Pop Quiz
What President saied: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”?
What President said: “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.”?
What President said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”?
What Enlightenment philosopher said: “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference; while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude,”?
What Founding Father said: “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know…. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors”?
Answers at the end of the post.
Is the practice of Individual Freedom over the last 2,000 years a hockey stick or a bell curve?
By Freedom we mean Freedom of movement, Freedom of thought, Freedom of speech, Freedom of association, Freedom to conduct commerce and Freedom from government repression. These Freedoms have over the last 2,000 years evolved and grown but by the end of the 19th Century we arrived at Robert Frost’s poetic roads diverging in a yellow wood. We are being afforded the opportunity to choose between the hockey stick and the bell curve…”knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back”. Will we choose wisely?
The ultimate absence of Individual Freedom is slavery. A slave has no Freedom to change his or her circumstances. Moving to greener pastures is, absent Spartacus (the Roman slave not Corey Booker) almost impossible. There is a clear demarcation between master and slave and association is rigidly controlled through physical and mental chains. To encourage free thinking is to court open rebellion and, historically, education has rarely been afforded to slaves.
Our analysis will focus on Europe (excluding Russia) where, since the beginning of the Common Era slavery was not widely practiced. Rather the Europeans implemented a practice called serfdom. The individual was not “owned” but was tied to the land on which he lived and worked.
The Roman Warming Period was marked by the Greek and Roman civilizations which were not, by modern standards, bastions of individual Freedom. They were, however, marked by significant advances in things that mark civilization such as philosophy, education and open debate.
The fall of the Roman Empire was an admixture of barbarian conquest and global cooling. The advance of individual Freedom came to a grinding halt and human life during the Dark Ages was described by Thomas Hobbes as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Individual Freedom waned from the fall of Rome until about 1300. The waxing began with the arrival of the Medieval Warming Period. Coincidence?
Individual thought was controlled by the Church of Rome. Individual Freedoms were severely limited by the Holy Roman Empire and Divine Right rule by the monarchs across Europe.. There was no mass communication and as Europe was water locked emigration was not an option.
Milestones on the Road to Individual Freedom
The Power Structure
In 1215 King John I was forced to sign the Magna Carta. For the first time a monarch acknowledged individual legal and economic freedoms. The power of the king was reduced and the agreement by King John to seek counsel from the Magnum Cocilium, the Great Council, and secure consent for exercising the power of taxation ensured that the Council would be a partner in government rather than a tool of the royal family. The Great Council was the precursor of the Parliament. The Magna Carta forever changed the relationship between the monarchy and the people. The genie was out of the bottle.
Communication
In the 1450s Johann Gutenberg revolutionized communications. Gutenberg invented a metal movable type system that allowed the mass publication of written information. For the first time in history “ideas” were made available to the public at large. Information was distributed widely and public debate became impossible to control. This, in turn, unleashed the Enlightenment on a welcoming world.
Freedom of Movement
When Columbus reached the New World in 1492 he unshackled the people and allowed them to escape the controls imposed by the authoritarian governments of the European continent. The Pilgrims fled religious oppression if England and settled in what is now Massachusetts. Maryland became a refuge for Catholics who were persecuted in England. Those who sought the economic freedom protected by the Magna Carta settled Virginia and the Carolinas. The denouement of this Western migration was the formation of the United States which became a petri dish of Individual Freedom which was reflected in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Codifying Individual Freedom
The Declaration of Independence makes clear that the people have the right to dissolve the ties with the government that seeks to control them. It includes the open proclamation of the self-evident truth that “that all men are created equal”. That proclamation was consummated on December 6, 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment.
The U.S. Constitution including the Bill of Rights is the single greatest statement of individual rights and restrictions on the powers of government in world history. It can be persuasively argued that America, with the ratification of the Constitution and the 13th Amendment, reached the apogee of the Individual Freedom. The people were, indeed, “free at last”.
Freedom in Europe
In 1789 the people of France rose up against the oppressive French monarchy. The mantra was: Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood…we must admit it sounds more compelling in French. On January 21, 1793, the French consummated their declaration of independence by eliminating the need for King Louis XVI to buy any more hats. But it soon came to pass that some were not ready for true Freedom….
Danger Will Robinson!
The new despots in France almost immediately surrendered to their authoritarian instincts. The likes of Robespierre, Marat and Danton instituted the Reign of Terror, unmoored the government from its moral foundations and their short lived claim of Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood evolved into the House of Bonaparte and the fragile candle of liberty was snuffed out. Recommended reading: Proofs of a Conspiracy written by Jon Robison in 1797 and Buonarrati’s History of Babuef’s Conspiracy for Equality published in 1836.
It has been argued that the so-called Babeuf Conspiracy was the first seedling from which grew the communism espoused by Karl Marx. It must be remembered that socialism is authoritarian while communism is totalitarian. That distinction was made clear by Eric Blair in his classic novel 1984, published in 1949.
The Communist Manifesto was originally published in 1848. The author was an abject failure in everything he ever tried in his uneventful life but his call to arms has provided nightstand reading by the weak of mind such as AOC, Zohran Mamdani and John Brennan. The teachings of Marx have found fertile ground in the mediocre minds of people who cannot function in a merit based world. The spread of communism has brought us to the Frostian diverging roads.
Socialism is basically the elimination of economic freedoms. The dirigistic folks who advocate socialism simply do not trust free enterprise…they want free healthcare but not free choices in the market place. It never worked and never will but that fact escapes folks like Mamdani who seeks to impose government run grocery stores and free childcare on the poor saps who elected him. Freedom is reduced under socialism but not extinguished. And it is that inability to achieve total enslavement that motivates many to take the next fatal step and advocate global communism.
We would do well to study the globalism playbooks of the UN, the WEF and the EU. In Agenda 21 Ron Taylor catalogues the UN plans and schemes, most of which are designed to limit individual freedom. The WEF pushes the theme of a one world government which includes constant attacks on liberty and the rights of the individual. The EU is just a bureaucracy on steroids. President Macron is not a fan of free speech. He said: “the concept of free speech on social media…is “pure bulls**t” without transparency in algorithms that guide content.” It would be interesting to find out exactly what those “algorithms” are and who establishes them. We can be assured that the unwashed masses would have no voice in that arena.
It cannot be said that communism doesn’t work. It works all too well and any dissent from that fantasy is quickly extinguished. Communism requires the total eradication of all Individual Freedom. The slaughter of over 100 million people by Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, the palindromic Lon Nol, Castro and Mao, who operated the world’s largest internment camp, suggest that we might see a rebirth of the Dark Ages. Covid was a test drive of a totalitarian response to the man made pandemic. In China they locked people in their apartment buildings and welded the doors shut. In America we shut down such basic freedoms as assembly, speech (through censorship) and the right of children to attend school. If communism is universally imposed the answer to the question posed above is…individual freedom is a bell curve.
The question is how do we return to the expansion and protection of our Freedoms. Education and the eradication of ignorance would be a good start. A return to our Constitutional roots might just seal the deal.
We will soon be engaged in our mid-term elections. We must defeat the candidates of the Left who are opposed to both Individual Freedom and individual responsibility.
Answers to the pop quiz:
What President saied: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”? Ronaldus Magnus
What President said: “The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.”? James Madison, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers
What President said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”? Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence
What Enlightenment philosopher said: “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference; while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude,”? Alexis de Tocqueville
What Founding Father said: “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know…. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors”? Benjamin Franklin, lover of kites