The Best Place To Find A Helping Hand Is at The End of Your Own Arm.
— Unknown Source.
A Helping Hand
Tag Archives: Personal Liberty
“In the state of nature, liberty consists of being free from any superior power on Earth. People are not under the will or lawmaking authority of others but have only the law of nature for their rule. In political society, liberty consists of being under no other lawmaking power except that established by consent in the commonwealth. People are free from the dominion of any will or legal restraint apart from that enacted by their own constituted lawmaking power according to the trust put in it. Thus, freedom is not as Sir Robert Filmer defines it: ‘A liberty for everyone to do what he likes, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws.’ Freedom is constrained by laws in both the state of nature and political society. Freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature. Freedom of people under government is to be under no restraint apart from standing rules to live by that are common to everyone in the society and made by the lawmaking power established in it. Persons have a right or liberty to (1) follow their own will in all things that the law has not prohibited and (2) not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others.” – John Locke
Give Me Liberty: Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century Hardcover – by
“We are slaves. All of us,” writes Wyoming superlawyer Gerry Spence with his trademark exuberance. “The New Master is an entanglement of megacorporations on the one hand and an omnipresent national government on the other, each stuck to the other like a pair of copulating dogs, each unable to move without dragging the other behind it, each dependent upon the other, hating the other, but welded to the other in a dissolute enterprise.”
Gerry Spence is one of “My” Personal Heroes. Care to tell us about some of yours?
“One of the best aspects of our community is that we have the freedom to control access”.
“One of the best aspects of our community is that we have the freedom to control access”.
The reference above is a most heady quote from an anonymous homeowner in a private, gated subdivision in western Colorado. His use of the words “control” and “freedom” in the same sentence gave me pause. Get all the doors of your home fixed and repaired with the help of the services from garage door repair belton, so that your privacy can be maintained and whatever happens inside the house stays inside the house.
It apparently had not occurred to this gentleman that control does not create freedom, nor community. Common sense and common history can tell us that. His line of reasoning simply escapes me, although it seems to be a common way of thinking these days.
Why are so many of us so eager to assist in the creation of the pretty prisons of our own design?
I wish I had an easy answer. For now, my brain can only categorize his statement under the ever more popular category – “You can’t make this stuff up!”.
But I do know that the Freedom To Control and Regulate Is No Freedom At All.
You Might Also Like Sacred Ground or Fair Warning At The Altar of The Black Robe.
“Why Do You Hate Freedom So Much?”
“If I had one thing to say to the USDA and the FDA, I guess my question would be why do you hate freedom so much? What is it about freedom, whether it’s the consumer’s freedom to choose the food they want to drink, whether it’s me as a farmer choosing the customer who wants to buy my product, or how I want to make my product. What is it about freedom that is so horrendous to you that you are willing to take my property, take my life, take my customers, take my animals, take my land, that you are willing to do this in order for me to not have the freedom to even sell a porkchop to my neighbor?”.
From an interview with Joel Salatin contained in the movie Farmageddon: The Unseen War On American Family Farms by Kristin Kanty.
You Might Also Like: Bureaucrats and Other Pesky Critters
What Do You Fear?
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared we would become a captive audience. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”.
Quote by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe