Freedom is a Constant Struggle

Posted on by

Quote of the Day

The best way to tell whether someone wants to end American freedom for good is to check how angry he is about the separation of powers in our government. Anyone who says out loud he wishes he could disrupt the system of checks and balances that has prevented tyrannical government overreach for nearly 250 years, is showing that what he really wants is a dictatorship. Of course, they all believe that said dictatorship would be benign to them and vicious to their political opponents, forever. Always an apparatchik, never a kulak!

There’s something in the human psyche that longs for a king to follow. Perhaps it hearkens back to our prehistory, when our little tribe had one chieftain and we just did what he said. Perhaps it’s a subconscious desire to submit, to let someone else worry about the details. It’s a system that may work out okay for small, family-based groups, but it has never produced a nation that respects human rights.

Mo Rockwel
June 6, 2024
Anti-Gun Pols Try to Delegitimize Supreme Court before ’24 Elections – Freedom’s Lodge (freedomslodge.com)

While I think this is accurate and a great point, it is not just a desire for a king. As an alternative path to essentially the same thing, many believe a majority vote is sufficient for the creation of an enforceable law as well. As if 50+% voting to enslave the minority of a population is entirely reasonable.

As pointed out in the quote above the deeper truth is probably that people want someone else to take responsibility for most of their actions. In essence, they yearn to be slaves in return for a promise of the necessities of life. How else do you explain the persistent popularity of socialism and ultimately communism?

Whether it is a tribal leader, a king, or the “central committee”, “Someone” should decide what is best for all of society and force everyone to work together for “the greater good.” The problem is that while this was almost certainly true at the tribe level it does not scale as the group size grows into the thousands, millions, and billions. Religion and then governments came to replace the tribe and mostly solve the scale problems but these create new problems. Here are some hints of how these problems manifest themselves.

I further suspect that because of the evolutionary advantage this gave tribes over individuals it now has some genetic component that can only be overridden by a conscious application of rational thought and examination of historical data. This means there is a constant yearning for the “freedom” of no responsibility and the “comfort” of slavery.

Combine the masses yearning to be told what to do, a few claiming they were born to rule and you have the conditions for tyranny and justification for genocide.

Hence, freedom is a constant struggle.

Share

13 thoughts on “Freedom is a Constant Struggle”

    • Sorry, Trump as dictator is about as realistic as Joke Biden writing his own speeches.
      He didn’t run anything the last time he was in office. He isn’t going to do anything this time around either.
      ‘Cept maybe distract everybody from what is truly going on, and those who truly are running this country.

  2. So close.

    Satanism is about freedom from the constraints of God’s law. “The whole of the law is do as thou will.” They want freedom from consequence of their actions, both here and in the afterlife. It doesn’t actively seek destruction, just maximum short-term individual freedom, with morality being relative, not absolute.

    The next step seeks to maximize control with soul-crushing regulation and totalitarianism. Destruction is the “casual” byproduct, not the intent.

    Lastly it’s actively seeking destruction and inflicting pain.

    No man is free from the law or consequences. It’s just a matter of what law, and which consequences, he decides upon. Choosing not to choose is a choice, too.

    Recognizing that the world isn’t going crazy or insane, but rather going more openly evil, is a painful but needful step to seeing what’s going on more clearly.

    https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/the-strategy-of-evil

  3. The problem is that while this was almost certainly true at the tribe level it does not scale as the group size grows into the thousands, millions, and billions.

    Essentially what I’ve been saying for years, if not decades: Socialism works in small groups, but does not scale well. Like any system, it requires accountability to keep everyone honest, and when the group is small enough that everybody knows everybody and their business, there’s accountability.

    The moment the group gets too large and someone can hide behind anonymity while breaking the rules (or have their rule-breaking lost in the noise) and avoid accountability, is the moment socialism starts to break down and fail.

    This is why the Powers That Be are so interested on monitoring all our communications, friend and peer groups, online activities, non-cash purchases, etc, and storing all that data in “fusion centers”. It’s an attempt for the controllers to “know everybody and their business” like in small-group socialism, but on a massive scale.

    Interesting times.

    • So if Socialism works in small groups, how is the experience of the Plymouth Colony explained? Pretty small group but Socialism proved to be nearly fatal for them and would have been had they not made the right choice to abandon the philosophy. Seems to me that nothing has ever worked well that did not allow for individual liberty and the personal assumption of responsibility for the consequences of the use of that liberty. Anything less than that ultimately devolves into a society where personal freedoms are abridged and the consolidation of power over others becomes the epic quest.

    • Also true for democracy. The Founders were well aware of the problems in classical Athens (citizen population about 150,000, probably didn’t include women who were more or less chattel and definitely didn’t include slaves) and designed the Constitution to give us a republic instead. Yet democracy more or less worked at the scale of the New England town meeting.

      So the Founders were heavily influenced by the Roman republic with its separation of powers (consuls, tribunes, pontiffs, tribes etc). Yet that failed too with the descent from the assassinations of the Gracchi, to the proscriptions of Marius and Sulla to the outright civil wars in Caesar’s time. At least some historians believe this was a scale problem as well. Rome, after the victories in Carthage and Macedonia had become an empire in fact with TPTB still pretending it was a republic. Sound familiar.

  4. Always an apparatchik, never a kulak!

    I think this is the absolute fundamental failure of every for of government that eventually develops a supporting bureaucracy.

