| View Blog
|
|
|
|
Coercion is when some other person limits my choices, fences my options. Freedom
is always there, wherever there is a human being, even when a human being is being
coerced and enslaved. I do not lose my existential freedom if and when you put a
loaded gun to my head. I will obey you, immediately, not because I am not free, but
because I am both an intelligent being and a volitional being. My will obeys my mind
when I obey the commands of an armed gangster. Obeying my intellect is not opposed
to my freedom. What is opposed to my freedom is the gun; but the gun does not erase
or remove my freedom. The gun only serve to obstruct my freedom.
If my choices are limited, my freedom is not thereby minimized. Freedom is not
quantifiable, even if choices can quantified.
The putative freedom generally attributed to wage-contracts is a doubtful freedom,
a deceptive freedom, and yet a real freedom all the same. The freedom of wage
contracts is ambiguous and equivocal. Freedom has a double meaning; and so it
can be a very fuzzy idea, a very nebulous concept. We do our best to express what
we mean about freedom as clearly as we can. But freedom is an unruly notion, an
unbridled intuition about ourselves.
Freedom is not lost when a person is coerced, even though there is a loss of freedom,
in another sense of the word. Freedom is not like sand in an hourglass. Freedom does
not trickle out, or down, or away.Freedom is not a thing. Freedom is no-thing. There are
no atomic units of freedom. The quality of freedom is never lost when my choices are
limited by duress. However, the quantity of choices with which I can express or externalize
my freedom are reduced when I am under duress.
Coercion and freedom are incompatible ideas, antagonistic concepts, but that they are
concurrent realities, coincident facts, co-existing truths. Reality contains contradictions,
and we do well to recognize this truth.
"Communism really exists nowhere, least of all in the Soviet Union. Communism is
an ideal that can be achieved only when people cease to be selfish and greedy and
when everyone receives according to his needs from communal production. But that
is a long way off."
-- Josef Broz Tito
|
|
Posted by rallen2 on 2008-03-05 14:11:36 | Rating: | Views: 37
|
|
| |
|
|
| Blog Comments
|
|
|
|
|
How different we are! I've had a "gangster" point a gun at me from feet away, and I still had the unmitigated moral fortitude to say oppose the one holding the gun when I was unarmed. Such a test proves the strength of one's charactor, not the freedom of one's mind. To quote a founder's battle anthem, "Live free or die!"
|
|
Posted by happydayone1
on 2008-03-05 14:23:13
|
|
|
|
Yes. I suppose that we are different.
If I were commanded to surrender my
money to an armed criminal, then I
suppose that I would surrender my money
to the armed criminal as fast as I
could. However, the difference between
courage and cowardess is not always
clear. The difference between intrepid
behavior and impetuous behavior is not
always easy to see.
Thank you for your comment.
Sincerely,
Ron Allen
Atlanta, Georgia
|
|
Posted by rallen2
on 2008-03-05 15:28:59
|
|
|
|
|
|
Email This to a Friend 
