What Do You Personally Feel Prevented From Doing by Lack of Freedom/Liberty?

[STer]

Magnus,

We could sit here and debate the historical issues you raise all day long. But I really have no interest in that. We disagree on several things, but it is not what I am interested in talking about in this thread. I want to stick to the messaging/perception issue here.

We seem to agree that most people perceive themselves as free to a level that is tolerable to them. You raise a worthwhile point about the role of propaganda in that. That does play some role. But if you are saying "If people knew the truth, they'd suddenly be unwilling to accept the state of affairs" I'm not sure you're right. Even if they saw the things you think they are blind to, as long as they could still get up in the morning, travel mostly where they want, wear what they want, say what they want and so on, I think many, if not most, would continue to consider themselves "free enough." If what you're saying is "What they are missing is that that will not continue to be the case and the government will continue to infringe further and further on those freedoms" that is another story. Then the question becomes "How far does it have to go before the freedom message resonates?" I'm not saying it never could. I'm simply saying as things are presently, I don't think the freedom message resonates and even if people could see the things you think they are blind to, I still don't think currently the freedom message would be that powerful. If conditions change to where everyday basic freedoms are more obviously restricted, then I could see that changing.

I don't think we disagree on any of what I just said but if we do, feel free to correct me (concisely if you could, without another long explanation of why you despise the government, since I already understand that. [] )

[TDB]

It's not really my freedom that is the problem. Things like crazy foreign policy and mass incarnation bother me, but if they went away my immediate circumstances would not change. I should perhaps be embarrassed by my ability to adapt and thrive within the coercive system, and fortunately I have never caused any powerful asshole to notice my existence and decide to make me uncomfortable. So I get to do most of what I want, I just have to accept a certain level of risk that I could be persecuted arbitrarily.

STer seems interested in what would motivate people to resist. I'm not sure we're thinking about it the right way, sometimes people adapt and tolerate terrible things, because "that's just the way it is," sometimes they suddenly stop. Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Why didn't it collapse earlier, during the Czech Spring or the uprising in Hungary? Wy not last longer? Why did people put up with gulags and  secret police surveillance and censorship, until they didn't?

And what counts as resistance? In a way, every pot smoker, prostitute, and gambler is resisting, but culture devalues their resistance. The prisons are half full of political prisoners, but most people, including most of the prisoners themselves, consider them to be common criminals.

Are the people using bitcoin, Imule and BitTorrent engaged in resistance? Are homeschoolers engaged in resistance?

[STer]

 

It's not really my freedom that is the problem. Things like crazy foreign policy and mass incarnation bother me, but if they went away my immediate circumstances would not change. I should perhaps be embarrassed by my ability to adapt and thrive within the coercive system, and fortunately I have never caused any powerful asshole to notice my existence and decide to make me uncomfortable. So I get to do most of what I want, I just have to accept a certain level of risk that I could be persecuted arbitrarily.

STer seems interested in what would motivate people to resist. I'm not sure we're thinking about it the right way, sometimes people adapt and tolerate terrible things, because "that's just the way it is," sometimes they suddenly stop. Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Why didn't it collapse earlier, during the Czech Spring or the uprising in Hungary? Wy not last longer? Why did people put up with gulags and  secret police surveillance and censorship, until they didn't?

And what counts as resistance? In a way, every pot smoker, prostitute, and gambler is resisting, but culture devalues their resistance. The prisons are half full of political prisoners, but most people, including most of the prisoners themselves, consider them to be common criminals.

Are the people using bitcoin, Imule and BitTorrent engaged in resistance? Are homeschoolers engaged in resistance?

 

In the examples you give, either people actually could not just dress, speak and move where they wanted - things were much more repressive - or the economy was horrible and a significant proportion of people were having a hard time getting basic needs met (making even our recessions look like luxury). My point is that nothing that goes on in rich Western countries is really near the degree of those cases. On an abstract level, you can make analogies. But the average Westerner does not experience anything like average people in Communist Czech or the Soviet Union before the collapse did. If an average American were transported to those societies, they'd notice some vast differences in how free they felt. There really is a stark difference between the experience of an average Westerner and a person in a truly repressive place. If you don't acknowledge that out of some kind of ideological anti-government purity then you are just not going to sound credible to most people.

So it's really important to consider why this gap exists between the perilous leviathan spoken of by lib/an's and the pretty ok day to day life most people seem to feel they live. And I don't think the answer is to compare it to the denial in those other repressive regimes. It's true that things can get very bad and people still be in denial. But I don't think that's what's going on here. I think what's going on here is that Westerners have the best standard of living the world has ever known, lots and lots of everyday freedoms and they are pretty content when push comes to shove on issues of freedom.

The homeschooling example is interesting because you ask whether it's resistance. But I keep pointing out that homeschooling is legal. It's a perfect example of what I keep saying - that our government has not stopped us from having a lot of freedoms. There is no need to resist anything to homeschool. It's one of the freedoms we enjoy.

[PatrickC]

Yuri Bezmenov discussed this process at length in the early 1980s.  He was a Soviet defector, and KGB propaganda expert, who described the psychological methods of control, which they called "Ideological Subversion."  The first phase of Ideological Subversion was what the KGB called "demoralization," by which he meant the de-programming of people's basic moral compasses.  An entire population, in one generation, he described, could be de-moralized -- all vestiges of their instinctive moral reactions could be removed, and replaced with a set of moral attitudes favoring the government.  Videos of his interviews and lectures are all over YouTube.

I found this fascinating. Can you recommend any journals or books about Yuri Bezmenov or similar (re propaganda) in particular.

