@freedom

Freedom: Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been relatively quiet about the ‘freedom’ movement in Canada. The ‘freedom’ convoy in Ottawa earlier this year set off a fairly entrenched opposition to vaccine mandates and other freedoms purportedly lost according to the leaders of this movement, at least one of which is still in jail for an inability to respect bail conditions. It’s impossible to know how many adherents the ‘movement’ has, but it is definitely a small minority of Canadians at this time. Who knows, however, what the future holds. 

Hyperbole is rampant in recent pronouncements from the leaders of this movement, one even suggesting, according to an article by Sarah Richie in The Canadian Press, reporting on statements by a ‘leader’ of the movement, Canada is facing a civil war. If it were true that Canada is facing a civil war, I’m not sure what the fighting sides would look like. Maybe anti-vaccine types on one side and everybody else on the other? I don’t know. I can’t seem to wrap my head around the notion of a civil war over vaccine mandates. 

Now, if the ‘freedom convoy inspired protestors’ represented a real political movement that, for instance, rejected the overriding influence of public corporations (global ones, primarily) in politics, I might sit up and take notice. However, I don’t see anywhere in the press or on alt-right websites that anything like a coherent platform for revolution or civil war is extant. Right now, it just seems that the only policy they have is flailing arms, shouts of ‘freedom’, flag waving, and rank ignorance of history, politics, and common sense. 

The whole notion of freedom and the purported loss of such is singularly misguided. Where does the idea of freedom originate? The idea of personal liberty and ‘freedom’ (although I hesitate to even use the term) can be traced back to the beginnings of a capitalist mode of production in Europe as far back as the thirteenth century, but really taking off in the sixteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the transformation of the peasant class into the urbanized working class was solidified. Along with the real transformation of people’s lives from rural to urban came the idea that people were now free to move around, change employers if they so desired, giving the impression that individuals were now in charge of their destiny. Veblen’s book The Instinct of Workmanship (1918), although makes for ponderous readings to some extent, is probably the best analysis of the creation of the urbanized working class that I have read. It’s not possible to summarize Veblen’s argument here. It’s a complex analysis of the rise of the business class and the idea that although we, as humans, long to do things, to work, we are not particularly suited to employment. The distinction between work and employment is basic to his argument. 

It’s always been true that individual human beings have agency. We are not like billiard balls subject to movement only at the invitation of the cue, although strangely there is some truth to this view. In fact, as Thorstein Veblen points out in the early twentieth century, that idea is the foundation of modern classical economics.

At this point I invite you to read a blog post I wrote in early 2019. It’s about the hedonistic calculus and what Veblen does with it in his dissection of neoclassical economic theory. It’s not a post wherein I write about my experience with myeloma because I hadn’t been diagnosed yet. I would also invite you to read my blog page on critical thinking which is based on an earlier article I wrote for teachers. It addresses the fact that we generally lack awareness of our place in the world because the school system systematically, via its prescribed curriculum and in spite of the efforts of individual teachers, fails to systematically address our social responsibilities. 

This brings me back to our ‘convoy’ protestors. The ignorance expressed by the ‘leaders’ of this ‘movement is astounding. They insist that they want freedom without ever telling us what they mean by that except to suggest that they don’t want vaccine mandates. They feel that vaccine mandates infringe on their ‘rights’. They should consider that they live in societies that require some individual compromise to ensure the safety and security of its citizens. 

Don’t get me wrong. I have no love for the Federal government’s unfailing support of often dangerous and completely self-interested business corporations, sometimes not even Canadian ones. But, like I said before, if the convoy goofies had an even basic understanding of Canadian political economy I might be inclined to hear their arguments. But they have no analysis, just empty opposition to perceived grievances. 

