Reflecting Upon Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom pt. 4

Conclusion

Freedom can become more oppressive than liberating if we fail to understand what it is that oppresses us. To have is often to be oppressed by what one has.It is not, however, simply the abandoning of possessions in order to be free. We must somewhere reside in a conscious state of not evaluating persons by possessions and recognize that when we do so the possessions themselves become the imprisonment that prevents the freedom we are longing to find.

We cannot be from possessions any more than we can become free from government, free from rules, or whatever we might perceive that delimits our route to becoming free from. At the same time while we may not become from anything, as Dr. Snyder suggests, we can be owned not just by governments or other men, but by objects that are presented to be desired.

It is not to say that desires are inherently wrong; desires can lead us onto epicurean paths that can never be satiated. Or desires can be a noble vision where all desires become unnecessary because they are always fulfilled by suppressing desires by permission, the Brave New World of ordered permission for epicurean fulfillment in order to control and subdue everyone by letting them believe their desires are always accessible to being fulfilled. The desires are lobotomized into uniformity by allowing them to be fulfilled and eliminating reflection upon their acceptableness, or if the desires are even desirable.
In modern parlance, it is the artificial intelligence presented as “smarter than” when of course the goal of its authors is to sell humanity on accepting themselves as having less intelligence than the tool, and thus allow themselves to become susceptible to valuing humans, earth, nature as lesser than the machine. The tool as something to be used is useful. The tool as something more valuable than its user is useless.

But it can be used to control by those who wish to control others, it cannot become the ultimate mental assassin by those desiring the “freedom” for absolute control. But if freedom is the freedom to control, then the Ideal of Being Free can only be realized by the one in control.

But of course to be granted the powers to absolutely control is to potentiate becoming controlled (absolutely?) by what one has control of or over. The power of controlling becomes an all-consuming need to have such power. The ideas of gods originate from the minds of this need. It is not a foreign obsession to human personality, but appears to be a nearly universal human need for recognition. The challenge for human society and formation of human cultures is to fashion cultural norms that both recognize each individual as an individual and at the same maintain a check on individuals’ competitional efforts to succeed above or over others.

Some that we have mentioned are the Papuan use of mocking individual achievement. The Papuan who “succeeds” becomes the one who accesses authority by delegating his authority through its own insignificance.

In our western mind, one “takes” power, but in these cultural situations power becomes so insignificant that one must give his power to the other to become powerful over the other. This creates what some began to determine to be a type of partible personalities similar to the ant-colony sisterhoods where each ant in the colony is important to the colony by her interactions with her sisters within the colony.

But what I observed in my own observations of ant colonies is that jealousies can exist between the sisters and sometimes the partible cohesiveness can become aggressive attempts to seize authority over the colony, The ant caste system of worker ants/reproductive ants that creates a society where a few depend totally on the labors of the many can break down usually due to limited resources for the population. Probably because of the way my ant colonies were housed in order to observe their territorial expansion for both further colony territory that might have additionally given way to seemingly limited food supplies, sometimes there would be an attempt to usurp (kill) the queen. Most frequently these attempts were put down by the majority remaining loyal to the queen.

Once however I did observe a successful elimination of the queen. That event seemed to unleash several queen contenders and before the intercolony warfare ended more than ⅔ of the ants in my observational colony had been killed (and cannibalized by opponents).

Others have observed the formation of dulotic ant colonies that will kill the reproductive adults in other colonies and transfer the eggs to their own colony. When they emerge into life, these slave ants can behave as if they were in their own colony. Among other routine ant tasks, they rear the slave-maker brood, defend the nest, and sometimes feed and groom the slave-maker workers. But it has also been observed that these enslaved ants can revolt by killing the eggs of the brood into which they have become enslaved. This had long been observed but it seemed to make little evolutionary sense since these slave ants had no colony to return to.

You might liken it to the Kikuyu rebellion in Kenya; or actually many of the Steppe conquerors from the Kassite incursion into Mesopotamia and have recently been linked to early Egyptian pharaohs, or to the Yamnaya all the way to the Mongol excursions eastward.