[DoubtingThomas]

 

It seems more like you selectively quoted my response to leave out the part where I already answered your question, which was only two sentences before the part you did quote, which leaves me wondering if you somehow missed seeing it or rather just decided to be provocative and troublemaking by pretending not to have seen it and then claiming I chose not to answer your question when instead you chose to ignore my answer. You also continue to oddly miss the fact that cases where government protects from evil created by other elements in the government supports my point more than the other cases, not less. If you don't realize that then you may want to reread to understand the point I'm making better because you must be missing the purpose of my argument. Talking about cases where government is solely protective is fine. It's a perfectly interesting discussion to have. But it's a far less compelling one when the topic is "Why do people have such mixed feelings about the government's relationship to evil?" If you're making a case for why people have mixed feelings, showing that government can be both at the same time is a lot more of an example of that than showing it can be one or the other.

 

I just want to know if you can come up with a strait-forward example of government protecting from evil that does not originate from government. That's it. You did not answer that question.

[STer]

 

 

It seems more like you selectively quoted my response to leave out the part where I already answered your question, which was only two sentences before the part you did quote, which leaves me wondering if you somehow missed seeing it or rather just decided to be provocative and troublemaking by pretending not to have seen it and then claiming I chose not to answer your question when instead you chose to ignore my answer. You also continue to oddly miss the fact that cases where government protects from evil created by other elements in the government supports my point more than the other cases, not less. If you don't realize that then you may want to reread to understand the point I'm making better because you must be missing the purpose of my argument. Talking about cases where government is solely protective is fine. It's a perfectly interesting discussion to have. But it's a far less compelling one when the topic is "Why do people have such mixed feelings about the government's relationship to evil?" If you're making a case for why people have mixed feelings, showing that government can be both at the same time is a lot more of an example of that than showing it can be one or the other.

 

I just want to know if you can come up with a strait-forward example of government protecting from evil that does not originate from government. That's it. You did not answer that question.

 

This just becomes curiouser and curiouser. I pointed out that you ignored my answer to your question in my previous post. So you respond by ignoring my having pointed that out too and asking the same question yet again. OK since you don't want to do the work of scrolling up a couple posts, I will paste it for you:

"It's much easier to give examples where the government just protects
someone from "evil." Those are a dime a dozen. A person is assaulted by a
neighbor and a policeman saves them and a zillion other examples along
those types of lines."

Now if you want to claim all neighborly assaults are caused by the government, I will have to emphatically disagree with you. If you want to say "Yes but some other entity could have saved them instead" that's quite true, but doesn't negate the fact that the government did it and people saw them doing it and it influences their view of the government. If you want to say "Yes but in many other cases, the police fail to arrive and do their job or they arrest the wrong person" or something along that line, I'll say yes and that's why the view of them is mixed and they are seen as sometimes "evil" and sometimes protective, which is precisely my point. So I think your question has been quite easily answered.

[DoubtingThomas]

 

 A person is assaulted by a
neighbor and a policeman saves them and a zillion other examples along
those types of lines."

Now if you want to claim all neighborly assaults are caused by the government, I will have to emphatically disagree with you. If you want to say "Yes but some other entity could have saved them instead" that's quite true, but doesn't negate the fact that the government did it and people saw them doing it and it influences their view of the government. If you want to say "Yes but in many other cases, the police fail to arrive and do their job or they arrest the wrong person" or something along that line, I'll say yes and that's why the view of them is mixed and they are seen as sometimes "evil" and sometimes protective, which is precisely my point. So I think your question has been quite easily answered.

 

It seems you've anticipated my answer quite well. Sufficed to say, I think the situation in which the police fail to arrive in time to save the victim is much more likely to be the case and that is not a point to be glossed over. The complete inefficiency of the state police in handling crime, mostly due to the fact their budget is tied to the crime not being prevented, is a massive problem. I would go so far as to say the "mixed," view of it stems only from the fact that many people simply have little or no interaction with the criminal justice system.

So while the example is valid, I think it doesn't speak very highly of why anyone could defend the state's ability to ward off evils that it has not itself produced. Even if we are to completely extradite the state from the cause of criminality and violence, that still leaves them operating a completely ham-fisted, inept, and inefficient racket. It would be much akin to saying that public sector unions create jobs. In the strict sense of the jobs directly created by that organization, they surely do. But in the aggregate their existence leeches resources out of the economy and produces even more inefficiency in the state sector, further compounding the problem of job loss.

The point being, I don't think that the state can be said to legitimately protect anything, aside from its own power, in a manner that is preferable to a private alternative.

[STer]

Sufficed to say, I think the situation in which the police fail to arrive in time to save the victim is much more likely to be the case and that is not a point to be glossed over.

It actually is to be glossed over when it comes to this particular topic because the case I'm making is not that the government is always protective and always perfectly efficient at protecting. It is that they are sometimes protective and sometimes not protective. They are not purely one or the other. That is why people see them as both protective at times and evil at times. Underneath all your attempts to avoid admitting it, you do not really disagree with this.

Your point is that the costs outweigh the benefits and that there are more efficient ways to get protection. That is a separate argument and one that I think is stronger. And I encourage people to try to show that one to people instead of trying to tell them they are so unfree and need a lot more freedom or that the government is pure evil without any protective intent or benefit.

Even if we are to completely extradite the state from the cause of criminality and violence, that still leaves them operating a completely ham-fisted, inept, and inefficient racket.

So focus on the "inefficiency" argument, not the freedom argument or the "pure evil" argument. That is my very point.

The point being, I don't think that the state can be said to legitimately protect anything, aside from its own power, in a manner that is preferable to a private alternative.

Again, good so focus on the "there are better alternatives" argument, rather than the freedom argument or the "pure evil" argument.

