lordkalkin

The Korean War Veterans Memorial bears the inscription "Freedom is Not Free." I've been rereading Schroedinger's Cat, and my gut reaction to seeing that phrase in a movie was "Well, that's just wrong." We're born free in virture of our being autonomous creatures. We are taught that we have been given rights by a government, and we to pay for those rights in some way. "There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free," is the motto of Cagliostro, a character in the novel. The point is that we have to get underneath what we have been taught to find real freedom. Obviously, freedom can be interfered with, but the natural state is freedom, not bondage. We are born free, then taught that we have a lesser sort of freedom which is at least better than the bondage we might have been born into were it not for a price having been paid which may need to be paid again. We learn that the default position is bondage, and in the US, we are born free only because we are lucky enough to have been born in a "free" country. As a species, I think we need to get past this and understand our natural state as freedom; not any government's freedom, but our own freedom as autonomous entities. We are taught to be beholden to a government which has given us something we had anyway. Actually, which has given us less than we are born with. It's as if you had all of your limbs when born, but someone cut off your arm before you were aware that you had one, then gave you a prosthetic, and made you feel like you owed him for the prosthetic. Wouldn't you then be pissed if you saw a picture taken right after you were born but before your arm was cut off? Better yet, wouldn't you be pissed if you saw a picture of the guy cutting off the obviously healthy arm?

I know that didn't make sense, and I actually don't care. I'm sorting things out at the moment.