"Whereas in other decades, autonomy was obvious--the new conformity is ubiquitous and often invisible, watch for what's hip, and you're sure to be among the more than like minded."
"Whereas in other decades, autonomy was obvious--the new conformity is ubiquitous and often invisible, watch for what's hip, and you're sure to be among the more than like minded."
Freedom begins with the premise that objectivity is its only corollary.
That is, beginning with the political, the freedom of man to choose his own thoughts and actions, beliefs and values, is not causally independent of creating and sustaining a rational and objective government to protect that right, and vice versa: that an objective government depends on a rational and objective populous to remain in a progressive existence, and perhaps to exist at all.
This means that the right of man to choose his own beliefs and to allow society to accept and protect this right is contingent upon the rationality and accordance with reality of that social system.
As a consequence of this fact--a society, any society, regardless of its political system, cannot sustain itself with a fundamental contradiction, in itself, nor with reality, of the personal ethics, values and philosophy of its populous.
To modern society in the western world today, the belief is that the reality is, in fact, the direct opposite: that freedom is corollary only to individual autonomy, individualism being the belief that protects that relationship. The mistake, in my view, is that these are treated as if both were causal, rather than merely related. This mistake can be identified as a contradiction by the basic tenets of individualism as unilateral:
The belief that, on one hand, man has the right to choose his own beliefs, and on the other, does not have the right to violate the rights of others.
Behind individualism, freedom itself is treated as the root uni-lateral value, claiming everything in its path. This is the most crucial, the exodus of our American culture. It is this riddle, the confusion between values which has lead us to the brink of annihilation. The most particular equivocation in the States is the confounding of Freedom with Collectivity. The latter is smuggled into the limelight with a faded and remnant Altruism of past so-called ‘American Heydays,’ be they the American Revolution of the late 1800’s, the 1950’s after the greatest War on Earth made us richer beyond our wildest dreams.
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On the face of it, to contemporary eyes, these principles do not seem to be in any way conflicting, but they rest on the belief that there are no social consequences in allowing man to believe whatever he may so choose to believe independent of objective reality.
More simply put, people today think it is not only okay for man to choose his own values, rational or irrational, and in many cases even supernatural, but that it is his right to, irrespective of the truth about where that leads.
Cultural evidence for the error of this cultural method and resultant attitude is staggeringly clear at the present moment where a third of people according to, for example, Michael Shermer reports that as much of a third, if not half of the US believes in the supernatural in some way from God which most people wouldn't even think twice about, but also far more curiously extending to the belief in creationism over evolution (!), dinosaurs as a cultural lie, (!) psychic ability, telekinesis and even ghosts.
How long can a free society exist without at least a striving for conformity to the reality (Oxford Dictionary’s Definition of ‘Truth’ by the way), and a government which strays from solutions derived through science not merely with passive fragility, but explicit fervor?
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