This is a very illustrative example. Your personal disgust for the state as a concept leaks into your discussion and you are unable, kind of like Magnus, to just stick to the point. It's almost like when you hate someone so much you refuse to just give them credit when it is due as if this somehow strengthens your case. But it doesn't. It just makes you lose credibility. The state does protect people sometimes. It really does. People aren't just delusional for thinking that they sometimes do. They do. That's a fact. Admitting that and then building your case from there - that it comes at too high a cost, that it's inefficient, that there are better alternatives - will make it a lot stronger than trying to deny that there is any protective side to it at all.

[DoubtingThomas]

I think the problem is that people are delusional. Admitting that the state does protect them at times certainly doesn't damage the argument that they are woefully ineffiecnt at what little good they do, but rather making the case that they are inefficient when so few are even aware that alternative CAN exist, much less that they already do exist in the real world, is impossible in most cases.

So I think either point of view works here, but neither works in practice with a statist audience.

 

[STer]

 

I think the problem is that people are delusional. Admitting that the state does protect them at times certainly doesn't damage the argument that they are woefully ineffiecnt at what little good they do, but rather making the case that they are inefficient when so few are even aware that alternative CAN exist, much less that they already do exist in the real world, is impossible in most cases.

So I think either point of view works here, but neither works in practice with a statist audience.

 

 

You might well be right. There are many cases where I often doubt there is any chance of getting through to people. But if there is a chance of resonating with people, I think a focus on inefficiency and waste and offering better alternatives is a lot more likely to do so than the "freedom" argument (in addition to being more accurate). I rarely hear anyone in my life ever complain about feeling unfree because of the state. That kind of talk I mostly only hear on FDR. I do hear people all the time complaining about government waste and inefficiency, however, both personally and even on the mainstream news.

[DoubtingThomas]

While I do agree there are voices in the mainstream that lament the inefficiency of the state, I don't know that any of them are genuine. The reality is that nobody who believes in shrinking the size and scope of the state is going to be widely circulated. For every FDR and other voluntary outlet there are a million or more propaganda sites with more viewers/readers/listeners.

To be critical of waste is one thing, but to be critical of the machine producing all the waste is quite another. Until I hear liberals question the efficacy of the welfare state and conservatives prod the pentagon over their gargantuan budget, I think it's safe to assume the public at large are not going to readily accept any argument that hinges on downsizing government in-general.

[STer]

 

While I do agree there are voices in the mainstream that lament the inefficiency of the state, I don't know that any of them are genuine. The reality is that nobody who believes in shrinking the size and scope of the state is going to be widely circulated. For every FDR and other voluntary outlet there are a million or more propaganda sites with more viewers/readers/listeners.

 

Really? I see John Stossel on all the time The Tea Party is reported on plenty. I've seen tons of media stories questioning the extent of surveillance lately. I could go on and on. More examples fly to mind but I don't even want to keep listing them all. There are lots and lots of mainstream reports on shrinking the size and scope of the state. I don't even think it's the tiniest bit rare anymore.

Your knee-jerk reaction will no doubt be to rant about how these are all meaningless and give me a lecture on things I already know about how big and bad the state is and how corrupt the media is. But none of that changes the fact that what I said above is true. I just wish anti-statists could paint the situation accurately, showing the balances on both sides and then take their arguments from there. When you go too far to an extreme in your argument, it just brings about backlash. I think you do better when you openly acknowledge the facts on both sides as your starting point. The "limited government" argument is hardly censored these days.

 

To be critical of waste is one thing, but to be critical of the machine producing all the waste is quite another. Until I hear liberals question the efficacy of the welfare state and conservatives prod the pentagon over their gargantuan budget, I think it's safe to assume the public at large are not going to readily accept any argument that hinges on downsizing government in-general.

 

You do raise a good point here that, while limiting government is hardly a censored idea, people tend to categorize into groups that want to limit it in one area, but not in another. I think actually most people are very open to downsizing government - as long as they get to pick which parts get downsized.

[TDB]

 

 

It's not really my freedom that is the problem. Things like crazy foreign policy and mass incarnation bother me, but if they went away my immediate circumstances would not change. I should perhaps be embarrassed by my ability to adapt and thrive within the coercive system, and fortunately I have never caused any powerful asshole to notice my existence and decide to make me uncomfortable. So I get to do most of what I want, I just have to accept a certain level of risk that I could be persecuted arbitrarily.

STer seems interested in what would motivate people to resist. I'm not sure we're thinking about it the right way, sometimes people adapt and tolerate terrible things, because "that's just the way it is," sometimes they suddenly stop. Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Why didn't it collapse earlier, during the Czech Spring or the uprising in Hungary? Wy not last longer? Why did people put up with gulags and  secret police surveillance and censorship, until they didn't?

And what counts as resistance? In a way, every pot smoker, prostitute, and gambler is resisting, but culture devalues their resistance. The prisons are half full of political prisoners, but most people, including most of the prisoners themselves, consider them to be common criminals.

Are the people using bitcoin, Imule and BitTorrent engaged in resistance? Are homeschoolers engaged in resistance?

 

In the examples you give, either people actually could not just dress, speak and move where they wanted - things were much more repressive - or the economy was horrible and a significant proportion of people were having a hard time getting basic needs met (making even our recessions look like luxury). My point is that nothing that goes on in rich Western countries is really near the degree of those cases. On an abstract level, you can make analogies. But the average Westerner does not experience anything like average people in Communist Czech or the Soviet Union before the collapse did. If an average American were transported to those societies, they'd notice some vast differences in how free they felt. There really is a stark difference between the experience of an average Westerner and a person in a truly repressive place. If you don't acknowledge that out of some kind of ideological anti-government purity then you are just not going to sound credible to most people.