Their anti-mandate grievance and calls for ‘freedom’ have no place in a social world. We drive cars, but we need licences to do so. We can’t simply get out on the road  without a licence or insurance and expect to be left alone to do that. A world without rules and regulations would be an impossible world. There are countries where ‘rules of the road’ are mostly non-existent, but there are unstated agreements among motorists and others sharing the road as to how to conduct themselves on the road. Those unstated agreements are social contracts nonetheless. We rely on social contracts every day of our lives and in everything that we do. We depend on other people always to provide us with services for our comfort and security. Yes, we are individuals, but we always act socially and, in fact, we couldn’t exist as individuals. 

To think about how dependent we are on others, just think about how often you interact with others every time you buy groceries or fill your car with gas. What of the roads we drive on? We don’t build those as individuals. We build them collectively through our taxes (although not always without complaining about it). We, most of us, have water piped to our homes, electricity to power our heating systems, to refrigerate our food, and sewage lines to take away our effluent. Without millions of people all over the world ensuring that we have what we need to live comfortable lives, we would be living cold, brutish lives in caves. Imagine if you were only allowed to wear clothes you made yourself from material you yourself gathered. That’s not possible in this day and age. 

There are people who want to live off the grid. That’s fine, but even that means buying arrays of solar panels, having vehicles to transport goods, seeds, livestock, and the means to access health services if necessary. We may try to live as socially distanced as possible but we still need to acknowledge how dependent we are on others and why we should have some consideration for their health and security because in the end our health and security depends on theirs. 

It seems to me that the ‘freedom convoy’ folks don’t have a coherent platform, nor do they have even a basic plan. What they seem to have is a diffuse and incoherent opposition, maybe a sense that their lives are meaningless, but that they would be filled with meaning if only the government would be removed or there were fewer rules and regulations. The fact is that rules and regulations arise often out of a need to live in society with others and to resolve conflicts between them. To be moderately safe we all need to drive on the right side of the road. If even a small minority of people refused to accept this rule and started driving wherever they wanted to we would all be in serious trouble. If someone does drive on the left in Canada, and insisting they have a right to do that, they could have their license revoked, just as anti-vaxxers can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. Nobody says you must be vaccinated unless there is, like in the military or in health care, a need for absolute safety (or as close as we can get to it). So, get over it. Play by the rules or play another game somewhere else.

What should I be thinking about now? How about death and dying, cultural discombobulation, misogyny, evolution, and pain management?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

I told you last post that I would be giving up on my blog. That’s still the case. I’ll likely wrap it up by the end of this month at least in its current format, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped thinking or wanting to write. When my readership fell below fifty views after a post, I decided that maybe it wasn’t worth the hassle of thinking about writing every week. Of course, some people might argue that if I have only one reader that should be enough for me. There’s an argument that can be made both ways. Who knows, things change. 

So, what should I be thinking and writing about now? As I get ever closer to death, it’s hard not to think about death and dying. My sister-in-law who was a couple of years younger than me, died recently. It seems like someone in my immediate circle of friends and family is dying every month. Such is life when one gets to a certain age. Of course, it’s not only older people who die. A forty-nine year old doctor in my Family Clinic died recently of heart failure. However, it’s certainly true that most Canadians, in any case, die at an advanced age. That will be me for sure because I’m already most of the way there.

Lately I’ve been trying to create a metaphor for the dying process. I think I’ve come up with one that makes sense. It’s probably not new to me, either. It’s the image of a wall, maybe a stone wall that can be seen in the distance just beyond a large, open field. In our younger days, the wall is low and hardly visible. We only pay attention to it fleetingly, maybe when we visit someone in the hospital, when we leave a funeral or witness a fatal car crash. Our physical vulnerability is only too obvious at these times. The truth is that we would have a hard time living our lives if we did not ignore the wall most of the time. Some people actually convince themselves that the wall doesn’t even exist and that even if it did, we could walk right through it. The thing is the wall is always there. As we get older the wall gets more visible. It gets bigger, thicker and broader and we begin to see individual stones in it. It begins to draw our attention more frequently. We seem to be getting closer to it and in fact we are.

