want it, and prefer the freedom from Responsibility by choosing Hayek's Road to Serfdom in the welfare state.
In fact you can explain the history of the last 150 years as the working class dissenting from the middle-class culture of Freedom and the Limited Government that set up the modern state and its representative government, and clearly telling the world that it preferred a much lower level of responsibility than advertised in the culture of the middle class. Ditto women half a century later and ditto African Americans a century later.
Then you add into this mix the cult of the Creative Ego in the People of the Creative Self who seem to want absolute Freedom for themselves to be creative and want the People of the Responsible Self to pay for it.
OK, so where I am going with this? Well, I'd say that with the failure of gentlemanly conservatism of which you've heard tell, we now have to pick ourselves us and figure what to do next.
For me, the desideratum is to live as a Responsible person without truckling to a beneficent Oz of a Master, be he a political boss or a Social Justice Warrior. But the fact of life is that there is a ton of people that don't want to be Responsible: they just want to write that novel or do Activism as taught in their secular seminary. Or they just want to get their share of the loot and live their life around the free stuff that is handed out to faithful servants of the regime.
So the challenge is to stake out a patch of land, in a world where tons of people want free stuff, and make our non-negotiable demands that we demand the right to live our lives as Responsible individuals, and if we don't get it we are going to make life very difficult for the current ruling class, what Glenn Reynolds calls the Front Row Kids, and what I call the People of the Responsible Self. In fact, we might even toss the ruling class out if we have a mind to do it.
Remember when Nancy Pelosi said that Obamacare would be great for artists and writers, 'cos they wouldn't have to work any more, but follow their bliss in creative work? We People of the Responsible Self demand as of ancient and immemorial right that the bloody artists and writers get a job, and stop pretending to be helpless People of the Subordinate Self. Because artists and writers are Cloud People and should not be free-riding on the Dirt People of the Responsible Self.
As they say in China, the first step is a modern Rectification of Names, to make sure that we know what we mean and mean what we say. And that goes double for Freedom and Responsibility.
But is it? Is Freedom really the glorious dawn that opens up all vistas?
I think that it is important for anyone promoting Freedom to recognize that Freedom comes with a terrible cost. Who better to explain that to us than lefty Herbert Marcuse?
In Five Lectures Marcuse argues, from Freudianism, that the sublimation of instinct from the repression of sexuality releases human energy to be expended in work. In other words, society dominates us by forcing us to repress our sexuality and channel that energy into work.
As soon as civilized society establishes itself the repressive transformation of the instincts becomes the psychological basis of a threefold domination: first, domination over oneself, over one's nature, over the sensual drives that want only pleasure and gratification; second, domination of the labor achieved by such disciplined and controlled individuals; and third, domination of outward nature, science, and technology.These dominations are in a dialectic with the freedoms:
And to domination subdivided in this way belongs the threefold freedom proper to it: first, freedom from the mere necessity of satisfying one's desires, that is, freedom for renunciation and thus for socially acceptable pleasure--moral freedom; second, freedom from arbitrary violence and from the anarchy of the struggle for existence, social freedom characterized by the division of labor with legal rights and duties--political freedom; and third, freedom from the power of nature, that is, the mastery of nature, freedom to change the world through human reason--intellectual freedom.But Marcuse is not finished:
The psychic substance common to these three aspects of freedom is unfreedom: domination of one's instincts, domination that society makes into second nature and that perpetuates the institutions of domination. But civilized unfreedom is oppression of a particular kind: it is rational unfreedom, rational domination. It is rational to the extent that is makes possible the ascent from a human animal to a human being, from nature to civilization.The dread truth of this reminds us that many people will not want to make this Faustian bargain. To insist on Freedom in civilization is to bind yourself to self-governance, to repressing your instincts in living as a social animal that is not directly dominated by a Master and must therefore take on oneself the responsibility of being useful in the world. It is to renounce the limited kind of freedom in being a Slave, that you do not need to take responsibility for yourself. You do your Master's bidding, and in absence of direct instruction, you relax and follow your instincts, which is freedom of a certain kind.
Now, on my reductive Three Peoples theory, the ascent to Freedom occurs at the boundary between life as People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants, and life as People of the Responsible Self, city people, and that agrees with Marcuse's notion, except that what he calls Freedom I call Responsibility.
And the notion of Responsibility correctly understands that Freedom is not free. Actually it is the opposite. Freedom comes at the cost of Responsibility, and that is a very high cost, and that is why a lot of people don't want it, and prefer the freedom from Responsibility by choosing Hayek's Road to Serfdom in the welfare state.
In fact you can explain the history of the last 150 years as the working class dissenting from the middle-class culture of Freedom and the Limited Government that set up the modern state and its representative government, and clearly telling the world that it preferred a much lower level of responsibility than advertised in the culture of the middle class. Ditto women half a century later and ditto African Americans a century later.
Then you add into this mix the cult of the Creative Ego in the People of the Creative Self who seem to want absolute Freedom for themselves to be creative and want the People of the Responsible Self to pay for it.
OK, so where I am going with this? Well, I'd say that with the failure of gentlemanly conservatism of which you've heard tell, we now have to pick ourselves us and figure what to do next.
For me, the desideratum is to live as a Responsible person without truckling to a beneficent Oz of a Master, be he a political boss or a Social Justice Warrior. But the fact of life is that there is a ton of people that don't want to be Responsible: they just want to write that novel or do Activism as taught in their secular seminary. Or they just want to get their share of the loot and live their life around the free stuff that is handed out to faithful servants of the regime.
So the challenge is to stake out a patch of land, in a world where tons of people want free stuff, and make our non-negotiable demands that we demand the right to live our lives as Responsible individuals, and if we don't get it we are going to make life very difficult for the current ruling class, what Glenn Reynolds calls the Front Row Kids, and what I call the People of the Responsible Self. In fact, we might even toss the ruling class out if we have a mind to do it.
Remember when Nancy Pelosi said that Obamacare would be great for artists and writers, 'cos they wouldn't have to work any more, but follow their bliss in creative work? We People of the Responsible Self demand as of ancient and immemorial right that the bloody artists and writers get a job, and stop pretending to be helpless People of the Subordinate Self. Because artists and writers are Cloud People and should not be free-riding on the Dirt People of the Responsible Self.
As they say in China, the first step is a modern Rectification of Names, to make sure that we know what we mean and mean what we say. And that goes double for Freedom and Responsibility.
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