So it's really important to consider why this gap exists between the perilous leviathan spoken of by lib/an's and the pretty ok day to day life most people seem to feel they live. And I don't think the answer is to compare it to the denial in those other repressive regimes. It's true that things can get very bad and people still be in denial. But I don't think that's what's going on here. I think what's going on here is that Westerners have the best standard of living the world has ever known, lots and lots of everyday freedoms and they are pretty content when push comes to shove on issues of freedom.

The homeschooling example is interesting because you ask whether it's resistance. But I keep pointing out that homeschooling is legal. It's a perfect example of what I keep saying - that our government has not stopped us from having a lot of freedoms. There is no need to resist anything to homeschool. It's one of the freedoms we enjoy.

 

Above, I am admitting I have a remarkable degree of freedom compared to many people now alive, that my personal freedom is currently a nonissue. Even the risk I mention is pretty low, assuming I don't go looking for a fight. So STer's response, which seems to take everything I said as an argument against his position, seems to misunderstand what I am saying. Let me clarify. I basically agree with his point that we won't convince many people to do much of anything by talking about how the government limits their freedom, true or not. And my interpretation of what Stef has said does not contradict it either - Stef is all about raising a generation of rational people, not about starting a revolution, violent or otherwise. I am a bit less patient than Stef, but my plan doesn't rely much on that sort of propaganda (nor for that matter violence). It might get a bit of traction in a neighborhood with a lot of "stop and frisk" going on. Or maybe not.

Anyhow, you would not try to abolish Catholicism by convincing Catholics that the Pope is restricting their freedom. He's the Pope, thats what he does. You need to convince them that Catholicism is nonsense. Statism is a religion. Only by undermining the fundamental beliefs can you so much as dent it. Even if we could convince the average person to gripe about government bureaucrats squelching freedom, we would not necessarily have demolished that temple. Perhaps STer will find this new approach even more challenging and difficult than the previous one.  

In the discussion of the USSR, I am not making an analogy. I am thinking about what makes people resist or not, even under more dire conditions. And it is eluding me. Sometimes revolts happen in good times, sometimes in bad, sometimes ruthless tyrants die of old age in their sleep. 

 

WRT homeschooling, So nothing that is legal counts as resistance? Maybe I need a new word. It's not civil disobedience. Subtle disobedience? Uncivil disobedience? Cultural transgression? Subversion?

[Magnus]

I don't disagree with you, STer, that a less-radical set of statements about the State will tend to resonate more with people who tend to resist radical statements. Who could argue with that? It's practically a tautology. 

I just think it's a trivial point to make. 

There is no perfect argument to be made that will do the trick, no magic combination of words that will suddenly snap billions of people out of their current mindset, and meaningfully orient them toward a greater respect for freedom. 

Thats what I was saying when I mentioned the blindness to the color red. When it comes to almost everyone, it will not matter one iota that you make an argument. It will not matter if you make a more refined and elegant argument. It will not matter that you make a more sound and rational argument. You really need to get your mind around a very important point here -- billions of people are completely unreachable. 

There exists a very small group of people who are not fully brainwashed, who are not beyond hope. In America, it is probably a number that is smaller than the number of people who would fill a basketball arena. The purpose of anarchist thinkers and writers is to discuss the unvarnished truth, regardless of how radical it may be. The watered-down version that you are promoting, which dithers over discussions of trivial points, is best left to the conservatives, liberals and libertarians. They waste their time with those topics on purpose. It preoccupies them, so they don't have to think about the disturbing questions. That's a feature, not a bug. 

The degree of control that the State has over the other 99.9999% of the population renders them completely impervious to your arguments. 

You might be able to reach some of these people through propaganda -- by sneaking libertarian themes into widely popular forms of entertainment.  That is the only way to meaningfully persuade large numbers of people, not by changing our argument from "the State is all bad" to "the State is mostly bad."  

I am not convinced that you are genuinely interested in talking about the nature of psychological population control. Every time I try to discuss it, or point out that your trivial refinements to anarchist rhetoric are missing the Big Picture, you say that I am just ranting against the state and am blinded by my rage, etc.  That is clearly a psychological defense mechanism. You are not an anarchist, and are discussing these marginal issues to avoid the more important issues. 

[Magnus]

 

Yuri Bezmenov discussed this process at length in the early 1980s.  He was a Soviet defector, and KGB propaganda expert, who described the psychological methods of control, which they called "Ideological Subversion."  The first phase of Ideological Subversion was what the KGB called "demoralization," by which he meant the de-programming of people's basic moral compasses.  An entire population, in one generation, he described, could be de-moralized -- all vestiges of their instinctive moral reactions could be removed, and replaced with a set of moral attitudes favoring the government.  Videos of his interviews and lectures are all over YouTube.

I found this fascinating. Can you recommend any journals or books about Yuri Bezmenov or similar (re propaganda) in particular.

 

He's great, isn't he? 

I don't know more about Bezmenov specifically, other than the stuff on YouTube, but as to propaganda generally, the books by Lippmann and Bernays are short and chocked full of the techniques of their time. Joseph Goebbels wrote a lot about propaganda theory itself. Huxley's essays collected as Brave New World Revisited are also very good. Postman wrote a short book called Amusing Ourselves to Death on the effect of TV on society generally, regardless of content. Those are the best popular books I can think of off the top of my head, and they're all very informative. 

Contemporary marketing books are probably the next best place to turn. The sub-fields within marketing of neuro-psyche and branding in particular are focused on the modern tools of population control. 

[PatrickC]

He's great, isn't he? 