My wall is clearly visible to me now. It’s so big, I can’t see much beyond it. Earlier in my life I could see mountains on the other side of it. Not anymore. Now, the wall demands my attention. It will not allow me to turn away from it. In a sense it’s a beautiful, solid wall. It’s obvious that much care was taken in its construction spanning the whole evolutionary time on this planet. Everyone has to come to the wall. No one is allowed to pass through it.

The denial of the existence of this wall is the essence of Ernest Becker’s work. My early posts on this blog consist of an exposition of Becker’s work and his contribution to understanding the denial of death. His last book, one that he had no hand in publishing because he was dead, was rightly entitled Escape From Evil. The evil that Becker writes about is death and disease. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the power of denial in our lives because it’s a power that has determined so much of the death and destruction this planet has experienced with Homo sapiens at the centre of it.

Let’s now explore that denial a bit from a different perspective than I would have normally used. First up is how our social world seems to be coming apart at the seams with the war in the Ukraine, growing authoritarian at home and the pandemic that doesn’t seem to want to go away. I’m talking about the discombobulation of our social world and our reactions to it. Later I write about misogyny and evolution with a nod to Aristotle, the consummate misogynist and other philosophers of his time and ilk. But first, discombobulation.

Discombobulated  

This is my drawing of discombobulation. It’s my personal visual statement of my reaction to the Kurt Vonnegut world we live in today.

The word discombobulation is an old word from the 19th Century that shouldn’t be forgotten because it so expresses the sense that not much makes much sense anymore. The world really hasn’t ever made much sense if one considers humanity’s millennia-old legacy of war and brutality combined with a huge dose of goodwill and caring underlying much of human history. It seems as though every generation has to learn this truth on its own never learning from history. I’ve spent my whole adult life in a quest to unravel this discombobulation. I think I have things more or less worked out (with the help of a lot of people now dead who were much smarter than me), but I can’t seem to communicate that to enough other people for my knowledge to make much sense. At least I feel that way sometimes. I may be like the proverbial falling tree in the forest with no one around to hear it fall. What does it matter? Well, it does matter to me. Sometimes I think of my writing as a drop in the bucket of cultural commentary, but it’s still a contribution.

That said, it’s a contribution that will leave many people behind. Admittedly, reading my blog posts requires a modicum of literacy. I don’t speak to a Grade 8 audience. That in itself will limit the influence of my work. My personal intellectual voyage can never be yours, but we must learn from each other otherwise the discombobulation wins. Patently, there are many people (No, I haven’t done a survey although others have) who are incapable of hearing what I have to say because they have been captured by an ideology that is inherently contradictory in itself but still seems to speak to their individual lives somehow. I’m talking about people who deny that we are inherently social and dependent on each other not only in our families and other intimate relationships, but in a collective sense with people we don’t know personally but who, combined, hugely affect the world we live in.*

I’m referring here to people who see taxes and government as an infringement on their freedom, whatever that means. They have no idea themselves what ‘freedom’ means, and it’s almost embarrassing if you dare ask them what they mean by it because their answers are naive to the extreme and essentially childish. In other aspects of their lives they may be competent enough, but when it comes to thinking about their place in the world and their responsibility to others, they just have no idea, except to spout platitudes they have absorbed by watching too much Fox News or have been absorbed by concentrating on their belly buttons for too long. I’m no big fan of much of what government does, but I’m not willing to chuck out the baby with the bathwater either. 

Recently, Carolyn and I listened to a CBC Ideas podcast on The Authoritarian Personality. The people who fit this profile are the people I’m talking about. The Authoritarian Personality is an idea popularized after the Second World War by Theodore Adorno and others to try to explain why people are attracted to fascist leaders. The book is available to be borrowed for free at the Internet Archive but it’s been revived and republished with an introduction by Peter Gordon of the Frankfurt School and is available on Amazon in various formats, including as an eBook, but it ain’t cheap. The book was first published in 1969 but was in writing for some time before that while the research for it was being conducted in California. The book itself and the blazing controversy surrounding it can be seen at the Internet Archive by simply typing in The Authoritarian Personality in the search function and looking around. Some of the reactions to the book are a full example of discombobulation. In fact, I would argue that the book is itself a treatise on cultural discombobulation as are reactions to it. We live in a discombobulated world but there’s nothing new about that.

