What is freedom and do people want it? I think this is not at all
an abstract or collective question. This is very much a question
about what it is to be an individual.
I have already mentioned at some point that it seems to me that
the lack of economic mobility (at least in short term) is in some
ways satisfying. I appear to move to an even more controversial
stance of questioning progress as a sustainable social movement.
Not in some "political" realm, but as a philosophy.
I do know that for example Nietzsche was here before myself with
the declaration of "god is dead". Personally I have been unable
to read any of his stuff because of his style of yelling all the
time. It feels to me like everything he says is in caps all the
time. So, apart from some random commentary here and there, I
don't actually know much of what he says, but I am convinced that
his writing has had as much influence on modernity as Plato did
on antiquity.
So, pardon me in case I just restate whatever he has already
railed against.
The problem appears to me largely psychological: It is in our
nature to seek conformity with our peers and one of the (very
few) dominant ideologies. By this I mean that in a prepastural
setting there would have been very very few actual choices for
allegiances in people and in ideologies.
Those days are far gone, but the psychological demand remains.
This instinct did not evolve in a state where you have hundreds
upon hundreds of little ideology sects to choose from. You did
not have access to thousands of people at any given moment.
The concept of freedom is based on the natural limitations that
were quite absolute in those days. Sure, you might be a special
person who travels around the local area and has some more
exposure to different people and ideas, but how much more
different could they really be, considering they had co-evolved
and were constantly funneled back and forth as people married off
to neighbor tribes. The situation is vastly different with our
modern access.
So, I say that we are being run through sort of a dissolving
effect. We are pushed out into the air, left floating, grab
what you can, nothing is better, up, down, who cares?
This is not an issue that can in any way be solved with any
of the tools we have. Are there any successess that sociology can
point to, as tools of "controlling" people? They don't come close
to giving people meaning, and since this meaning has been
leaking away since the beginning of the 20th century, it is not
very likely that there are many people who would even know to
grab hold of it, were they to see it. And this meaning is, on
it's face, anti-freedom, which makes it even harder to pick out
from the numbers of other commodities you are constantly being
bombarded with.
The best choice you can make is to limit yourself in as
hard a regimen as you can stand indefinitely. The important
word is the last one. If you are only able to keep going for a
limited amount of time, this is not very useful at all. I think
the best is probably to start from modest changes and push out,
always considering that you need to fulfill your needs in future
as well as now. For example, if you feel like you have to have
children in the future, this limits how far you can go, since
there are very few spouses that will be willing to go there
with you.
I don't know if I have jealousy towards the more conservative
person. They do have their christ, but I don't think they
actually believe in him in their heart of hearts. I can summon
respect for Jesus as a figure of early humanism, I can even smell
the mystical something or other that the Catholics and the
Orthodox saw in their golden towers reaching for heaven (while the
Protestants really fucked this up by removing the glitter and the
incense), but I don't think that this would begin to get me to a
space where I had the ideological certitude that the prepastural
people had in their idols. I doubt that anyone living in the
western modernity has.
And a modern person would say this is good. This is progress.
I am not so sure. I think this will probably end badly. I do get
the "end is nigh" part right.