I don't know more about Bezmenov specifically, other than the stuff on YouTube, but as to propaganda generally, the books by Lippmann and Bernays are short and chocked full of the techniques of their time. Joseph Goebbels wrote a lot about propaganda theory itself. Huxley's essays collected as Brave New World Revisited are also very good. Postman wrote a short book called Amusing Ourselves to Death on the effect of TV on society generally, regardless of content. Those are the best popular books I can think of off the top of my head, and they're all very informative. 

Contemporary marketing books are probably the next best place to turn. The sub-fields within marketing of neuro-psyche and branding in particular are focused on the modern tools of population control.

He certainly was. He reminded me of some of the discussions I had with my uncle whilst he was living in Hungary. He used to sell black market goods to the Soviet troops, who were on a permanent ration of black bread (horrid stuff). When the discussion turned to the KGB I remember him remarking that some of the officers would tell him, 'oh don't worry about those guys, they are too busy swilling vodka down the necks of western dignitaries'. He eventually escaped Hungary and I think he was helped by some of these officers if I recall right.

Anyway, thanks for the information, fascinating stuff.

[STer]

 

Anyhow, you would not try to abolish Catholicism by convincing Catholics that the Pope is restricting their freedom. He's the Pope, thats what he does. You need to convince them that Catholicism is nonsense. Statism is a religion. Only by undermining the fundamental beliefs can you so much as dent it. Even if we could convince the average person to gripe about government bureaucrats squelching freedom, we would not necessarily have demolished that temple. Perhaps STer will find this new approach even more challenging and difficult than the previous one

 

I don't think the only way is to undercut belief in something through rational arguments against it. Another way is to show corruption. I would think the scandals of the church have done as much to make people question them as any rational arguments againt faith.

 

In the discussion of the USSR, I am not making an analogy. I am thinking about what makes people resist or not, even under more dire conditions. And it is eluding me. Sometimes revolts happen in good times, sometimes in bad, sometimes ruthless tyrants die of old age in their sleep. 

 

Yes it's a very complex question. Seems nobody is able to quite predict these things.

WRT homeschooling, So nothing that is legal counts as resistance? Maybe I need a new word. It's not civil disobedience. Subtle disobedience? Uncivil disobedience? Cultural transgression? Subversion?

 

Well how is it disobedience at all to do something that is perfectly allowed? Perhaps some people use homeschooling as a means of subversion. But it seems like more people who homeschool are conservatives who are patriotic and nationalistic than anti-statist subversives

[STer]

 

You really need to get your mind around a very important point here -- billions of people are completely unreachable.

 

I'm not saying they are reachable. They may well not be. But if they are, I don't think the freedom argument is the most likely to work in Western countries. That's all.

 

The purpose of anarchist thinkers and writers is to discuss the unvarnished truth, regardless of how radical it may be.

 

That is the purpose you see in them. I don't think that's a universal thing. Some of them certainly want to do more than just discuss. Also, we disagree on the truth. My point here isn't just that the freedom message isn't very effective, but that, in the West, it's really not very accurate. People in modern Western countries, in practice, have a tremendous amount of freedom. In fact, more freedom than most of them even care to use. The restrictions that anarchists lament so much are mostly ones that don't impact people on a day to day basis in terms of their dress, speech, travel and so on. There are some that do impact them, but in ways that aren't important enough to cause them to lose any sleep. You attribute this to brainwashing. I attribute it, at least in good part, to just being everyday people who are focused on basic day to day activities and content to raise their families rather than worried about major political concerns. It is a values difference. They simply value these day to day activities more than they value larger picture concerns. This could well tie into a personality type difference, as this is exactly what you'd expect from certain types as opposed to others.

 

The degree of control that the State has over the other 99.9999% of the population renders them completely impervious to your arguments. 

You might be able to reach some of these people through propaganda -- by sneaking libertarian themes into widely popular forms of entertainment.  That is the only way to meaningfully persuade large numbers of people, not by changing our argument from "the State is all bad" to "the State is mostly bad."'

 

You say anarchist thinkers and writers want to discuss the unvarnished truth. Well the unvarnished truth is not that "the State is all bad." I've listed examples where the State does things that are pretty universally understood as good things to do. The response I get, and the actual unvarnished truth as some see it is "the State is too inefficient and costly at doing the good things that it does." Or you can say "In doing the good that it does, the State ignores certain crucial moral principles so in spite of that good, it is still unjustified." But if you want unvarnished truth, you need to be more precise, not less.

 

I am not convinced that you are genuinely interested in talking about the nature of psychological population control. Every time I try to discuss it, or point out that your trivial refinements to anarchist rhetoric are missing the Big Picture, you say that I am just ranting against the state and am blinded by my rage, etc.  That is clearly a psychological defense mechanism. You are not an anarchist, and are discussing these marginal issues to avoid the more important issues. 

 

I think you are not looking at the big picture because you are so narrowly focused on the big bad government. There is psychological persuasion going on all around us. It doesn't just come from government. It comes from our families, corporations trying to sell us things, everyday people with something to gain from convincing us, and, yes, also from the government. I think it's an incomplete picture to just paint the government as having this hypnotic mind control over people. In fact, it's considered common knowledge, almost cliche, that politicians are all liars and thieves. Everyday people joke about it at the dinner table all day long. There is a big difference between that and what you see in North Korea. But your version of unvarnished truth whitewashes right over that difference. Things are not as black and white as you make them. It's a complex circumstance. And many of the messages bombarding people contradict each other. I just think you're oversimplifying.

