Nothing without Freedom

Warning: The following contains scenes of horrifically twisted and gruesome introspection not suitable for mature readers.

Seriously, the following is just me talking to myself, though of course I welcome readers or I wouldn't be posting it in the first place. After two years of false starts, finally I think maybe I've got a potentially terrific blockbuster of a fiction story I've been working on, but today I got sidetracted into writing this. Tomorrow I get back to working on that story I'm really excited about. Anyway, here's today's brain droppings (love George Carlin, though this is in a different vein).

If the place where you stand (your attitude) is not useful in the larger place where you find yourself, you might consider moving to a different place, which might simply mean finding a more appropriate line of work (where you can actually be of some use) or new friends with common interests. Change your attitude (viewpoint, the place you stand) not in relation to the place in which you find yourself, but find a completely different place altogether, in which your bad attitude might be a good attitude. The best time to do this is early in life, though it’s never too late to make a change.

Where I come from, when The Man hands you a shovel you start digging, and you keep your head down and your mouth shut and keep digging until he tells you to stop. I never knew anything different, and so I kept digging, and never stopped for even long enough to think about it. Did I know that hole was never going to be deep enough to satisfy him? I can’t remember.

The Man just wouldn’t say stop, wouldn’t quit. Not that he was doing anything but standing up there looking down on me and occasionally kicking dirt on top of my head for amusement, but he wouldn’t quit with that, just standing there doing nothing. The Man appeared to me as the boss, but it could have been the classic Freudian father/son deal; or he might even have been me. Yet in the end (which I see more clearly as I get closer to it) the responsibility falls on the individual, if for no other reason than that he is the only one that can change himself, who alone has that freedom.

I can’t resist blowing some smoke, self-serving I’ll admit but there might be some truth in it: In the US anyway, the power that government exerts over the individual is actually minimal. The government never gave me any real trouble unless I had it coming, and I think the laws for the most part are meant to keep people from violating the freedom of others, which seems to me like a good deal and the way it should be. I don’t see how people who the first time they don’t get their own way will straight off present themselves as victims of “tyranny.” If they want tyranny (and I suspect they do), and if they know as much as they claim, then they ought to be capable of building a time machine by which to travel to Nazi Germany where they’ll be happy.

Social institutions are far more coercive than the US government (at least in regards to its own citizenry), but even social institutions with all their braingames will generally leave you be as long as you perform the rituals and feign respect; though that seems to be changing of late, as the coercion is becoming more devious and forceful, as the legitimate authority of constitutional representative government is being deliberately and treasonously undermined. It’s all being engineered by big corporations advised by psychologists and motivational experts, who now that they’ve taken almost all the money (stashing it along with their allegiance in foreign countries instead of investing it here) find themselves still unsatisfied, and so shift the object of their greed from money to power. Like kids playing King of the Hill, the alliances change whenever somebody gets knocked out of the game.

I can’t blow smoke forever, and when it clears the real dictator stands as he always has, oneself. If there are overly restrictive limits to freedom, you haven’t even gone anywhere near those limits, so don’t complain. Nobody really can make you do anything you don’t want to. The problem may have to do with confused motivations, and I think we usually end up getting what we want but what we want is not always what we think we want. Maybe we should call in a shrink, get one of those motivational experts in there, inside your (no, my) head, to help figure this thing out. Nah, because I can figure all I want and it will be just me stalling my actually doing anything about it. The trick (talking to myself now) is to simply get your head screwed on straight, find out what you want and then go out and get it.

But when you’ve been holding that shovel all your life it’s not so easy to pry your fingers from it and start the long climb out of that hole.