In thinking about the nature of being human, one has many
different possibilities to think about…One of the better
possibilities lies in this statement by Jean-Jacques Rousseau…
‘‘Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains’’
I will call his being born free as ‘‘Atomic man’’…
we are thinking about human beings as individual atoms…
being born free… and how is this atomic man/individual,
becomes ‘‘everywhere he is in chain’’… how do we get from
the one, being born free to being in chains?
We first have to work out what being free means?
My hand-dandy dictionary says:
‘‘Free’’ is a versatile term primarily meaning provided without
charge, of the state of not being under the control, restriction or
confinement of another’'…
So, are we actually free when we are born, as Rousseau suggested,
Physically, we are not free… because we, in order to survive as a baby,
we must be in control of another… our parents for example… for we cannot
by ourselves feed, clothe, educate, bath… simply biology prevents
us from being born free…
The next step is the non-biological understanding of the word ‘‘free’’
Rousseau comment is about the various systems that exists
around us, are the ways and means we are not free…
As has been noticed, the various systems, political and economic
systems that rely, in fact demand us to be under their control…
capitalism for example as does Soviet style communism…
now recall, there is a difference between political systems
and economic systems… and both capitalism and communism
as understood by Marx, are economic systems… not political
systems and that point has to be understood or none of this
will make any sense…
let us look at capitalism in terms of freedom…It is claimed that
capitalism is the system of choice, economically, but that in fact,
is not true…due to various monopolies, the freedom to choose,
which is the heart of capitalism is in fact extremely limited…
for example, in automobiles… we have a lot of cars for sale,
it is said that there are over 300 car brands and logo’s,
however, the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of cars
sold are owned by 9 companies… GM, Ford, Stellantis, and
Tesla dominate the American Market… German car companies
include Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz… in Japan,
we have Toyota and Honda… of course, there are a few more, but
this is enough to give us a sense of what capitalism really does…
it pretends to offer us choices to buy, but in reality, our choices
are dominated by a few companies in that field…
but what is forgotten, is the back side of capitalism… which
is the production side… and there we have very few choices…
it is pretty much work or starve in the capitalistic world… how are
we to be free when we are forced to work under a wage theft society…
every single worker in capitalism is a victim of wage theft…
(the exception is of course CEO’S who get many times the pay
over the amount of work, they do) this in part is the why of
Rousseau statement of ‘‘everywhere is in chains’’ if I want a job,
I must agree this this wage theft… and how is that an act of
freedom? (now there are some who will say this choice, such as it
is, is freedom… one is free to starve to death, but that is in conflict
with our biological imperative which is to survive at all costs…
we are via evolution, our software, instincts given to survive…
that is biology… and every single biological creature has this
instinct to survive… so, we are forced into working as to not
violate our instincts…so, we have the choice of working or
starving… and our instincts will not allow us too voluntarily
starve…So, we have this conflict between work and our evolutionary
instincts… and this isn’t really a choice, is it?
if we must work in order to live, that isn’t a choice…
but this is economics, not political… what choices do we
have politically…recall, that animals have no choices, and
we are human, and the entire facet of being human is to
have choices… we have several types of political systems…
and democracy is one such choice… as is monarchy, anarchism,
and of course, MR. A choice, dictatorships… but what kind of choice
does the totalitarian choices leave us? No choice… that is the point
of a dictatorship… it has no choices… and any moderate study
of two types of dictatorships in the 20th century confirm this…
the two dictatorships we are looking at is the Nazi’s and the
Soviet Union… the only role for the individual, the one was to
support, at all costs, the reigning dictatorship… there was no
other choice but to support, even at the costs of one’s life, the
dictatorship…and again, this is the type of chain that
Rousseau wrote about… for if you must support your government,
the system of government even unto death, that isn’t a choice…
and that is living with chains…
Now one of the ways and means we offer up choices in a political
system is by voting… we, by voting, choose who to represent us
in congress and within the state itself… for example, due to
term limits, Gavin Newsome has been term limited, and so,
we are voting on the next governor…(most likely to be
Becerra) and that limited choice, is still a choice…
and it is only by choices do we express ourselves as
human beings… and of course, some here will attack that
as being no choice at all… but they won’t even accept that in
order to be human requires us to make choices.. it is in choices
that we define what it means to be human… and that argument,
that we in fact don’t have choices because these choices were
forced on us… but I say, instead of practicing fatalism, being
passive, how about trying to change the system? Nah,
that would require us to make more choices, and those who
oppose voting are also opposed to making choices because they,
wrongfully believe that there are no possible choices, if that is true,
then we are not human, but animals… and I can choose to
be human… unlike those who oppose voting who proclaim
us to be animals with no choice… fear drives the passive ones,
the ones who deny choice… and that is too bad…
they not only deny choices, but they actively embrace their
chains as being determined by forces outside of their control…
this is the essence of the conspiracy theorist, that we have
no choice because of forces beyond our control… and to accept
this, is to accept fatalism…
I believe in breaking chains… while many around here believe
in fatalism and remaining in their chains…
Kropotkin