A thought on the irony of freedom:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

One fundamental twist in the 20th Century is that it was a century still of imperialism, but in the second half of it there were two Empires, the American and the Soviet, both alike drawing fundamental claims to power from the same war. To both alike there was a blend of thuggish and brutish means of enforcing power cloaked in the highest-sounding rhetoric of freedom and justice for all. The fundamental irony in this is that both the United States and Soviet Union again drew their power from war and the marching of armies and sailings of navies, hardly a foundation to inspire confidence in champions of liberty.

The very nature of that Cold War illustrated the paradox of two hostile empires both dominated by federations with military-industrial complexes bristling with nukes and engaging in dicksizing contests with each other. Both railed about freedom and the evils of imperialism to turn themselves to doing exactly what it was that they claimed so to despise. The United States, which had proclaimed loudly the Four Freedoms, rapidly turned to using war criminals to take it to the Moon and to propping up pro-Axis colonial regimes, attributing to the collaborators with Hitler's bloodsoaked regime a moral superiority to people who had actually fought those exact same regimes. The Soviet Union, of course, eliminated fascist regimes and their repressive apparati, often by retaining the same torturers and murderers to use their talents for the Soviet Union's own benefit. The Soviet Union was undoubtedly in this the moral inferior to the United States, as the USA's unwillingness to level Paris for leaving NATO and the Soviet decision to level Prague illustrate. Yet despite being the moral inferior of the United States the Soviet leaders didn't wear spandex and steeple their fingers cackling about the latest plans to end all freedom and proclaiming "Glory to the Worker, Service to the State." To me this illustrates one of the big paradoxes of the various hegemonic/imperialistic/ideological struggles that keep recurring through history.

Nobody in human society or human history decides to wake up one morning and put on their Evil GarbTM from Evil IncorporatedTM and kick six pug puppies before breakfast. People will always want to see themselves as basically good, and always right. The reason it takes fortitude to admit one is wrong is the realization that this belief does not correspond to reality is difficult for anyone to accept when you get right down to it. To me also there ends up continually recurring the idea that admitting one is wrong is somehow bad, that it marks one as somehow prone to giving up an argument too quickly.

Yet if one is in fact wrong on a certain matter and proven such, isn't continuing the argument for the sheer hell of it essentially wasting time and energy better-spent doing something else? Some things are fundamentally good, and other things are fundamentally evil. The problem is that these are a very small minority of overall human behaviors and societal values, most such values being infinite permutation of lighter and darker shades of grey.

To me it is the basic paradox of arguing for freedom that two people can mean entirely different things with the same word, a word popular to use around the world in entirely different contexts by entirely different cultures. Yet this most fundamental principle of democracy is one that in the same discussion can lead to long Photian instances of argument over the right comma or use of the right elipsis because two irreconcilable meanings are attached to the same word, with people as usual unwilling and unable to admit that either the other point of view is one to be disagreed with or occasionally one to which no compromise is possible.

Yet this is the very problem: everyone at one level or another wants to be free, but nobody has ever provided a consistent, universal declaration and definition of freedom. If this seemingly simple, illusory concept can be so rarefied as to produce the phenomenon of people arguing for pages on end about the same word on the same side of an argument, much less different sides, what is it that makes freedom such a useful and enduring barometer of values that are so universal? Is it not possible from this that in one word, the problem is that we cannot agree on it because in this sense there is no one freedom but multiple competing ideals of it, some reconcilable, others not so?

And then if this is so, and this premise is accepted (which itself is a big if) then how is it that we claim consistent ideological bases for anything? To me the mere problem in defining freedom is the biggest argument for Realpolitik with its sordid and morally ambiguous nature imaginable. Because a word that is slippery to define but one whose meaning is uncompromising is the most dangerous of all words because in this one word there can be found excuses and rationales to do anything. Ultimately politics cannot be based around slogans and aphorisms held to as dogma, there must be a realistic approach to it that accepts the evil nature of the business that led Otto von Bismarck to compare it to sausage making.

This is just my point of view on why ideologies cannot co-exist with democracy, I'm sure others disagree with it and that this OP is rather less clear to others than it is to me so I welcome comments or questions about it. I added some text to the second paragraph to clear up any lack of clarity about a specific point.

Comments

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I agree. The forced integration of the US military was morally equivalent to forced collective farming in the Soviet Union.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I didn't say the USA and USSR were morally equivalent. Obviously the totalitarian dictatorship that uses murder to resolve political disputes is the moral inferior of the democracy that uses compromise to resolve political disputes. I do think the rise of the USA and the USSR has a few parallels with both empires but the parallels on their own do not make one state the equivalent of another beyond a very, very superficial sense.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Very, very superficial indeed.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's what the point of my OP is, the possibility to have two superficially similar meanings of one word that are irreconcilable and illustrate the flaws of ideological politics. Words can be very slippery things. The USA and USSR were not moral equivalents, but that didn't stop the USSR from claiming Slavery Is Freedom and that it was in the moral right. Even though the claim was bankrupt on its face.

[raven-blue.livejournal.com]

I must admit that I agree with you on this. Sometimes you have to take a stand and declare your side. Sometimes you are forced to do so and sometimes you simply have to do to protect what you believe is the better way of life.

