Here is the thing: freedom is an escape from certainty. It is an escape from finality, necessity. You can CHOOSE what you want, what to pursue, who you want to become. But it is not a foregone conclusion that you will achieve it. But you CAN. It is possible.
I read that Gunther Grass was an admirer of the Castro regime, but a harsh critic of the Soviet Union. One wonders why. I don’t want to make the time to investigate, but I think it reasonable that as someone who CHOSE to join the Waffen-SS, he was someone unsure what the proper use of freedom was.
Cuba never had a mass famine. They only killed thousands of people, and what torture they did was mostly the “advanced” Soviet variety of soft torture, like locking people in small boxes for long periods of time. This, to some, makes it seem almost palatable that an entire nation is sitting around in the heat, underfed, underemployed, under constant surveillance, and in large numbers willing to risk death to live in poverty here.
But I think the very lack of freedom is appealing to certain class of lost human being. Life is simple in Cuba. We must grant that. Do what you are told and keep your mouth shut. Who is unable to understand those instructions?
Thus, inflicting freedom on a certain class of these lost human beings would be a de facto torture, even if one that is only made so by THEIR refusal to individuate, to assume personal responsibility, personal agency, to make imperfect choices in an imperfect world.
I get in mind the many Saw scenes of alleged freedom. I have within me a capacity for cruelty. I was more or less psychologically tortured as an infant. Much of it is coming up: terror, fear, coiling up in a ball helplessly.
But I see beyond this. It does not limit me. In Saw everyone was not free. They were given two choices: live or die.
In my scenario I imagine advanced forms of self torture. What if I made one “colony” composed ONLY of profoundly narcissistic, self absorbed, intellectual blow-hards? What if I furnished them with a library of precisely the texts I knew they would fight about? Marcuse, Gramsci, Marx, Lenin, Feuerbach, Hegel, Foucault, Heidegger, etc. I am not familiar enough with the intra-idiot debates to say at this moment what would be there, but I would figure it out.
So many people, granted freedom, choose confinement. The ability to value, to savor, freedom is an advanced life skill.
Even in America much of our “freedom” was merely a freedom to choose the form of ones confinement, which is to say one’s exact religion (religio, again, meaning “to bind”).
I see clearly how it is possible to perform operant conditioning on children, like small animals. You reward what you want, and punish what you don’t. Through physical abuse, you can associate trauma with disobedience, making the only possible relatively anxiety-free place the state of absolute obedience.
This is the condition in which many religious people live today. I would say, in fact, that much of the world is like this. Between zero and few societies raise their children for freedom, for autonomy. Rather, they condition them to live as their parents did, who were conditioned to live as their parents did, etc. Errors in the system come from wars and calamities, with the systems then adapting and again self replicating.
What if our grand global vision were actually raising children for freedom, the world over? I think it is a much better vision than the global fascism and commissars the global elites want for us (but not for them: although of course they already live in gilded cages. No free person could wish coerced unfreedom on others).