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The loss of "freedom of speech" is the end of all freedoms.
Equally dangerous but less acknowledged is "freeing speech," which is a form of liberation from meaning. We lose correspondence and consensus once interpretation is impossible because it relies on subjective feeling.
The specificity of language tends to dissolve, stretch, or spread, but when attenuated beyond commonality, there is no communication, just noises of pain or appreciation.
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Why should you struggle when you can have a mediocre life for free? To have a great life.
Freedom of possibility comes from growth, not mediocrity. Paradoxically, your options for living expand when you fully engage specific restrictions.
Not all restrictions (not all submissions) help, but those that allow you to maintain focus and process emotions in a non-destructive manner create resilience and wisdom that will enable you to move freely through the world, unhampered by the anxiety and disorders that plague others.
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Problems stem from excess.
Something that is good in moderation, say the freedom from authority to explore or engage in taboo thoughts and desires, is liberatory.
However, embodied as an institution, or ethos, liberation is oxymoronic: excessively pursued it undermines (deconstructs) with the goal of removing any stabilizing reality with subjective relativism and irony. This excessive liberation is now akin to chaos, anarchy, or hedonism.
But now -as the new norm- “freedom” or “liberty” means escaping the fragmented disorder into stability: new liberation from chaos is safety, tradition, and discipline.
These types of reversals stem from excess and are crazy-making.
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There is a contradiction in appealing to equity and egalitarian outcomes in a society that proclaims individuality as a natural right: the liberated person is an imminently vital figure to be protected.
Equality is an improbable ideal, and egalitarianism removes rights from some to disperse amongst others. These concepts level through a promoted “normalization,” which is the opposite of sovereign self-making: it is coercive alignment.
Maintaining a state/society that can move into the future requires a shared set of values (such as equality under the law, the idea that your rights end when they infringe on another, and wealth/position is not a shield.)
Contradictions can be tolerated when the narrative provides a payoff (a noble or economic goal to be achieved) but become intolerable when confusion unravels stability.
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We empower our thoughts by focusing on them: by battling them, by pondering them.
By refusing to pay attention to them, they dissipate; they self-liberate.
Consider thoughts a byproduct of living that we manufacture, like methane or carbon dioxide. When we keep it inside, inside our brain in a little cage made of attention, we never let the idea release. These thoughts then agitate and drive us.
It is not that thoughts themself are poisonous or toxic; it is our attentional focus that retains them until they replace silence and cloud our desires that harms us.
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The “dizziness of freedom” produces anxiety, according to Kirkegaard.
When you can do anything, you open access to a surplus of choices, “the possibility of possibility,” from which uncertainty blossoms: which decision will lead to happiness?
Kierkegaard says empowerment comes from ownership (taking responsibility) and making a choice: to restrict your “freedom” by choosing frees you from anxiety. This can be called a “leap of faith,” when you realize that more pondering of the problem is a problem to decide and act creates relief.
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Liberalism, in the classical sense, promotes individual freedom and civil liberties, that is, the agency of the individual citizen and acceptance of difference.
However, in promoting the idea politically as Libertarianism, it becomes flattened into economic excess and regulative access, behind which selfishness thrives.
In a system or state designed around economics and policy-making, a successful political movement would focus on -and move- these twin levers of money and law. Yet, cynically, moving the policy lever is a means to allow wealth, which exempts those made wealthy from the law, providing an elite uber-freedom and the power to close the policy door behind themselves.
Expounded socially, the reductive, deregulatory imperative of ‘liberalism’ works hard to sell ‘positive freedom,’ which paradoxically destroys the more complex range of human freedoms, such as cravings for harmony, social and communal stability, and fiscal parity. In fact, it preys on these concepts by offering them as immanent results of complete freedom, which can never manifest.
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To be free, you must find a purpose beyond yourself. Which is slavery to a purpose.
It will be championed (and reflected) by your friends, which provides a sense of joy.
This freedom that is not freedom, providing you with reflected joy, is absurd. Wallowing in purpose can create a disgusting bureaucrat or motivated altruist, or any manner of thing between.
Be cautious: see it, be wary of it, and yet still maintain a disposition beyond contradictory futility.
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You can find a type of freedom by exempting yourself from responsibility. By playing the victim, you can often convince others to release you of burdens. However, the ensuing trap is to lose agency.
In a reversal of freedom, this “outsourcing of obligation” binds you to the other: in a master/slave scenario, you lose the burden of responsibility by incurring a guardian.
The victim sees external circumstances align against them, which excuses them from fault and responsibility, but becomes deterministic in that they cannot control their fate.
Freedom is the ability to create your own prison of responsibilities.
This “frees you” from the need to heed the edicts of others but ensures you must vigilantly maintain your own dictates, and guard your own duties and virtues, which sounds not at all like freedom.
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Consider the censorship of literature: "fat" is replaced with "enormous" in Roald Dahl’s books for inclusivity.
While this feels like a restriction, it is an alteration. To alter (despite the insipid logic inspiring it) is simultaneously the "freedom" to generate or create, though censorship does so in a negative sense.
To amend or reshape as a tool of bland political correctness is a waste of existing freedoms; a folly which threatens future freedoms.