So, I’m thinking that this post is long enough. I have probably another 5 or 6 thousand words I want to get out of my system at the moment but I think I need to break those up into manageable chunks. Therefore, I’ll leave this post as it is but I’ll carry on writing about the other topics in the title of this post and present them to you as soon as I get them fleshed out with good references, etcetera. Besides, it’s six o’clock in the morning and I’ve been writing since two thirty. Yesterday I went back to the hospital to get back on my chemo regime. The dexamethasone I took yesterday won’t let me sleep anyway, so instead of fretting that I can’t sleep, I might as well write, but enough for tonight…it’s getting light out and the coffee beckons.

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*This is a disparate group of people from grocery store clerks and managers, to cops, to delivery drivers, to municipal workers, librarians, veterinarians, road crews, mechanics, garbage (solid waste) collectors, baristas, Hydro crews, emergency personnel of all kinds, Hospital workers including medical doctors, nurses, technicians, etcetera. I mean anyone you come into contact with on a daily basis and who provides you with a service you depend on. Just think about it. You are massively dependent on others, even people in China and other Asian countries who make your T-shirts, jeans, phones and computers for you, and on the people who work on the planes and boats that get those products to you. How can anyone deny that? But they do because to recognize this fact they would have to accept that their individualism is contingent and not absolute. We are not free to do whatever we want. Let’s just get over that silly notion. I used to challenge my students to unplug their homes, and I mean in every way: cut off water, electricity, the internet, waste collection, everything. Do that for a few days and then let’s discuss how independent and ‘free’ you are.

Freedom

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

The word freedom is much bandied about these days particularly by people engaged in or supporting the “freedom convoy” now occupying downtown Ottawa. I thought I’d give a shot at defining it, because I don’t think most people have a clue as to what it means or implies. I invite you to think about what you mean by it, if in fact you use the term at all when it comes to your life. 

The online dictionary (the one living on my computer) defines freedom as:

The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint: we do have some freedom of choice | he talks of revoking some of the freedoms. 

  • • absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government: he was a champion of Irish freedom. 
  • • the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved: the shark thrashed its way to freedom. 
  • • the state of being physically unrestricted and able to move easily: the shorts have a side split for freedom of movement. 

• (freedom from) the state of not being subject to or affected by (a particular undesirable thing): government policies to achieve freedom from want. 

• the power of self-determination attributed to the will; the quality of being independent of fate or necessity. 

• unrestricted use of something: the dog is happy having the freedom of the house when we are out.

I also looked up liberty in the dictionary. Here’s what I found:

1 the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views: compulsory retirement would interfere with individual liberty.* 

• the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved: people who have lost property or liberty without due process. 

• (usually liberties) a right or privilege, especially a statutory one: the Bill of Rights was intended to secure basic civil liberties. 

• (Liberty) the personification of liberty as a female figure: the Statue of Liberty. 

2 the power or scope to act as one pleases: individuals should enjoy the liberty to pursue their own interests and preferences. 

  • • Philosophy a person’s freedom from control by fate or necessity. 
  • • Nautical shore leave granted to a sailor.

I don’t see a lot of difference in these definitions, at least not in substance. So, to distill these definitions some, it looks like that at the individual level, if you were free or completely at liberty, you would be able to do whatever you wanted to, whenever you wanted to do it.