The cause of the cold war was the end result of WW2 (though the real root causes run a bit deeper). I think the greatest tragedy for America in the 20th century was allowing ourselves to be defined by what we stand against rather than what we stand for. This is the legacy we leave to our children unless something drastic happens.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

To me the cause of the Cold War was that in WWII it turned out that the USA and USSR were the strongest powers that went into the war, but both had that irreconcilable approach to geopolitics that meant neither would be able to have the more restrained kind of chicanery engaged in by the 19th Century Great Powers.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

The same number of Kulaks and Freedom Riders died, so the equivalency is obvious.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

As I said to Pastorlenny I am not saying they are equal. I am saying they had irreconcilable claims to both represent secular federalist states committed to freedom, though the US version that resolves things with compromises and legislation is preferable to the Soviet retirement plan of the bullet in the head in an anonymous grave.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

And if two parties make opposing claims, we can of course conclude that 1) both claims are entirely false and that 2) any such claim is by definition incoherent.

or do they?

[capthek.livejournal.com]

"Nobody in human society or human history decides to wake up one morning and put on their Evil GarbTM from Evil IncorporatedTM"



No ideology? Even an ideology about democracy?

Hey, you seen the movie Europa Europa? Good examples in there contrasting nazis with soviets

Re: or do they?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No ideology. The problem is that democracy needs compromise and therefore at least some moral ambiguity. Ideologies can't compromise by their very nature. They can do some good, but they are akin to playing with fire in a wooden building. Of course compromise itself requires both sides to recognize that they are two sides in a political discussion, not eternal enemies doomed to struggle in a forever war.

Re: or do they?

[capthek.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I think you may be defining ideology too narrowly. I mean, if you want to say ideology may always be a problem because it is always abstract, I can see that point. But some Anarchist ideologies are vague enough to kind of be ever changing and they have democracy as their central theme.

Did you watch the video?

Re: or do they?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Anarchism is like that, you're right, though the fundamental premise of Anarchism to Smash the State doesn't work well even when the State is supposed to be democratic. I did watch it, it was very amusing. :-).

Re: or do they?

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Re: or do they?

[raven-blue.livejournal.com]

There is a difference between the evil that lies within all men and those men who allow that evil to define who they are and what they do. At some point the most evil man in the world was not really evil but he made a choice, he may not have realized he was making it but then again we make choices everyday we dont know we are making. There is an old Taoist proverb that says every breath is a choice we make to be good or evil.

[404.livejournal.com]

Ideologies and democracy can go hand in hand as long as the ideology in question believes in democracy. Just like Nazism and the Weimar Republic ended up the way they did illustrates this point. Environmentalism/Socialism/etc all are ideologies, but are pro-democracy, in that they try to derive their power from the ballot box (obviously there are whackos who don't, but by in large they have been peaceful and play within the system.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

I guess you can say something like this:

There's two types of freedom.

Positive freedom - freedom to do something.
Negative freedom - freedom from something.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but essentially don't libertarians NOT believe in the concept of negative freedom?

I think they're equally important, and freedom from oppression/tyranny/violence/financial ruin/medical ruin and such are goals worth striving for. It's a tricky business I admit, but it's worth a try.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

You're thinking of positive and negative rights, that one of them doesn't exist (the one that requires someone else to provide it to you).

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Rights, freedom, it all comes down to the same thing: What do you expect from living in a society? You have negatives rights in the sense that you can walk down the street and are free from being mugged, because it's illegal. It's not a guarantee that you won't be mugged, since something being illegal doesn't stop some people, but it's a type of assurance that's provided by the society.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I agree. The thing to me is that democracy requires a bare minimum of compromise that is typically not easily done by ideologies.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Democratic politics should be a compromise by definition. This idea that 51% support gives you a mandate is ridiculous.

[raven-blue.livejournal.com]

Norman Rockwell painted a series of that he called the Four Freedoms that were inspired by Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address. They were called Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom From Want and Freedom From Fear. The naming of each came from Roosevelt’s speech and are very telling of the way Americans have redefined what freedom means. The first two are obvious, everyone agrees that we have freedom of speech and worship. They are touched on in the constitution and the various letters and documents of our founders and great statesmen. But the last two have subtle shift that had not really existed before in any meaningful way. Suddenly there is a promise of the freedom from something; Freedom from want and freedom from fear.

The President was actually speaking in direct reference to the war and as such his statements should be held in that context. He was speaking directly to the suffering that Europe was going through and the suffering that Americans would be surely go through. But the legacy of that statement is complex. Norman Rockwell captured this idea wonderfully.
In Freedom of speech he captures a very real promise, the right of a man to stand up and speak his mind. But the Freedom from fear is complicated. How can anyone be granted or even earn a right to be free from a raw emotion? The truth, contrary to what the picture shows no one can be free from fear or want for that matter. They are pure abstracts. But they have a legacy which we are still dealing with today every time we argue if this or that is really a right.

I would argue that any negative freedom (as you say) is to easy to subvert to negative consequences. Freedom from a thing means that the thing must be kept from you or you from it. I encourage anyone to really look at these four paintings as they provide a symbolic representation of just what you are hinting at.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

There are many flavors of freedom. Freedom *of* choice is one, freedom *from* choice is another.(*) Most people say they prefer the former, but nearly always crave the latter because it is much, much easier. The eternal struggle is finding the balance.

Hopefully to clarify, most people find some level where they are happy within the hierarchy of dominance; a place where both difficult and trivial decisions can be handed off to others. This allows them the freedom to make decisions on an appropriate level. As I see it, the difference in ideology expressed in the OP is simply the level at which the citizen class fits into this hierarchy. The ideologies aren't exclusive, they are just different implementations.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...

(*)I have a strong urge to insert Devo lyrics here because the song is now stuck in my head.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

There's quite a bit of research showing that after a certain point more choice makes us less happy. I've been thinking about doing a post on it.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's certainly a fair opinion and I'll grant you that.