since Kierkegaard, the discussion of “dread” has been in the
air…guilt has been around for 2000 years and has been the basis
of not one, but two religions… Jewish and Christian…
the common assumption since K. has been that man has felt “dread”
because of the “fear and dread” brought about by the understanding
of freedom… in other words, we feel “dread” because of our recognition
of freedom…we are afraid or live in dread brought about the true nature
of freedom…if we are free, then we are or become responsible for our lives…
this responsibility brings about “dread”…
this was a common point of existentialism…everyone in “continental philosophy”
engage in some fashion or another with the concept of “dread”…
and that is the common assumption… that we find ourselves “free” and in
that “freedom” we are overcome by “dread” because of our newfound
responsibility in being “free”…
and that would explain the need of human beings, being done right now
with the Trumpista’s in America…following the path of other right wing strongmen
like Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet to name a few…people hide from freedom being
afraid and in fear by escaping into following dictatorships…
and we certainly can see the “dread” and “fear” brought about by this concept
of Freedom that has the right wing full of “dread” and “fear” but and this is important…
does this escaping from the “dread” and “fear” of freedom really impact all of us?
I would hold that we modern human being have in fact, very little
freedom available to us… our modern world tries its best to
snare us into the modern slavery that is our current political and
economic systems… it is very hard to be free when we are tied down
into our current economic slavery system by all means necessary…
it uses our educational system, by forcing people to get loans to
go to collage, by forcing people into an economic system that
turns us into slaves by the use of the capitalistic system
of paying us a small, small fraction of our actual production…
in other words, we create $10 of productivity and the corporation
pays us $5 dollars worth, thus stealing that $5 dollars from us every hour…
we are never paid what we have created, and this is true from lowly
hourly workers like me to highly paid businessmen… they must produce
more then they are paid to get their salaries…if they are paid $100,000,
they must produce over $100,000 worth of production/or effort to justify
their salaries… if not, they are fired…
this slavery system or economic tyranny is the basis of the wealth of
any business or person… to be wealthy means you must steal the
productivity of many people… pay them less then they produced…
and this is the basis of every one in America… from every small business owner
who steals the effort of their workers by paying them less then what they produce
to the largest corporation and people in America…
are we free to leave this system? no, and if we do, we are going to starve…
and that cannot be the basis of freedom… be a slave or starve to death…
that isn’t a choice…so I hold that we in America in fact, aren’t free at all…
now politically this is true as well… if you hold to a “deep state” or
some sort of conspiracy like the "jews run the world or there is a group
of people who control everything, then you to also don’t believe in
people having freedom… if some group is controlling everything,
then you don’t have any freedom…
to be in “dread” about some possible freedom, would suggest that
we in fact have some freedom… I would suggest that we don’t have
any freedom… and this is the battle we are or ought to be fighting…
to achieve true freedom in the modern world…
to be free of our political and economic tyranny…
then, perhaps we might have some “dread” or “fear”
about freedom…the “dread” of having responsibility
for our own lives… instead of god, or the state or the culture
or the church or some faceless political or economic system…
the rush of the right into dictatorship of IQ45 isn’t a rush to
freedom or an engagement with even the possibility of freedom…
it is a rush to flee into more slavery… as if we really need anymore
slavery in our modern world…
we are slaves who don’t even see how we are slaves…
at least the slaves of the Greeks and Romans, knew
they were slaves… we are blind to that fact…
a blindness the current political and economic forces
try very hard to maintain…and the drive to make all
of America into trumpism is just another drive to escape
freedom…
so the question is really this… how are we going to discover
our freedom? how are we going to be free from the dictatorship
that is the political and economic systems in both America and the world today?
I cannot live in “dread” of something that I don’t have… I cannot live
in “dread” or “fear” of a freedom that I currently don’t have…
Kropotkin