Suzanne Foitzik has studied slave ant rebellions and she has theorized that if “the ants of neighboring host nests are often closely related to each other…When the enslaved ants keep the nests of their parasites small by killing their pupae, this is clearly of no use to their own nest, which has almost certainly been destroyed. But it does benefit the closely related ants in neighboring nests in that it keeps the demand for slaves low so that raids are less frequent.”

The intra-social relationships within ant communities, in many ways, can teach us more about large and small communities and the power relations of complex social interplay than studying many mammal societies because within these ant organizations efforts need to be made to induce harmonious intra-relationships that attempt to disrupt those who will attempt to disrupt the community itself.

Probably partially because they are the only animal communities, other than human, in which I have any direct observational ethnological experience. But many other ethnological observers give us quite a degree of anecdotal understanding. And like human communities, ant societies can vary from five or six to thousands and so the structures themselves that are the systems of organizing their communities remain complex but contingent on many of the same variables that large or small human communities can find necessarily should require variable influences upon maintaining the cultural relevance.

In addition, to my knowledge, the only other species that practice agriculture are about two hundred and forty species of attine ants.

Archaeological evidence is putting myth to the former conception of hunter-gathers that I have discussed previously. What farming began some 12,000 years ago was probably not the civilizing or denomadifying of human previously thought. What did begin was more than likely only the successful development of grain harvesting.

And while that success would lead to great transformations in human behavior, it was not simply that the grains were being harvested, but that this grain harvest could draw those less willing to participate in human work as a magnet to humans who wished to exert control and that, not the farming itself, is what altered the future of the human species forever.

But humans, no matter when they began any type of agriculturism, were very late to the game. By the time early humans had even evolved from their ancestors these attine ants had themselves been cultivating fungi in the rainforests²⁶ of South America for some sixty million years. These wee agricultural wizards developed sophisticated techniques for domesticating crops that are still unknown today unknown without the presence of their cultivators.

These attine ant species are known to farm fungus in the Americas and the Caribbean. Their underground crops fuel complex, agriculturally-based societies that are not only sustainable and efficient, but are seemingless immune to predation by viral or bacterial invasion and are toxic to any multicellular predators. These diminutive farmers are united by a common strategy of foraging for bits of vegetation, but, unlike us, don't eat it. Instead, they use it to nourish their precious fungi, which they grow on an industrial scale.

The fungi are completely isolated in underground gardens in dry, inhospitable habitats where their wild relatives can not survive. Nor can they escape from their underground walls that act as un-sunlit greenhouses so that these domesticated fungi can not meet or swap genes with their wild counterparts. . As a result of this isolation, the domesticated fungi have evolved in complete codependency with their ant farmers. For their own part, any colonial expansion under a new queen takes a piece of her mother’s fungi to establish her new colony“

Now why these attine species began this cultivation I do not know, but like many human domestications of other species, many of our most popular foodstuffs never existed in nature, and our focus on these specific crops have also stolen a great deal of the habit of wild species and creates an incentive for nature to not evolve naturally upon many plant specifications because of the tendency to kill the wild seed before it grows.
Ants and humans both show tendencies to modify behavior which, again, is not a positive or negative. It is dependent on cultural development, not on any innateness of quality to behavioral modification.

This, however, leads to what I call the methodological formation of human learning that emerges by the human infant’s observations and negotiations, and his ability to comprehend and formulate those observations and the directions those negotiations lead the child to direct its attention create the brain methodology of what is going to be most beneficial to the child’s emergence into society at around age three. What has failed to materialize favorably will not become the focus of what the child observes and it becomes all the more difficult to learn when one’s brain determines its self-preservation needs to eliminate much of what it observes as dangerous tigers.

So for all who like to think they are smarter (or others dumber) it is not that they were born with genetically smarter parts of their brain or that there is any other type of genetic function within their brain that allows their brain to be capable of developing superior intelligence to others. The brain works the same…but the methodology that the brain has developed towards what observations it will accept can be vastly different.

