User:RD/9k/freedom (Q778)
Main entry
freedom
(top-level category) -> one of the only terms worse than free will in terms of how many definitions it has. genuinely don't use this Item except to list the category on category pages- freedom -> tradition: Liberal-republicanism (LR), Kantianism (IK), Existentialist-Structuralist tradition (ES), anarchism (A)
any philosophy can talk about this concept, obviously, but these are the main ones that popularized it or insist on it
Definitions of freedom
- freedom (fragmentation) / democracy (fragmentation) / decentralization (chopping things up into tiny pieces to supposedly create Freedom) / democratization (spreading out a particular activity to more people without regard for how well it will be done, whether it will lead to uncontrolled hotspots of the activity being used for violent or hateful purposes, or whether it will divide people) / choppification (meta-Marxism; generic) / (9k)
- freedom (lack of limitation on capabilities; Feuerbach)
- freedom (lack of necessity; Avakian) [1]
- freedom (absorption of all necessity applying inside society into theories of society) [2] / The realm of freedom can blossom forth only with necessity as its basis (Marx)
- Freedom cannot be possessed / Freedom cannot be had / Freedom is always negative / There are no positive freedoms / Freedom is never something you "have" or "are", and is always a thing that is absent or that you are not; although positive freedoms can be defined even positive freedoms are in fact always negative freedoms / Freedom cannot be possessed; it must come in the form of destroying something else -> it took me such a long time to figure this out. literally at least six years. but this model of freedom is literally the only way for any concept of anarchism to make sense or to understand all forms of anarchism on a single historical timeline
Anarchy isn't about taking things away + Freedom cannot be possessed = Anarchy is about taking things away. - Anarchism is partly defined by erroneously declaring a natural or inanimate process to be deliberate oppression and the attempt to overcome that process to be an inherent or deserved freedom; inanimate processes humans are upset with may include the collision of separate growing populations (chunk competition), the perpetual upward or downward motion of corporations ("infinite growth" or post-structuralist civilization), capitalism hitting equilibrium ("modernity", "technofeudalism", or historical periods becoming stationary), nation-state borders hitting equilibrium ("decadence" or large-scale nationogenesis), Liberal-republican elections ("polarization", "populational schizophrenia", or strictly un-thinking decision processes), other towns of people failing to learn about something that never interacts with them ("prejudices" or Einsteinian gaps), people existing each day specifically through acquiring more products ("consumerism", or capitalism), corporations supposedly programming everybody with the wrong values or incorrect portrayals of particular real-life phenomena, or simply every single individual failing to do what somebody subjectively believes to be ethical -> this is one of the strongest connecting threads between charcoal anarchism, blue anarchism, brown anarchism, and orange anarchism.
- "Freethinker" is less technical and more expressive than "atheist" [3] -> goes to show that anarchism really is the default mode of thinking rather than a great new invention. and I hate that. because freedom doesn't mean
anything. it's actually rather obvious what an atheist is, but "freedom" actually is a belief in nothing because it really is just the absence of whatever else it was tossed in against.
Freedom and Habermasian logic
unfitting action
(truth value) / vicious individual actiondoes not promote freedom
(truth value)fitting action
(truth value) / virtuous individual actionpromotes freedom
(truth value)
Freedom and domination
- Domination of nature and freedom of the individual are inherently connected; far from freedom being an exact opposite to domination which can only take the shape of a communal tribe and cannot take the shape of an antagonistic empire, when individuals have total freedom to escape domination by each other a la Habermasian ethics, they must make use of the methods of science and mechanical philosophy to survive alone and practically make use of that freedom
Freedom and government
Government can create liberty
/ Government can create freedom (Liberal-republicanism)Government cannot create liberty
/ Formal government cannot create freedom; it cannot manufacture the ability to act and choose freely (anarchism, meta-Marxism) -> this is the crux of the three-way conflict between anarchism, Communism, and Liberal-republicanism. Liberal-republicanism uniquely believes that government can create Liberty. anarchism often does not believe that, and believes that some tiny-scale process such as The Subject is responsible for creating Freedom/Liberty while formal government can only take it away or at least act in contradiction to it. however, when faced with Bolshevism, anarchism and Liberal-republicanism have similar reactions — both of them tend to aggressively turn into "anarchism" and insist that Bolshevism is killing The Subject and must be Zinovievized in order to create Freedom From Communism.
in this sense, Liberal-republicanism is a deep contradiction. on one hand, Liberal-republicanism tries to insist at various times that because "democracy" is capable of creating Freedom and poverty is a lack of Freedom it must be that "democracy" can socially construct a lack of poverty. on the other, it can only actually try to achieve that end through actions that attack Freedom. nobody who supports Liberal-republicanism wants to acknowledge this, although it is an inevitable thing to recognize if you adhere to Liberal-republican frameworks. Liberal-republicanism is not founded on any generalized concept of social progress, but strictly on concepts of peace and Freedom. so if Liberal-republicanism has to do anything that limits Freedom even for the purpose of protecting Freedom it becomes a really big problem. Liberal-republican theory is almost entirely the study of Freedom. this makes it very difficult to push anything that doesn't revolve around Freedom, such as Marxism, in a country that has adopted Liberal-republicanism, although things that do happen to revolve around Freedom such as anarchism have a somewhat easier time. so here's the part absolutely everybody misses: that's a catastrophe. that's not okay. Freedom itself is a heavily incoherent concept which is itself almost inherently built on intolerance and destruction. having to work with a national culture that has built itself on Freedom is actually in and of itself an apocalyptic, world-threatening proposition.
Hierarchies are freedom mountains
/ "Hierarchical" societies are actually stratified by amount of freedom rather than amount of domination / Society is not actually divided into order-givers and order-takers, it is stratified into the individuals who are educated and talented enough to be handed a lot of freedom to make big changes to the world and the people who are deemed not competent enough to be trusted with freedom; Stalin was given his position involving the most freedom to give theoretical pronouncements due to his expertise while Trotsky was denied the highest forms of freedom because he was not considered to be good at Marxism; Donald Trump was given the freedom to make declarations about foreign policy because he was deemed the best at being "American" and defending the United States while other people were not elected because they were not considered good enough at fighting China or Iran ->
this is very obviously not an ethics-based statement, it's a descriptive statement, but it's a little frightening how well it expands to describe Liberal-republicanism, capitalism, Bolshevism, and Deng Xiaoping Thought. if you're going to be an anarchist and insist that capitalism and Bolshevism are 'basically the same', then this is how you should look at things. 'hierarchy' is not its own unique thing. expertise really is a form of hierarchy most of the time. you have to genuinely figure out how to navigate a world where there are Trumps and Trotskys everywhere wanting to give you terrible advice on how to get through large-scale world events that should not be followed and yet it's also simultaneously true that stopping those people from taking control and leading people is oppressing them.
Freedom and Bolshevism
- Bolshevism enslaved the individual into Stalin's project / some kind of conspiracy to bring down power and control onto poor unsuspecting businesses to enslave them into a nationality / (9k) -> note that this proposition as you usually see it is factually false because over half the population was in support, not just dragged along; claiming this is as bad as claiming that if 60% of the population votes for Barack Obama and he wins the election that the United States is enslaved under the Obama regime. Obama enslaved all Black people because White people in Florida didn't want to vote for him.
Contradictions of freedom
- I came to Tel Aviv to be who I was, but it became clear I was welcome as a lesbian, not a Palestinian [4] -> case of: joining a "community" for a specific identity not leading to acceptance of other identities; violation of Rhizome model.
Related
Ideology codes
- (none)