Freedom

For all intents and purposes, my definition of freedom is: to include all possibilities, even those beyond awareness.

The more possibilities (or choices) you have, the “freer” you are.

However the standard definition of “Freedom” in western culture (USA) is very far removed from my definition. Western ‘Freedom’ is an amalgamation of philosophical ideals. Much of it includes the “Blank Slate” theory, Marxism, and Enlightenment conceptions of (a)morality. To sum it all up, the average “Western” person, believes that freedom comes from defiance of nature …that “Nature” cannot define you. Or that people can act opposed to their genetics. For example, it has become popular and contemporary that prior mental illnesses are inverted, and now people can be “rainbow-gendered”, that there are “infinite” numbers of gender, instead of two. Science be damned.

The Western definition of freedom is regressing, degenerating, and moving backward, not forward. It is not progressing. This regression is demonstrated by how average western people, called “Humanity”, now misplaces or mistakes “Freedom” for delusions and illusions. In other words, a man pretending to be a woman, “is a woman”, and he is “free” to be so. This is how the western definition of freedom has devolved, and shifted downward. What was mentally ill previously, is now redefined as one of the many “freedoms” people have.

Western people are “free” to be ill, to be mistaken, to be delusional, to be wrong. And this is now the premise of western “Freedom”, to believe in any fantasy, and the more radical and defiant of nature, supposedly means that you are “as free as you can be”.

That’s not my definition of freedom. But it is probably yours. And it represents a very low standard and quality, an ignoble conception of “Freedom”, a perversion of history’s previous ideals.

In terms of genetics (Nature), western history has moved from Darwin, to Nazism, and then regressed to Humanism.

Nature used to be scientific and premised upon the “survival of the fittest”. Organisms that can adapt, survive, and pass on their genes. Nazism overturned many of these scientific notions and they became political. Some races are better than others. Some races are superior to others. Some races are the masters of others. And so World War II was fought, and “won” by the western-liberal notion of freedom. Thus western civilization was “freed/liberated” from the idea that races of men were not equal. Then, in the united states, blacks sought “equality” with whites. Leading to today, where hypothetically, “all races, all humanity, are equal”. Are they?

So historically and classically, the western conception of freedom is strongly linked to genetics. You are not free insofar as you are ruled, dominated, “programmed” by your DNA. Science says one thing. Politics say another thing. Humanism/Abrahamic religion says yet another thing. So which thing do you believe in? Where is your freedom? Is it based on truth or falsity? Are you aligned with your genetic composition, or opposed? How could a person be opposed? Is it even possible to defy genetics? Or, are actions only ever the secondary status of an organism? That your genes define you first and foremost, and try as you may like, no action that you could ever accomplish, or worse, no idea you could ever fathom, could be opposed to your DNA?

Then, scientifically, can DNA be changed? Doesn’t DNA change within a lifetime? Or does DNA change across generations of lifetimes, and then, how could anybody ever change anyway? Where are the changes/mutations within genes and life? Where are the changes within Nature, at all?

It is these types of questions, and reasoning, that the western notion of freedom, or freedom in general, could be advanced again.

A hammer, a nail, or a cup of wheat, have great meaning, because they help support a life.

Nihilists say that there is no morally valuable objects.
Which is crap.

In fact, things like rocks and oxygen in the air are wonderful and good things.

Because they are possibly empowering, they can be made to increase freedoms.

Power is a vital component to freedom.

Without these objects, without the ground beneath our feet, life would not be possible. So even the simplest and mundane objects, are valuable. The foundation of life is valuable. But people take it for granted, forget it exists, and eventually pretend it has no value when it obviously does. People are reminded of the value of simple things, like oxygen, when it is deprived from them.

A person who can’t breath, will quickly reaffirm the value of air.

The above examples of oxygen etc. show a common identification of universal consensus as objectivity.

There is no “valueness” to be found in oxygen, it is not intrinsically valuable, it’s just happens to be valuable to all people who are currently able to value - and even to other lifeforms who are not even aware of their own values. But just because all of these valuers value oxygen, doesn’t mean oxygen is inherently, objectively valuable. A technical point, but there is no absolute value.

This is what gives away freedom as a product of dominance - the more dominant you are, the more open the realm of possibilities is to you. You can get people to assist in providing you the means to access even more choices that would otherwise not be available to you by yourself. This is how freedom as a whole, “for all” doesn’t necessarily make sense, because you can only enhance your own freedom beyond what you can do by yourself to the degree that you can take away the freedoms of others to choose what they would otherwise choose, and instead get them to work towards enhancing your own freedoms and choices.

The loophole here is when people genuinely want to choose to enhance your freedoms, that doing so is actually an enhancement of their own freedom, and of course to utilise non-valuing technologies to enhance your freedoms whilst not feeling any way at all about their own freedoms or lack thereof - they just do what they do when powered and designed to do so. But beyond this, an increase of freedom is the denial of anothers’ freedoms - and in this way, we see the modern conception of freedom of the rich at the expense of the poor. The rich can afford (are allowed/legitimised) to enhance their freedoms, whilst the poor cannot afford (are not allowed/legitimised) to enhance theirs - and are only allowed to maintain the freedoms they do have if they sell their labour (compromise their freedoms) to the cause of enhancing the freedoms of the rich.

