Freedom Has Become A Dirty Word In The USA
ASTORIA, NYC: A friend recently got upset with me because she saw the tattooed lettering on my stomach that said “Freedom.”
“Is that like a pro-America, Trump thing?” she asked.
I was confused for a moment. I actually received the tattoo when I was a far-left teenage anarchist and I never thought of freedom as being a politically polarized concept. Doesn’t everyone, regardless of ideological affiliation, like freedom?
No, no they don’t.
Once I realized that everything else began falling into place. Movements such as those against free speech (just look at Twitter), against the freedom of assembly (no-platforming), against the right to bear arms, and basically against the entire Bill of Rights now started to make sense. I could now begin to understand why such a large swath of the population so enthusiastically cheered for lockdowns, mask mandates, social distancing, and forced vaccination (even when there wasn’t a lick of good science to support any of this). There was something about this loss of liberty that they seemed to like, that made them feel comforted, that made them feel … safe. It was their team that was calling the shots and they gleefully donned the Brownshirt and went out to hunt the Other.
Freedom means that people that you disagree with can express themselves publicly, it means that they can assemble, it means they could potentially even use the wrong gender pronouns, it means that those who think differently than you can exist and propagate. Freedom means unpredictability, that you may hear opinions and words that you don’t like, that you may occasionally feel compromised. And freedom is something that is no longer a pan-cultural positive in the United States.
Read the rest. It gets a lot darker and doesn't offer any solutions.
I was once advised by a Korean student to read Escape from Freedom by psychologist Erich Fromm.* I have yet to read it, but I recently bought it as an ebook, so it's on my queue.
From Wikipedia:
In the book, Fromm explores humanity's shifting relationship with freedom, how individual freedom can cause fear, anxiety and alienation, and how many people seek relief by relinquishing freedom. He describes how authoritarianism can be a mechanism of escape, with special emphasis on the psychosocial conditions that enabled the rise of Nazism.
We all, to some extent, fear the burdens of choice and responsibility—especially responsibility, which as the root word "respond" indicates, means we have to answer for our choices and their consequences. We'd all love to live out consequence-free fantasies, but that's not the real world. Freedom, real freedom, is both a power and a burden.
Enjoy a mindful Fourth, fellow Yanks. To my UK friends: sorry about that crossing-the-Delaware thing. And about that accepting-French-help thing. To my non-US, non-UK friends: we American punks will endeavor to restrict our unbearability to just today.
No promises, though.
__________
*The UK title for Fromm's book, The Fear of Freedom, is closer to the German title, Die Angst vor der Freiheit. But I've read Fromm's preface, and it sounds as if the book had been written in English first, so the original English title was indeed Escape from Freedom. The UK based its title on the German translation, for whatever reason. Erich Fromm left Europe and moved to the US.
1 comment:
Freedom isn't free and never has been. So, in that context, folks not wanting to pay the price isn't all that surprising. Still, it is pretty far out there on the scale of insanity. And clearly, many of our fellow citizens are infected with the freedom-hating disease.
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