 Let’s see if that works. Well, if you live in a society, as most of us do, this is a highly improbable and unacceptable idea. I mean, it’s possible, I suppose, for you to do whatever you want, whenever you want to, but you might end up in jail pretty quickly if you try it, or you might end up dead. Try lying in the middle of the freeway at rush hour. That’s something you might want to do, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Or you might want to ignore those pesky red lights at intersections all over the place. Again, you might get away with that a few times, but you may soon end up with a wrecked car or a traffic ticket. Do it again and you may have your license suspended. Driving in this province is a privilege, not a right, and that ‘freedom’ can soon be taken away from you. That would be a good thing for the rest of us who follow the rules because otherwise we would have anarchy. Then again, you might want to have sex with that gorgeous young barista at your local coffee shop, but you might want to ask her before you attempt it. She may not be as into it as you are. 

At another level, you might want to skip paying your mortgage or your rent for a few months because you want to spend the money on a new video game. You can do that if you want, but the consequences may be that you end up living in a cardboard box under an overpass somewhere. You may not want to do that, but we are not always happy with the consequences of our actions. You may be sick and tired of your job and don’t want to do it anymore. Yes, I can relate to that, but I don’t suppose you want to starve to death either, so you have to find some way of paying for groceries. I could go on, but I hope you get the idea. 

No matter who you are, where you live, or how much money you have, there will always be restrictions on your freedom. During the 1980s when Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their ilk were the heads of government, they advocated the removal of regulation on business arguing that business wouldn’t do anything to hurt their bottom line so they would always do what their customers wanted. They argued (following the shill economist Milton Friedman) that corporations needed to be released from regulation and when that happened, we’d get the trickle-down effect because they would invest in ‘the economy’ and we’d all end up rich. In truth, give corporations the freedom to regulate themselves and you end up with the MAX 737 catastrophe, the mining disasters that keep showing up in the news (think Mount Polley for a recent example), buildings collapsing in Bangladesh killing hundreds of textile workers, plastic pollution, global warming, the depletion of global fish stocks, etcetera. I could go on. We know what happens now too when corporate tax rates are cut to almost nothing and they are freed from regulation. We get more social income inequality than ever.  Corporations need to have curbs on their freedom. They cannot be allowed to do as they please whenever they please. 

So, what does freedom actually mean when we live in a society with thousands if not millions of other people all wanting to do what they want, whenever they want to? Without rules and regulations limiting freedom you get a shitshow. It doesn’t make sense to allow people absolute freedom. We need a system to maintain order at least to some degree. You may not be happy about having to curb your desires and wants because of other people, but that just has to happen. You learned that as a child, or maybe you didn’t and that’s what’s making you unhappy now. Living in society means having to compromise and negotiate, and to temper our urge to always do as we please. 

So far I’ve considered freedom in the context of the individual and the potential for freedom in a social context. There are other contexts to think about freedom. 

Years ago, the convenience store chain 7-Eleven introduced a marketing slogan: Get your freedom at 7-Eleven! I was incensed! Not sure why except that I was quite convinced that there was no freedom for sale at the 7-Eleven in my town, just mostly fast food and other crap. So, is freedom these days just part of a marketing strategy? It seems so if we consider the evidence. The “freedom convoy” is not about freedom. Taking spokespeople for the ‘movement’ at their word it seems that they want no government interference in their lives. Or they want to become government so they can get rid of all the pesky rules and regulations governments impose on us. Good luck with that. 

It strikes me that we need to think of freedom and liberty on a continuum. Nobody is perfectly free nor is anybody completely unfree. When I taught the odd course at the Matsqui Medium Security ‘Correctional’ facility, I heard one kid saying he wanted to go into solitary confinement so he could have the freedom to work on his college assignments and study for his mid-term exams. This was a month before Christmas. He got his wish. I’m not sure how he did it, but he did. Freedom in captivity. Weird, eh? 

I concluded decades ago that I cannot be free unless we’re all free. If I enslave you, I’m captivated by the need to watch over you, by the need to punish you, by the need to keep you in your place. So the only way to maximize freedom is to do so for everyone. Perfect, absolute freedom is impossible. If someone tries to sell you on that idea, call bullshit on them. They are obviously deluded or disingenuous. Don’t stand for it. 

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*…and don’t try to convince me that Canada is an oppressive regime. Try living in North Korea.