[TDB]

 

 

Anyhow, you would not try to abolish Catholicism by convincing Catholics that the Pope is restricting their freedom. He's the Pope, thats what he does. You need to convince them that Catholicism is nonsense. Statism is a religion. Only by undermining the fundamental beliefs can you so much as dent it. Even if we could convince the average person to gripe about government bureaucrats squelching freedom, we would not necessarily have demolished that temple. Perhaps STer will find this new approach even more challenging and difficult than the previous one

 

I don't think the only way is to undercut belief in something through rational arguments against it. 

 

Agreed. Rational argument is not even the best way. I rate demonstration higher. Not as in political demonstration on the capital grounds, but as in the Wright brothers demonstrated the principle of heavier than air flight.

 

WRT homeschooling, So nothing that is legal counts as resistance? Maybe I need a new word. It's not civil disobedience. Subtle disobedience? Uncivil disobedience? Cultural transgression? Subversion?

 

 

Well how is it disobedience at all to do something that is perfectly allowed? 

 

They're not taking the path of least resistance. There ought to be a joke in there somewhere. They are resisting the dominant paradigm, they're opting out, and doing it well. They're opening up space, demonstrating what autonomy can look like. Okay, I definitely need a better way of describing this.

Homeschooling currently is perfectly allowed (small quibble, some states impose a regulatory burden) in the legal sense. In the cultural sense it still goes against the grain, incurs a cost. The government bureaucrats push them in one direction, they zag in another. They are resisting an idea. Boycott is the word I should've used. They are in conscious opposition to the dominant idea. The fact that their resistance has been sufficiently successful that their activity is now mostly legal throughout the US should not disqualify it as resistance.

 

 

[STer]

 

They're not taking the path of least resistance. There ought to be a joke in there somewhere. They are resisting the dominant paradigm, they're opting out, and doing it well. They're opening up space, demonstrating what autonomy can look like. Okay, I definitely need a better way of describing this.

 

I haven't studied this much. But from what I've seen, it seems like many homeschoolers are not doing it to demonstrate autonomy. They're doing it so that they can indoctrinate their kids as they wish rather than the state indoctrinate them. It's not as if they're doing it to give the children the freedom to seek truth as they see fit. I am not saying nobody does that. I'm sure there are some very thoughtful parents that homeschool for this latter reason. But my understanding, which might be wrong, is that most homeschoolers do so for religious reasons because they want to control the flow of information to their kids in an even more narrow way, not broaden it.

 

Homeschooling currently is perfectly allowed (small quibble, some states impose a regulatory burden) in the legal sense. In the cultural sense it still goes against the grain, incurs a cost. The government bureaucrats push them in one direction, they zag in another. They are resisting an idea. Boycott is the word I should've used. They are in conscious opposition to the dominant idea. The fact that their resistance has been sufficiently successful that their activity is now mostly legal throughout the US should not disqualify it as resistance.

 

If I'm correct, many homeschoolers are opposing the dominant ideas of the government, but trading them for the dominant ideas of the church. And those messages are often in opposition, as this demonstrates. That's why there are religious families who believe government schools are so bad for their kids, from a religious standpoint, that they should remove them.

This is why I said in my earlier post that it's oversimplifying to just claim everyone is brainwashed by the government. In fact, they are getting mesages - often mixed messages that contradict each other - from many corners.

[DoubtingThomas]

I would tend to agree. Most home-schoolers are relgious and have no interest in empiricism.

That said, disallowing homeschooling in order to curb religious indoctorination would be a net-negative since it would also eliminate every secular homeschooler too.

[Magnus]

 

If I'm correct, many homeschoolers are opposing the dominant ideas of the government, but trading them for the dominant ideas of the church. And those messages are often in opposition, as this demonstrates. That's why there are religious families who believe government schools are so bad for their kids, from a religious standpoint, that they should remove them.

This is why I said in my earlier post that it's oversimplifying to just claim everyone is brainwashed by the government. In fact, they are getting mesages - often mixed messages that contradict each other - from many corners.

 

Religious homeschooling and government schooling are not in opposition.  They are rivals for control of people's minds, in much the same way that Fascism and Communism are not in opposition, but are rival governmental regimes. 

You are the one who is oversimplifying, when you suggest that because people are not revolting in the streets, it proves that things can't be all that bad -- the level of governmental control over people's lives must not be all that intrusive.

In fact, the lack of massive, popular response and objection proves no such thing.  On the contrary, it shows that the level of control is even more intrusive than you realize -- the State controls not only money, banking, transportation, telecommunications, land use, utilities, technological innovation, and all the rest (which is obvious to anyone who cares to examine these things), but also controls most people's psychological sensitivity to governmental control and intrusion. 

For crying out loud, it was just revealed (again) a few days ago that every single telecommunication to and from every person whose telephone calls, emails and internet traffic happen to pass through American computers are RECORDED.  The East German Stasi would have wet itself to have that level of intrusion, as former Stasi officers have actually said. 

 

Wolfgang Schmidt ... pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United
States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come
true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in
the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

In those
days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he
recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be
dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea
that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage
of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of
millions more.

“So much information, on so many people,” he said.

East
Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state
surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and
so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard
engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have
greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere
in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of
people were when they made phone calls or what video content they
streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.

Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled.

 

The Stasi is appalled, and yet, people are not deposing the US government over this. 

Postman talked about this in Amusing Ourselves to Death -- a book I haven't read in 20 years, but another poster here reminded me of it --  

 

Alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was
another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling:
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among
the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell
warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But
in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of
their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to
love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their
capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban
books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a
book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

 

You are looking at the level of popular response to governmental control and intrusion, seeing little of it, and concluding that the level of intrusion and control must not be very extensive. 

You are clearly not being scientific and rational about your analysis at all, because you are failing (and actively refusing) to consider the extent to which people's awareness of and sensitivity to governmental control and intrusion is itself malleable, and can be manipulated.