The easiest observation of this is that a child who is told stories will seek to be told more stories; the child who has books within his reach to observe will more than likely continue to seek out books to read. In neither case is the child innately more capable of reading but has not learned any value to seeking knowledge from observations within books. It does not mean they will be capable of learning to read. I know many remarkably successful “students” that succeeded quite well academically (better than I) but who shy away from books, or complete ideas, almost entirely. By complete ideas, I am referring to ideas beyond the soundbite and the headline and the assumption there is no rest of the story. And yet in talking with these “liberal” intelligentsia they were never read stories and some never had access to books within their homes. The brain developed a methodology that recognized a manner of successful negotiation that didn’t demand too much detail from one’s perceptions.

Freedom is voting rights, the rights of the amendments, and whatever other rights the government may grant but there is little conceptualization that rights are, in themselves, legal fictions, are rights that people have been deemed to possess. But people can also be deemed to not have rights which are also legal fictions. Women and Americans of African descent; but little discussed, children under certain ages.

If we believe in these rights as somehow inalienable then simple alterations of who can do what or is entitled to any particular “right” remain not only not inalienable but amendable. If you can declare African-descended Americans legally unentitled and then legally entitled, it is no different than removing what one might think one is legally entitled to and then finding one not legally entitled any longer.

All of these legal entitlements, seen as legal truths and not the legally created (and maintained) fictions that they are, create debates over the truth of “our rights” that are never true if they only originated as fictions. So another methodology of early childhood is determining not only what observations are acceptable to direct the individual’s attention to, but the manner in which one finds “truth”. This of course will greatly affect educational learning, but the mind will attempt to decipher from the mind any possible tigers from harming the self that seem to be alien truths. Of course the process of learning what are tigers and what are not develops from what ideas will be presented; I am suggesting, however, that the methodology is of determining real and false tigers in the development of the pre-maturated brain.

Substack columnist, Monica Sharpe, illustrates in her column, Monica’s Dark Corner²⁷ this quite well. The column is sort of a history of the civil war chronology without directly promoting the society of slavery itself, she illustrates the mental methodological creation of the southern mindset by events of the war that were perpetrated upon the southern society. The war was almost entirely fought on southern soil. So there was much more disruption upon the daily lives of the southerners and this created a methodology of cultural longing.

While the longing itself may be an error of attempting to release an ideal that probably never existed, the destruction unleashed did create a newer more unified culture of separateness apart from the culture of the United States in general. Despite the fact that they were probably a few who wanted a war to eliminate slavery; and quite possibly those voices would have preferred a legislated result, this was not Lincoln’s purpose in fighting the war.

The war was fought not to end slavery, nor was it necessarily fought over differing economic ideologies of servitude that I will return to directly; the war was to prevent the secession of one part of the America “empire” and preventing a “choice” of alliance apart from that of the National Unity of all of the states under the umbrella of one government owning the culture of every state had joined the union.

For that matter, John Bell Hood probably created as much havoc and harm in attempting to defeat Sherman as Sherman’s march to the sea created. This is not just my interpretation, but Lee, Bragg & Johnston all had severe reservations about Hood. Lee wanted to demote him, but Stonewall Jackson intervened. At first the distracted Sherman, but Sherman realized he was more of a gnat and was destroying more in the south than Sherman himself could do and he marched onward to the sea without more diversion of his own troops to counter Hood.

Of course many other generals of the southern defenders also inflicted pain on their own people, but probably none more than Hood. I’ve never, however, heard that Grant wept on the battlefield when he lost thousands on troops, but the report of Hood, at least, is that he did so, on multiple occasions but steeled himself himself in bitterness to continue to sacrifice more to save the south from the northern incursion into their land. I’m not defending the institution of southern slavery, and don’t believe Miss Sharpe is either.

What occurred however by the complete destruction and devastation of the southern landscape was that the majority of the southerners who had never owned slaves and never “liked” the slave culture became vested in an identification with the southern cause.

This was, however, not a “lost” cause, but a victory, as illustrated in Heather Cox Richardson’s book How the South Won the Civil War²⁸ that began to affect many regions of the United States as the nation, having forced compliance upon the south, and a temporary interest in granting rights to freed southern slaves soon went back to Business as Usual.