    In Tsarist Russian, if you had it made if you got a clerk’s position in the court. In Communist Russia and China, you’re set if you’re a Party member and get a mid to high ranking position. In Europe, you’re set once you’re in the managerial levels of civil service, or a ministerial position in a Party. In the US, once you’re an incumbent legislator, you tend to keep your job; if you get a civil service position, your union will protect you for life. It all comes down to the same formula: a little pro forma duty, lots of bennies, secure position, little actual accountability, and most of what you take credit for is done by other people (frequently for their own purposes). The bureaucracy settles in and the alleged people in charge find out their steering wheels aren’t connected to anything.

    This is why I’ve been thinking for a long time about anti-apparatchik measures could be integrated into government. I have four top ideas:

    1) You’re In, Then You’re Out: After you serve in a public legislative body, you’re out of everything government related for an equal amount of time. Get a real job with the rest of us.

    2) Public Employment Is An Earned And Limited Privilege, Not A Right. Cap public employment at a lifetime limit of 2510 safe days. Want to work more? Do something dangerous, dirty, difficult, strenuous that day, anything but be in an air conditioned environment shuffling papers, real or electronic. Does not apply to contractors, since they are ultimately not the decision-makers. Does apply to military. Also applies to publicly operated schools.

    3) Spread The Government Wealth Around. All the capital cities need to be emptied of their government agencies. Instead, all those government workers need to be dispersed to the most economically disadvantaged locations with proximity to their mission area, assuming they can’t just work from home on their office days. (Oh, work-from-home probably counts against item #1 above.) No permanent monuments to the bureaucracy: only 10-year leases, then that bureaucracy moves to another disadvantaged area. It’s not like it’s a big deal; nobody working in most of those jobs can do it for more than 10 years, anyway before they hit their lifetime cap.

    4) Since Bureaucrats Act Like Mobsters, Give The Jobs To Convicts. If we need papers shuffled, have the work done by long term convicts of the penitentiaries. They can get 2 days good conduct per day of work adequately done. For assurance of adequacy, have every item be processed by three or more separate convict-bureaucrats, and the job’s not done until three agree on what to do and even then it’d get checked. Also, it’d be informative to the legislatures when they write their latest stroke of genius from the Good Idea Fairy that whatever they want, it is going to be administered by convicted rapists, murderers, conmen, pedophile, thieves and thugs rather than their current staff of unconvicted thieves, pedophiles, rapists, conmen and perjurers.

    • There’s a lot of cushy padded military seats, so point two must ensure dangerous jobs indeed are dangerous.

      Absolutely no supervisory or CO roles across either military or private sector. Crab boat laborers get double credit.

  5. How about just imposing simple term limits on government* employment in the United States? A 5-day work week, 50X/year = 260 days; 8 years = 2000 days, with suitable remuneration to allow banning all employer-funded benefits. Some limitiing feature perhaps, such as departure after the 50% mark is final, precluding re-employment.

    Would such a system lead to “employee churn” and the attendant loss of efficiency? I certainly hope so; it should, at the very least drive government* to simplification and rsultant size reduction, and I doubt a constant cycle of new employees could be any less efficient than what the 30-Year Brigade has burdened us with.

    Employment in government* should be a privilege, an opportunity to serve the country and learn, build associations and friendships among both fellow employees and the citizens, not a comfortable lifetime roost.

    * “Government” is government – city, county, state, federal, janitors and clerks all the way to Presidents. No exceptions. Although, there probably should be some accommodation to the calendar regarding elections, since it can be claimed some elected offices may require more than 5-day work weeks.

    Does The People run the government, or does The Government run the People?

    • You as well as Wall Phone and Tirno are trying to fix a cultural or even evolutionary problem with procedural reforms. It won’t work. If it is a cultural problem, only a religious revival will work. If it is an evolutionary problem, only devolution will work. Nothing scales infinitely.

      • Oh, you misunderstand. I’m trying to destroy the idea that a career in public ‘service’ is even possible by making it impossible. No long term bennies, no ongoing prestige, no monkey-swinging up to the next big thing, no value as a lobbyist, no continuous progression. As a legislator, you’re out on your ass every few years and have to do something productive that won’t hurt your future electoral hopes. As a ‘civil servant’, you’ll have to be strategic about how you spend your limited employment time, and you’re better off honing your skills elsewhere to get those top .gov jobs.

        I’m also hoping to reduce the value of lobbying because a) if you buy a legislator, it only lasts until the end of their term and 2) if that guy wants to get into the legislature again after his exclusion period, he definitely doesn’t want to face an opponent detailing in attack ads all the ways he got pay-offs. It won’t stop lobbying, but it’ll make it a lot more expensive with less results.

      • What Tirno said.

        The idea is to make employment in government* something one does for a limited time period precisely because there is no advantage to remaining in the position for very long.

        Do it for a few years to show commitment to the public good, learn some things that will be helpful in life, then move on. “Move on” as in “find a productive job or business to work in in the capitalistic economy and society that forms the foundation of what America is.”

        * Government – again, all government – city, county, state, federal. There should be no sanctuary at any level of government that offers a lifetime sinecure.

        Would this require a massive restructuring of our societal order and culture? You betcha. But, just like getting that $34T debt under control before it eats us alive and destroys the county, ridding ourslves of the Governmental Gentry Class is a matter of survival. Will it happen? Yes, but not by choice; we’ll have to go through devastating upheaval to get there because we’re just not smart enough as a society to learn by any other method than severe pain. That, and we’ve allowed the Ruling Elite to honor the Constitution only in the breach.

        There is an old business proverb: “either you run the business or the business runs you.”

        Same thing applies to government.

Comments are closed.