Who would want to manipulate such awareness and sensitivity?  The very same people who would seek to increase control and intrusion. 

The primary instrument of this psychological manipulation is called "public school," although the state-sponsored media is the primary means by which childhood psychological conditioning is maintained, daily, throughout adulthood.

[TDB]

 

 

They're not taking the path of least resistance. There ought to be a joke in there somewhere. They are resisting the dominant paradigm, they're opting out, and doing it well. They're opening up space, demonstrating what autonomy can look like. Okay, I definitely need a better way of describing this.

 

I haven't studied this much. But from what I've seen, it seems like many homeschoolers are not doing it to demonstrate autonomy. They're doing it so that they can indoctrinate their kids as they wish rather than the state indoctrinate them. It's not as if they're doing it to give the children the freedom to seek truth as they see fit. I am not saying nobody does that. I'm sure there are some very thoughtful parents that homeschool for this latter reason. But my understanding, which might be wrong, is that most homeschoolers do so for religious reasons because they want to control the flow of information to their kids in an even more narrow way, not broaden it.

 

Homeschooling currently is perfectly allowed (small quibble, some states impose a regulatory burden) in the legal sense. In the cultural sense it still goes against the grain, incurs a cost. The government bureaucrats push them in one direction, they zag in another. They are resisting an idea. Boycott is the word I should've used. They are in conscious opposition to the dominant idea. The fact that their resistance has been sufficiently successful that their activity is now mostly legal throughout the US should not disqualify it as resistance.

 

If I'm correct, many homeschoolers are opposing the dominant ideas of the government, but trading them for the dominant ideas of the church. And those messages are often in opposition, as this demonstrates. That's why there are religious families who believe government schools are so bad for their kids, from a religious standpoint, that they should remove them.

This is why I said in my earlier post that it's oversimplifying to just claim everyone is brainwashed by the government. In fact, they are getting mesages - often mixed messages that contradict each other - from many corners.

 

Should I interpret all this as an argument against the idea of homeschoolers being engaged in resistance, or as a change of subject?[]

[STer]

Religious homeschooling and government schooling are not in opposition.  They are rivals for control of people's minds, in much the same way that Fascism and Communism are not in opposition, but are rival governmental regimes.

Yes, they are rivals precisely because they often give different messages. And the church itself often gives yet other different messages. And corporations trying to sell products often give yet other different messages. Which is my point. People do not just have one stream of brainwashing propaganda from the government. They have many streams of propaganda from various entities with various interests, some of which clash. And the government does not always win that battle for the mind. In fact, they only wish they had the level of unfettered message acceptance that you act like they have in this stew of messages coming at people. This is one area I claim you are oversimplifying.

You are the one who is oversimplifying, when you suggest that because people are not revolting in the streets, it proves that things can't be all that bad -- the level of governmental control over people's lives must not be all that intrusive.

I simply said people have a great amount of freedom in their everyday ability to say, do and wear what they want and go where they want and that, as far as the freedoms that are limited, I don't think they bother most people much because they limit them in ways they didn't really care about and don't lose much sleep over. If you disagree and think they are very bothered by this, go ahead and say so. Show me the things that everyday people in the West can't do that make them feel very unfree. If you can't do that, then you agree with me. And there is no need to keep posting "the government is really bad" because it's not relevant. The point is that whatever bad they do in the way of limiting freedom apparently isn't done in ways that make people feel unfree. So telling them how unfree they are won't hit home.

In fact, the lack of massive, popular response and objection proves no such thing.  On the contrary, it shows that the level of control is even more intrusive than you realize -- the State controls not only money, banking, transportation, telecommunications, land use, utilities, technological innovation, and all the rest (which is obvious to anyone who cares to examine these things), but also controls most people's psychological sensitivity to governmental control and intrusion.

But most people don't care about this very much, as long as they can get their money when they want it, drive where they want to, call who they want to and so on. I'm not saying they don't have any concern at all. But until they try to get their money and are told no (like in It's a Wonderful Life) or try to drive to see their friend and are stopped at checkpoints or things like that, where the limits become very concrete, I think they don't find it too bothersome. If you disagree and think they do find it bothersome, then feel free to show that. If you think "they only don't find it bothersome because they're brainwashed" that is both irrelevant (because I'm simply explaining why the freedom message doesn't resonate and, even if that was the reason, it would still be true) and, I think, not accurate because I think it has just as much to do with values (most people simply don't value things the same way you and most anarchists do and are much more focused on concrete day-to-day living at the most basic levels).

For crying out loud, it was just revealed (again) a few days ago that every single telecommunication to and from every person whose telephone calls, emails and internet traffic happen to pass through American computers are RECORDED.  The East German Stasi would have wet itself to have that level of intrusion, as former Stasi officers have actually said.

I said the "freedom" argument is not very strong. The privacy argument is something else. I think the privacy argument is at least a little bit more accurate and potentially effective. I would definitely encourage more focus on privacy as opposed to focus on "freedom" at the moment. I think the "we are unfree" message doesn't resonate with people's experience. The privacy argument does resonate. I'm not sure enough people care about it enough at this point to bother their still-pretty-free everyday lives about it. But at least it's got some weight to it. If you want to frame the privacy issue as a subset of the freedom issue, that's fine. In that framing, I would say it is one subset where people feel it speaks to the reality they experience, whereas most other subsets don't. Taxes is another side that you can consider a subset of freedom where the complaints at least make sense to many people, even if most are resigned at this point and are unlikely to get too worked up unless taxes went much higher. But when you talk about freedom as a general issue, I think people have a hard time relating while driving their cars wherever they want wearing whatever they want while telling jokes about how bad politicians are openly in public.