It was not the facilitation of granting the former slaves “freedom” however, but the non-freeing of the rest of the American society. The black Americans might be free, but who else was permitted freedom from the tyranny of the oligarchic owners of the workforce, and so of course no one wanted those former slaves to have the freedom they were still longing for.

The culture split not into haves and have-nots, but between the have-nots divided against themselves. Not just black against white, but farmer v. laborer, citizen v. immigrant; and the cash register continued to click for those who had while those that didn’t have fought over the crumbs that were never seemed to be enough.

Freedom continued to be offered as a reality but its own non-perceptibleness in individual lives created an extended value system in the human mental methodology that tigers were roaring through the society created by too many others that must be the cause of my lost freedom.

The delusions of doublethink continued to be the methodology of our minds as we long for freedom from…knowing we would not be free from being evaluated as lesser, but creating a need to be valued greater.

Prof. Snyder describes this as the politics of inevitably and the politics of eternity.

“Politicians of inevitability are fake economists who lull us to sleep with the idea that will always bring us back.” Dr. Snyder says he began to realize this after the”fall” of the Soviet Union. Capitalism had proven itself as “free”. Its victory was inevitable because it is the only economic system that could offer freedom. The Bill Clintons and Tony Blairs inherited the Reagan-Thatcher dismantling of “social safety nets” because that dismantling defeated communism inevitably, and since it was the inevitability of capitalism to be the only road to freedom,Clinton and Blair attempted to close the door that any other roads could even be possible…everyone would now be forced to recognize that capitalism gave rise to freedom and democracy must worship at the altar of this inevitability.

And all the while this inevitability gave birth to anguish around the world of those who were left further and further estranged from this capitalist reign of terror against the resources necessary for life…and for becoming free from the tyranny that supported the capitalist increased concentration of just about everything.

Capitalism gleefully took on its victory over freedom by increasingly limiting access to any opportunities and what have been inevitable is that the perceptions of being in need increased, the longing for the unmaterialized freedom increased; the tigers of our exaggerations became earnest tiger hunts against every assumed enemy except the Master we knew was inevitably the master.

Political longing moved towards againsters—against the black that Americans had always been against even being brought here. If it was the land where freedom might be had and slaves were brought from Alkebulan then the freedom seekers would have less opportunity.

It remains a peculiarity of longing that there is not enough of what I am longing for and that is why I am longing for. Longing for freedom is no different and no one wants to share his freedom if he remains in longing for it. We long for what we don't have, or what we struggle to have…so from the moment the people of Alkebulan set foot on these shores they became resource competitors, freedom, seen as one of the resources.

Dr. Snyder suggests that the politicians of eternity then emerge as “entertainers who assuage our senses with a…{heroic} past.”

So in the American past of the south become those who fought bravely against those who forced them to remain in the union.Why are those heroes less viable than the northern heroes only because the south lost the war. You really shouldn’t expect them to be abandoned for Lincoln and Grant who forced them to be part of a country they didn’t want to be in.

The Polish under the various “captivities” never lionized their captors, no, Pilsudski, Padrewski, and Koziusko remained their heroes. The Ukranians didn’t replace Khmelnytsky, Danylo, and Sviatoslav with Brezhnev. The entire legend of the heroic Arthur is a compilation of several heroes against several invasive attempts to conquer England,remnants of the Arthurian legend found in Welsh, Irish, Saxon and among the Bretons on the continent which seems to be where the prime source for Mallory’s tale originated.

Begrudge their heroes, increase their devotion. Increase their devotion, intensify their dissatisfaction with heroes who are supposed to replace them.

Conquering or imperializing people never sets too well and as inevitableness gives way to eternalness. Freedom is a goal that continues to be suppressed. As long as the longing to be free continues people are not feeling the Ideal of freedom. And so we begin to sodomize our own minds with a Time That Was Better. An unreal time of stay at home moms and father knowing better. Historically…even modern historical America never had too many stay at home moms unless there was no need for mom to add to the resources necessary to keep the children alive…fathers may have wanted to know better, but he really only knew better when he beat wife and children into giving him permission to know better…

History is mostly a mythical interpretation to begin with because it is mostly written only by heroes, politicians and those educated by the heroes and politicians. What history do we have between the twelfth and eighth century Greece? But when it reemerges in the eighth century it only does so by immortalizing the twelfth century leaders that had collapsed from the weight of their own tyranny.

