We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Samizdata quote of the day – Man is born free but… Rousseau: Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.
Marx: Man is born free but everywhere jobs.
Feminists: Woman is born free but everywhere men.
CRT: POC are born free (like Rousseau said) but everywhere wipipo.
Queer: Queers are born free but everywhere normality.
Kant: Man is born free but everywhere Reason.
Nietzsche: Man is born free but everywhere morals.
Nazis: German Volk are born free but everywhere Jews and queers and blacks and retards.
Hamas: Arab Muslims are born free but somewhere Jews.
– James Lindsey
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
Sudan – Man is born free but clap him in irons and you can get a decent price at the right market.
That’s almost the reverse of what Nietzsche actually said. In one of his epigrams, he says that other philosophers suppose that freedom (free will) leads to (the possibility of) morality, and morality leads to happiness, but that the actual sequence is the reverse: happiness (fortunate biological organization) leads to morality, which leads to freedom. I think what he is suggesting is that the capacity for self-discipline is the only thing that makes us actually free.
Builds up to a nice punchline, though.
Memes are born free but everywhere is ruined by William H. Stoddard being pedantic.
Just kidding. The metajoke was just too good to pass up.
“Men are born free but there ought to be a law!”
“Adults were born free but think of the children!”
“Proles are born free but freedom is slavery”
“Animals are born free but some animals are born more free than others”
Of course, we’re not born free, we’re born utterly helpless and dependent.
Nietzsche was very firmly not against morals, though.
(He did suggest that the overman, striving to be beyond-human, would need new values.
But that’s very much the opposite of nihilism; finding values fit to the people holding them is not a rejection of valuation.
Thus also he called Christianity “slave morality”, in that it was “a morality adapted to the needs of slaves rather than masters”, just as the old pagan morality was “master morality”, similarly – but importantly neither is “good” or “evil”, “right” or “wrong” – just fit for the people holding them and their social position.
(That and what Mr. Stoddard said, above, as well.
Nietzsche is complicated and often deliberately enigmatic, but well worth studying with a good guide, such as Kaufmann.)
John Dillinger was born free. But they put a price on his head.
There is also a very expensive bill from the obstetrician. But that depends upon when and where you are, thus proving that the definition of freedom varies from one situation to another.
Then the philosophers come in and make it even more complicated.
Kant and Nietzsche are indeed complicated.
It is easy to sneer at the politics of Kant – a world of republics (or weak Constitutional Monarchies) in a Federation – or to see this World Federation as blue print for the creeping totalitarianism that international organisations are now forcing upon us. But Kant did not want totalitarianism – not at all. And when we oppose his politics (and I do oppose it) we should remember that we have two centuries of hindsight – we are not more intelligent than Kant (far from it) – we have two hundred years of experience that he did not have.
Nietzsche is a mass of ideas – some brilliant, some rather mad. But he certainly was not a Nazi (as some silly people think) – indeed he despised Collectivists and Anti-Semites – and the National Socialists were both.
I wish he had carried on with his idea of Athena – rather than the idea that things are either Apollo or Dionysus (dreams or the gutter), but then he never totally abandoned Athena (the pursuit of excellence – of creating and achievement).
I think Ayn Rand would have liked the concept of Athena – of reasoned work to achieve noble things, things worth creating.
This statement always struck me as more than a bit delusional.
“Man is born free, but…”
Yeah, hey… Wait a minute. Man is emphatically not born free; were that the case, you’d pop out your mother’s birth canal, land on your feet, hit the ground running, and be on your merry way. Ain’t no human alive ever done that.
And, even if you had? You owe someone something for the use of that-there womb.
Because of the nature of the human beast, needing extensive post-natal care, you’re actually more accurately born into a web of duties and obligations; momma done changed your nappies/diapers for you, fed you, kept you warm, and all that? You have, my friend, incurred a bit of a debt: You get to do the same for momma, in her dotage. If you’re any sort of decent human being, that is…
The only way you can be “born free” is if your parents decide to dump your infant self on a mountain side somewhere, and you wind up raised by wolves or the local slaver. It’s also possible that they do such a terrible job of child-rearing that you’ve effectively incurred zero moral obligation towards them in any way, shape, or form… But, there’s likely someone out there that raised and nurtured you to adulthood, and you owe them a set of duties and obligations, whether you like it or not.
The only way you can be “free” in the sense that Nietzsche meant is if you first become a monster, unfettered from morality and human ties. Which ain’t healthy, for anyone involved.
Q: Why did Elsa the lioness get hospital insurance?
A: Because she wanted her cubs to be born free.
Man is born free, but finding his own path often means forging one through the wilderness.
Man is born free, but true freedom requires constant striving.
That is very interesting to me, because i hold pretty much the opposite view.
“Masters” (i.e. the ruling class) should have a Christian attitude towards “slaves” (the middle & working classes), leaving them (us) “free” in the Christian sense.
We “slaves” should strive to increase our freedom from the arbitrary power of the ruling class.
The latter is a pagan (Romano-Germanic), rather than Christian, concept of liberty/freedom. The Christian concept, as i understand it, is freedom from interference: God has arbitrary power over us sinful mortals, but does not interfere.