The Western ideal of freedom was hatched and built upon by long dead geniuses and visionaries. Their writings, painstaking creations, over the course of their lifetimes, of love, and a desire that we become more than what we had been up to that point, were read by other geniuses of a different order who, haltingly at least, placed us on a path to grasping toward that ideal. Men debated the ideas contained in these works, men bled so that their descendants would live the ideal contained within. This ideal was put into practice finally, in anemic and malnourished form, in the United States. However imperfect and incomplete, freedom of the individual emerged, and with it a series of miracles. Markets, abundance, flourishing, acculturation, progress. One would have thought that the argument for the merits of freedom had been finally and permanently won through this blindingly clear evidence. Let people be free, and they will, without their even knowing what they’re doing, play a part in the creation of widely dispersed abundance, in the realization of a better future. Political freedom gave the people the freedom to become more human, and they did. But the philosophy undergirding this freedom ceased transmission almost at the exact moment that freedom in practice displayed its true potential. Everyone enjoyed freedom, but having never learned its philosophical framework, never learned how to defend it from attack. They didn’t even know when it was being attacked. They only knew that prosperity began to decline suddenly, that a negative force had inserted itself into the milieu, that a regressive momentum was gaining steam. The philosophical progress made by the intellectual founders of political liberty evaporated, and within this vacuum a myriad of totalitarian creeds blossomed.
We live at the very end of this drama of freedom’s birth, decay, and death. There are virtually none among us who equal those who wrote the great works that brought into being the freedom that the last four or five generations have squandered, but if we are to ever emerge from this rapid descent into barbarism and authoritarianism, we must jolt ourselves out of the collective fugue state we all appear to be mired in. Distractions are mass produced to constantly distract our monkey brains, to prevent longer, more human trains of thought emerging. Our 5G IV drip drip drips into our cortex via three or more screens, providing the opiate that drugs us into quiescence and compliance. How do we wake up? Is it possible?