Lincoln may have become a hero for preserving the American union. And his tyrannous actions are seen as a necessary consequence of preserving that union. But he never did preserve it, you see. He only prevented the secession of some states by forcing them to remain in the union.

I can’t say what should or shouldn’t have occurred. I can only look at the results of that history. But I ignore the heroes except for the manner in which they are accepted as heroes. The real consequence of history is not in what the heroes have accomplished, but in the longings that have been placed upon other humans to be free from this hero or that; to not see their children and neighbors harmed or killed; and to not become so lethargic they internalize their longings as non-accomplishable.

American democracy, or any democracy, can only be a process. But if that process eliminates individual voice, if it assumes its representatives who “won” by 51% of the vote represents its constituency that is pipe-dreaming of the worst sort. A democracy cannot succeed by defeating nearly half of its people. Somehow there must be a better way to not make losers of anyone and give every constituent a voice that represents that constituency

Because no one who loses (the voters not the candidate) believes his voice is heard. If you play a game and your team loses by one point or fifty, you still lost. That cannot be a good formula for leading people towards an ideal of freedom.

But it seems to be okay because winning {in life} is a positive; but then why do lose feel devalued as persons and devalue others. The very conception of winning creates a need to win but the process of winning creates losers and losers strive to be valued more greatly. The very competition of winning itself creates a winner evaluating himself only by assuming his own evaluation is what makes him a winner and a preventive need to never value anyone else on a par with himself.

This creates continued longings in all of the different castes, neither Masters nor worker.slave/subordinates finding their longings able to be fulfilled.

Madison found himself struggling with how the mountain constituencies, the poor farming communities, and the continued enslaved populations could all be represented. In the end he succumbed to accepting the norm that the leaders would be the Masterclass, and he imagined these Masters would represent them. He also feared that if slaves were manumitted they would not be accepted in competition with the poorer classes and would be left out and become rebellious.

Gouverneur Morris tried to favor a middle path that all freeholders should be able to vote for other freeholders as their representatives. And he also flirted with enfranchising women but didn’t overpush the concept sensing backlash against greater enfranchisement, but appears to have at least mentioned the idea to the other constitutional delegates.^29,30

In a letter to James Sullivan, John Adams would write,

“It is certain in Theory, that the only moral Foundation of Government is the Consent of the People. But to what an Extent Shall We carry this Principle? Shall We Say, that every Individual of the Community, old and young, male and female, as well as rich and poor, must consent, expressly to every Act of Legislation? No, you will Say. This is impossible. How then does the Right arise in the Majority to govern the Minority, against their Will? Whence arises the Right of the Men to govern Women, without their Consent? Whence the Right of the old to bind the Young, without theirs.

But let us first Suppose, that the whole Community of every Age, Rank, Sex, and Condition, has a Right to vote. This Community, is assembled--a Motion is made and carried by a Majority of one Voice. The Minority will not agree to this. Whence arises the Right of the Majority to govern, and the Obligation of the Minority to obey? from Necessity, you will Say, because there can be no other Rule. But why exclude Women? You will Say, because their Delicacy renders them unfit for Practice and Experience, in the great Business of Life, and the hardy Enterprizes of War, as well as the arduous Cares of State. Besides, their attention is So much engaged with the necessary Nurture of their Children, that Nature has made them fittest for domestic Cares. And Children have not Judgment or Will of their own. True. But will not these Reasons apply to others? Is it not equally true, that Men in general in every Society, who are wholly destitute of Property, are also too little acquainted with public Affairs to form a Right Judgment, and too dependent upon other Men to have a Will of their own? If this is a Fact, if you give to every Man, who has no Property, a Vote, will you not make a fine encouraging Provision for Corruption by your fundamental Law? Such is the Frailty of the human Heart, that very few Men, who have no Property, have any Judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by Some Man of Property, who has attached their Minds to his Interest.³¹

It would appear to me more likely that the more that participate in the selection of delegates and the more directly the delegates actually represent their constituents and speak for those constituents who selected them the lesser the chance of corruption because they were more directly tied to only representing the interest of those constituents.