You are looking at the level of popular response to governmental control and intrusion, seeing little of it, and concluding that the level of intrusion and control must not be very extensive.

No I'm not. I simply said, over and over, that people can do almost everything they really want to do and the things they can't do are things they don't seem to care about much and therefore trying to work up any kind of fervor over being "unfree" is not likely to work well. The privacy issue is either a separate issue or a specific subset that deserves more attention though

You are clearly not being scientific and rational about your analysis at all, because you are failing (and actively refusing) to consider the extent to which people's awareness of and sensitivity to governmental control and intrusion is itself malleable, and can be manipulated.

I guess I wasted my time writing a whole response to that exact point earlier (and a couple times since). But at this point, seeing how many times you continue to almost intentionally misunderstand my points so as to somehow find a way to post another "government is very bad" post, which has nothing to do with the point I'm making about perception and day-to-day freedoms of expression, travel and so on, I'm not sure if there is much point to any of this. If government has brainwashed people so badly that they now accept huge levels of lack of freedom then my point is still correct that the freedom message is unlikely to work. And if I'm right that it's just as much about people simply being more concerned with the day-to-day basics of seeing their friends and family, taking care of their families and so on - and that, as long as they can do these things relatively unfettered, they will feel generally free enough - then my point stands that way too.

[STer]

 

 

 

They're not taking the path of least resistance. There ought to be a joke in there somewhere. They are resisting the dominant paradigm, they're opting out, and doing it well. They're opening up space, demonstrating what autonomy can look like. Okay, I definitely need a better way of describing this.

 

I haven't studied this much. But from what I've seen, it seems like many homeschoolers are not doing it to demonstrate autonomy. They're doing it so that they can indoctrinate their kids as they wish rather than the state indoctrinate them. It's not as if they're doing it to give the children the freedom to seek truth as they see fit. I am not saying nobody does that. I'm sure there are some very thoughtful parents that homeschool for this latter reason. But my understanding, which might be wrong, is that most homeschoolers do so for religious reasons because they want to control the flow of information to their kids in an even more narrow way, not broaden it.

 

Homeschooling currently is perfectly allowed (small quibble, some states impose a regulatory burden) in the legal sense. In the cultural sense it still goes against the grain, incurs a cost. The government bureaucrats push them in one direction, they zag in another. They are resisting an idea. Boycott is the word I should've used. They are in conscious opposition to the dominant idea. The fact that their resistance has been sufficiently successful that their activity is now mostly legal throughout the US should not disqualify it as resistance.

 

If I'm correct, many homeschoolers are opposing the dominant ideas of the government, but trading them for the dominant ideas of the church. And those messages are often in opposition, as this demonstrates. That's why there are religious families who believe government schools are so bad for their kids, from a religious standpoint, that they should remove them.

This is why I said in my earlier post that it's oversimplifying to just claim everyone is brainwashed by the government. In fact, they are getting mesages - often mixed messages that contradict each other - from many corners.

 

Should I interpret all this as an argument against the idea of homeschoolers being engaged in resistance, or as a change of subject?/emoticons/emotion-5.gif

 

I guess that depends on what you mean by resistance and resistance against whom/what? You implied that homeschoolers were resisting in such a way as to make a bold statement about autonomy. That may be true for some of the parents, who are asserting their autonomy by doing this. But it doesn't seem that they're doing it as a statement of autonomy as a consistent principle, since the child is often just having his/her autonomy taken over by the religious doctrine on which they're being homeschooled instead of by the public school. So it may be a statement of "You can't run my child's life. I will decide which entity runs their life and I choose the church instead." But it's hardly a statement of "I think autonomy as a rule is crucial and therefore I am going to allow my child a great deal of autonomy in his/her education."

[Sashajade]

  Not having freedom has made me insecure and afraid of not being able to take care of myself and others I care about.

I have struggled to get by in life, because I wasn't educated properly. I feel like I never had a chance from the beginning,

even if there were great opportunities. Not being able to get the rite help I would have needed earlier in life, has cost

my quality of life in many ways. It's hard to think about achieving your dreams, while at the same time feeling stress over

trying to take care of the here and now in order to survive. Don't get me wrong, its not that i don't want to be a

contributing member in society, it's about the conditions under which i feel like i can thrive and not just try to survive.

It's hard when you feel disrespected, exploited, like you have no control, resources, time, healthcare. It's hard to

think positive, when u have experienced and realize that so many things are corrupt. I feel like I have value and abilities

that i could be using much more. I would do drudgery work and meaningfull work volunatrily, because i wanted to.

The incentives would just be there. We would not be boxed into uncertainty and disatisfying lives in general.

[STer]

  Not having freedom has made me insecure and afraid of not being able to take care of myself and others I care about.

I have struggled to get by in life, because I wasn't educated properly. I feel like I never had a chance from the beginning,

even if there were great opportunities. Not being able to get the rite help I would have needed earlier in life, has cost

my quality of life in many ways. It's hard to think about achieving your dreams, while at the same time feeling stress over

trying to take care of the here and now in order to survive. Don't get me wrong, its not that i don't want to be a

contributing member in society, it's about the conditions under which i feel like i can thrive and not just try to survive.

It's hard when you feel disrespected, exploited, like you have no control, resources, time, healthcare. It's hard to

think positive, when u have experienced and realize that so many things are corrupt. I feel like I have value and abilities

that i could be using much more. I would do drudgery work and meaningfull work volunatrily, because i wanted to.

The incentives would just be there. We would not be boxed into uncertainty and disatisfying lives in general.

What specifically did/do you want to do and how were you not free to do it? Who or what barred you from doing that which you wanted/want to do?