It is a mystery that Liberty, Equality, Justice, and other idolized concepts -as understood and implemented by us- have been worshipped for so long by the same believers who had all the intellectual means to discern their counterfeit value.
On the surface, those concepts look precious, but their substance is cultural waste.
Let's take a few examples at random:
LIBERTY. Life itself is the best evidence against our idea of liberty.
We cannot choose
where, when and from whom we are born, but we pay the consequences. We cannot choose our sex, size, native
intelligence, strength, health, appearance, nationality, race or any other genetic characteristics,
but we pay for it.
Liberty is just a wishful word, which
should be parsed in different and mostly related concepts to be expressed with
words we don't have yet.
We also have the necessity of defending many aspects of "liberty" with opposites, like discipline, law enforcement, censorship.
It is very popular, for instance, to
demonize censorship far beyond necessity.
Outlawing censoring of the press, as well as permitting its slandering abuses,
for instance, is now a double-edged sword.
We don't need a far stretch of imagination to hear children think, "If they
can do and show this sex, murder, perversion... on TV, movies, all kinds of
publications, why is it so bad if we learn from it? After all, we would do no more
than what they do...".
Who is going to discuss it with them with convincing authority?
FREE WILL is now a hot potato for theologians, philosophers, psychologists, politicians, legislators, anthropologists, biologists.
The various theories of "free will" were created, changed, discarded and rehashed before we began to look into genes and genetics....
Our hero cries: "..give me liberty or give me death!", and then he goes on living enslaved to his body, to the handicaps imposed by all his physical, psychological, emotional, intellectual, financial, and other conceivable and inconceivable limitations, in a society with endless legal, religious, moral, folkloristic, social, fashionable limitations and shackles.
Liberty, for that man
or his peers, is only a relative concept.
One who is chained to a tree in a 30 square mile forest is "free" if his chains
are broken and he is allowed to roam within that forest as he pleases.
I am not
"free" if I am allowed to move at will within the American continent, but I am
not allowed to leave it when I choose.
Any "liberty" contrived and claimed within the present constraints remains what it is: a contrived claim.
As
we make laws to protect liberty, we increase the power of those who limit our
liberty while empowered to defend it. The same qualifications that are used to justify their existence are
used to wrong or enslave entire categories or populations.
To wit: "white supremacy", "human rights", "feminism", "affirmative action",
"social justice"... Only superficial politicians, teachers, demagogues, religious fanatics
and their groupies profess to believe in them.
EQUALITY of results is
desirable and fascinating at first sight, but ugly, revolting and even lethal if
realized.
When equality is implemented, differences cannot be allowed, no matter
how we try to qualify both "equality" and "difference" to make them coexist.
That kills freedom.
Ambition, betterment, competition, evolution become crimes, because they destroy
equality or are destroyed by equality.
Individuality, personal endeavors,
learning, creativity, excellence of any kind, pursuit of knowledge, discovery,
invention, originality, artistic expression, achievement, conquest... are all
neutered by equality...
Those who qualify
"equality" as "equal rights" almost invariably expect "equal
results", even if they vehemently deny it.
Enforced equal results, regardless of personal merits, are inhuman,
anti-evolution, anti-liberty and anti-life.
It is true that human
failings can cause oppression, suffering and inhuman disparity, but to correct
them with equality would be like correcting size difference with stretching on
the rack, decapitation or
feet amputation.
GENERAL WELFARE is
similar to giving enough money to everybody, so that everybody becomes
financially comfortable. The purpose is to give everyone all the food, clothing,
shelter, pleasure, leisure and other thinks he may need or wish.
The resulting lethal stagnation, inflation and general misery, famine and loss of everything
desired and necessary, are the proverbial result of equal riches for everybody.
Poverty for a few
members of society looks ugly, and often it is, but it is less evil than the
nightmares caused by true general welfare.
Just try: you'll find out and neglect to record it...
General leveling
welfare causes not only evil results, but it also eliminates the chances to find
the social remedy to endemic poverty.
It becomes lobotomy for an entire nation, for it tends to drain the productivity
incentive from welfare recipients and from anyone facing challenge.
Today's welfare proponents say that it is inhuman to remain indifferent to the suffering of the poor. No one can disagree with that, but the meaning of suffering and poverty is relative, ambiguous and ever changing.
A benevolent, all-knowing and loving dictator? History has proven thousands and thousands of times that that is not only the eternal illusion, but that it has always becomes worse than what it was supposed to remedy...
"But with today's means and discoveries..." See? eternal illusion...
Many, if not most,
today's American poor, for instance, would have been considered virtually well-to-do
a century or two ago.
They would not be regarded as poor in most Third-World countries now.
That is, a century ago in USA,
or nowadays in the Third World,
most of today's American poor would have caused indignation or some form of censure if
they asked for welfare as we practice it now.
On the other hand, if
we succeeded in distributing the wealth in the perfect way, the normal course of
events and human interactions would create a new hierarchy of values, merits and
availabilities, appreciation of the most wanted objects, positions and
possibilities, according to the abilities, ambition and diligence of each
individual...
These and many other factors would inevitably position all members of our ideal
society on each rung of the social and economic ladder.
At the end, those on the lowest rungs would be classified as poor, the
lowest-level people in relation to everybody else, even if each of them
possessed a house, a yacht, 2 cars, computers, all the desired money, appliances
and more.
The very fact that everyone else owned more would make these wealthy
"unfortunates" the insatiable pariahs of their society.
Soon enough, the number of these new poor would become large enough to attract politicians into seeking their votes by first stirring up unbearable malcontent, then promising to help them, the "working people" (as if others and their employers did not work at all), to obtain justice.
Thus: back to the
lowest, after reaching the highest.
History proves it abundantly, but many
politicians don't want to be confused by the evidence.
On a larger scale, think
of the countless cases of a king owning a smaller kingdom feeling horribly
disadvantaged against other kings with larger kingdoms... War, kill, kill,
and everything worsens for most, to the miserable advantage of a few wretched
winners, who end up unhappier than before.
All the above is
almost obvious, but we have not yet found other words to designate "liberty",
"justice", "equality" in the very relative and limited sense in which we should
use them.
Even in this book, we keep mentioning those crippled concepts with the
conventional words, as the only available way to communicate, because we still
have to define the proper concepts and their values.
The conventional perspective makes the above
debunked terms (and their politicized meanings) perfectly valid and honorable,
no matter how corrupted.
Regardless of what we say to the official pundits and their groupies, the truth
doesn't come through if the fiction has more influential or louder voices.
The hermit or yogi shows a superior, if
daunting, existentialistic wisdom-beyond-wisdom by settling in a cave and
developing elimination of the desires and needs that make all the other mortals
incurably unhappy for not reaching the unreachable happiness.