Part of the issue becomes how can be represented by a government that does not seem to directly support the interest of their own community? Should the same class (lawyers) who defend/prosecute the law be the class to make the law.? Can a mechanic ever understand the needs of the loomist, or vice versa? And yet cannot they alone not be the ones to figure out to protect their interests of each by conversing on how to protect those interests? Can libel law be only dictated by the freedom of those who might be libelous, or can the media be expected to differentiate the difference in what should be written about and whether what they are writing about might be harmful? This is the problem with writing about who's been arrested before there has been a conviction. It might be newsworthy but it also defeats justice for both the prosecution (can’t admit error after exposing possible culprits) and defense (assumption that arrestees are guilty because they were arrested.)

And just exactly is justice minus cultural justice that brings people closer together. Otherwise justice can never be “the same for all”. The one with more resources to defend his position has an inordinate advantage over one who does not. Freedom, thus, often has more to do with the pre-assessed resources and law takes on the properties of granting those with more resources more accessibility to determination of the law.

Now when we throw in social safety nets, these safety nets are designed on the premise that those in need should be aided in accessing their physical needs but do nothing to grant them the opportunity to actually have the resources that will enable them not to remain in need.

But needs are more than physical, they are social needs and our social needs become disturbed when our physical needs are in the control;of others. The freedom that comes from the culture that is testified to in the writings of Malinowski and Snyder, and perhaps the ideology of want expressed by Simone Weil, are the contributors to the destruction of not just physical needs but cultural needs.

Nations themselves who begin with the premise of citizenship as those belonging to and not belonging to the nation create an institution that denies the choice to those who might want to join, but also to those who might not wish to continue to belong, such as the American south. Or any part of any union within or between states.

States therefore must offer freedom but the bargaining for that freedom becomes initially denied by demanding freedom only with allegiance. We are right back to good being what is said to be good and not what is the absence of bad. And of course the state demands its laws are good and one must sacrifice one’s freedom to the state to be granted freedom by the state.

The irony is that is the only way anyone can be free. Communities with a cultural identity create a cultural continuity by its participants granting rights of selfishness to the culture so that its members obtain autonomousness as a community by giving up their individual autonomy for the comforting security of the community. But if this sacrifice becomes demanded by the state; or if this sacrifice to the community does not correlating give rise to that community placing all of its members on an equal participatory level–all members chief or child- must be recognized as equally important to the community in its decisions, then the sacrifice becomes a death knell to the sacrifice and freedom begins to be longed for.

And from this stage onward the state enhances that longing by presenting the “citizenry” with the “misinformation” that maintains their authority, or perhaps, in what becomes a democracy, competing lines of misinformation.

Under these conditions, democracy balances itself on a precipice, like the cabin in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. The longing for freedom ends when the cabin is no longer on the precipice and that cannot occur in society where some are more highly valued; or value themselves more highly.
What occurs is the society is effectively structurally ill and the populace increasingly mentally deformed from unsatisfactory behavioral modifications.

Democracy doesn’t exist unless they represent constituencies of interest rather than constituencies of design. Democracy doesn’t exist if the constituents are forced into believing in certain concepts. Surely slavery was a bad idea, but we haven’t successfully expanded slavery to include all who want to be master (some have written about this.) Nations guide and participate with their citizens; they don’t model them by throwing about legislation and granting rights. A nation cannot do that anymore than a southern plantation owner or a modern technocrat can own without some degrees of coercion; anymore than teachers can tell pupils what to learn instead of guiding their interests and leading them to sources; anymore than men can expect their husbandry commands the wife’s servitude.

And by god you can’t own your children. And if anything is “age-appropriate” you’re fooling yourself into thinking that prevents children’s knowledge…but it can enhance behavioral modifications that such things are inappropriate and create a longing to become inappropriate as soon as possible and a guilt over the inappropriate actions that leads to letter bombs sent from a cabin in Wyoming or absorption into computer games and imaginary successes because life has become inappropriate.

And so we long. For Appropriateness. For Appreciation. For Freedom.

And then we collapse when all the longings remain unfulfilled.