“Freedom”

I was listening to a Leonard Cohen song, and thinking about the hippy “islands” in the 1960’s, where the “freaks” could land to safety and reassurance, and it hit me that freedom for such people consists not in the space to create their own personality and own sense of self, but rather in being with like-minded people.  The difference is assumed, since the people in that group are not like most of the people in the larger culture, even if internally they all think the same. Freedom is freedom from people who think differently.

There is of course nothing wrong with pursuing alternative paths to contemporary America–as it existed then or now–but to do so purely in opposition, and not in a genuinely creative spirit, is to value conformity not genuine freedom.

All you have to do is remove the love beads and Nehru jackets and you get people saying openly and seemingly without shame that free speech should be confined to people who think and act like them, and thus belong to them.

It is so easy to confuse the outer form with the reality that most people do it.  People who sing about love need mean none of it.  They can limit it to accepting people who were already in their tribe.  People who sing about freedom need mean none of it: they can limit it to not being different than a group which defines itself as different, without any felt sense to actually BE different.  All gray mediocrities can claim they are special, if they also claim the right to inflict violence on their chosen enemies.  The Nazis did it.  The Communofascists did it, and continue to do it.  Muslims can do it: they claim their world view is unique and special, even if everybody within it marches in lockstep to an ideology which celebrates rape, murder, torture, pedophilia, imperial conquest, and pillage.

I read a Heinlein quote which simplified the world to two groups: those who want control over others, and those who don’t.  Freedom only benefits those who value it, and to value it you must be capable of imagining new things, new ways of being, and doing so in isolation and without immediate reassurance and reinforcement;  you must value exploration and perceptual movement.

Those who fear the new, who fear movement, join the first group, where their first act is surrendering their uniqueness and individuality.  This is all Islam really demands: that you become a slave.  It’s very name means submission.  How many people, I wonder, know this?