That’s how I see freedom in Western Culture.

You’re seeing freedom in Western Culture as coming to be defined in the mental sense, how freedom of mentality is taking prominance over physical freedom. It’s the same kind of delusion we’ve historically seen in Christianity, where the powerless got seduced by the idea that spiritually they were richer than the physically rich who had real power over them and denied them their own physical freedoms. If the poor cannot dominate in the physical realm, they can resort to creating a system whereby they dominate other realms - this is a Nietzschean point about the Nihilism of Christianity. In the mental realm, such as with the valuation of the physical, you can interpret reality how you please in some alternate way, even if it contradicts reality - much like the Christian delusion of the kingdom of heaven being more real than the physical world. Exploring the mental realm in itself is no crime - coming up with new ways to interpret the world helps advance us all, but only up until the point where it contradicts reality. From then on, pushing “freedoms” of thought comes increasingly at the detriment of the real world. Technically it’s a freedom, but it’s a freedom that can end up counteracting real freedoms - especially when these detrimental products of the mental realm start to be enforced in the real world - and I think in cases such as Christianity, and new wave Feminists etc. this is at least subconsciously intentional as a kind of revenge against the rich.

This is the primary problem in my reckoning - in a society where people can win, what do you do with those who lose? If nothing is done about them, they resort to this kind of nonsense and inversion of concepts such as freedom. I am in favour of societies where winning is possible, but it actually works in the long term favour of winners to not win too much. The reactions of losers, such as crime and usurping the spiritual and intellectual realms with nihilism bring everybody down, when if they didn’t consider their losing situation to be so terminal, the thirst for revenge on the real world would not be so dangerous. Of course, this is a directly intentional limitation on freedom, which makes the idea so unpopular to people who can see increased freedoms otherwise within their grasp of which they are denied, but ignorance of the psychology of losers is no excuse for not moderating success.

All “value” is relative to life. Life has value insofar as it values its own survival. And so, living organism “value” the earth, to walk upon, air, to breathe, water, to drink, etc. All values are “subjective”. But the objectiveness of values refers to the commonalities that all lifeforms share. Thus all organisms, on earth, “value” the earth, at least in the sense of support that without the earth, there would be no life and no survival, floating out in dead-space in the galaxy.

So an “objective” value merely refers to the most common and generalized, shared-values of all life.

Above the shared-values, values diverge, and animals specialize. The food that one animal eats, maybe disgusting or even poisonous to another animal. This is an example of specific, different, “subjective” values.

Yes, and the liberal-leftist politics wants to take away Choice (freedom, privilege, power, dominance) from the top, and “redistribute” it among the poor and “unprivileged”. This is more similar to Socialistic political views. In reality, there are always differences of power. People are never “the same” although some people maybe closer to each-other in power/privilege/freedom than others. For example, the “standard of living”, the median of power, is the so-called “Middle Class”. Thus people want to expand this notion of middle-class to more people, so as to increase the overall power of a society.

People also generally agree on “Opportunities” for children, teenagers, and young adults. For example, there are anti-discrimination laws, which transfer Privilege from the white-males, to the women and blacks. 50 or 100 years ago, women and blacks could not hope to go to an Ivy league school. Whereas today the power/privilege has been redistributed.

No, I mean it both ways. It’s not merely your “Choice” to pickup a 500 lb. weight. You either can, or you can’t. If you are very strong, then you can. And so that possibility is within your domain of power. You can Choose to pick it up. Whereas weaker people cannot. So freedom is very much based on reality, not fantasy.

The degeneracy of western civilization, Nihilism, is the mental gymnastics and fantasy world. Degenerates say “Well, I could pick it up if I really wanted to!!!” In their heads, they believe they can. But in reality, it is not a choice. You either are capable, or you are not.

Concerning these points, my position is this: a person must first adapt to Reality, before attempting to pickup the 500 lb weight. If a man is young, and weak, then he may admit that he cannot pick it up, but wishes to become stronger (gaining Dominance and Freedom, Power). So he will lift weights, train, and with enough perseverance, he may accomplish his goal. That is the means to attaining power, hence, increased Choice/Possibilities/Freedom.

But, as you point-out, the western notion of Freedom has become quite perverse and inverted in many ways. People mean freedom, only in the fantastical, nihilistic sense, becoming absorbed by delusions (Autism). People deny and reject Reality. So the sense of freedom, choice, possibilities, and power, also become tainted. Nowhere in this thread have I indicated that reality ought to come second. Reality is primary.

But confronting the real power-difference in people, can be very hurtful. Many people have a weak sense of pride, and it will shatter, when they are under the delusions that “I can pickup anything, I can do anything”. No, you can’t. You are limited. Everybody is limited. Everybody has constraints of power, constraints of freedom, dominance, and choice. There is no such thing as unlimited Privilege or Power, because Power has costs, as you said as well.