Individual Freedom

At the heart of Earthlings’ great work are nations’ leaderships of men, who measure themselves against each other. Their hierarchies declare a delusive idea of individual freedom for all humankind: a new world in which we are free to choose our lives; not to be trapped by class or income into predestined roles; to liberate the individual. When one looks back over the most recent eight years, we discover the kind of freedom proclaimed by men, and supported by some women, has turned peculiar and ever so quickened. ¹

Empathy and altruism seem unseen in a peculiar freedom, a freedom opposing an inclusive nature by narrow, indulgent purchasing powers of money. Debt, a form of psychological slavery, has become individual freedom’s trap out of which we are required to calculate ourselves into comfortable and vibrant living. Elephantine bankers with their nosey system might be enjoying their joke on citizens, but taxpayers are not laughing.

When computerized targets and quotas are output as results, then economists and marketers force massive, persuasive insinuations into media. Without considering options, many Earthlings are quickly manipulated by advertisers’ behavioral-specific messages for us to ‘stop global warming,’ ‘buy a green car,’ ‘buy better insurance with you in mind,’ ‘bring democracy home,’ or ‘fight terrorism.’ Too few are awake to cycles of calculated persuasive ambiguities accelerated via media into any citizenries, in any geographical locations, in any pre-determined times.

The attempt to liberate people with a firm hand of democracy, for example in AFGHANISTAN and IRAQ, led to an increased rise of a controlling system of management driven by maximized competitions for gains, goals, incentives, targets, and quotas. Forecasted statistics and goals have been incentivized (a corporate word) for anything imaginable from numbering cafeteria wares to armaments sold to lives lost—into a cyclic computer analysis of corporate capitalism.

Computer generated numbers also create simulated models of global products and services (or free markets, or a money-driven market democracy). At any level in hierarchy committed to a delusive individual freedom of choice, USA and UK public servants have actually presided over increases in citizen inequalities, severe collapses in social mobility, and a mobilized anti-democractic, authoritarian, religious fundamentalism.

Most importantly, the consequence has been what leaders proclaimed would not occur: the return of class power and privilege in the USA and UK. Manly decisions and errors based on computer enhanced gains, goals, incentives, targets, and quotas have brought to fruition a strange paradoxical world during a relatively short measure of time. ²

¹ Refer synopses from The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom, a BBC documentary, 2007; 165 minutes

² …The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, fascism, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.…

Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Refer George Orwell (b Eric Arthur Blair 1903), British author, journalist; from essay Politics and the English Language, 1946 pdf

Our constant curiosity is key
to watching what’s being created.
~ David Moorhead