Well, that's not very historically or etymologically accurate of you.Originally Posted by Dave
I've posted this before, and I guess I'll have to post it again, on True Freedom:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/ne...3/posts?page=6...
True freedom, the freedom that liberates, is grounded in truth and ordered to truth and, therefore, to virtue. A free person is enslaved neither to the sheer will of another nor to his own appetites and passions. A free person lives uprightly, fulfilling his obligations to family, community, nation and God. By contrast, a person given over to his appetites and passions, a person who scoffs at truth and chooses to live, whether openly or secretly, in defiance of the moral law is not free. He is simply a different kind of slave.
The counterfeit of freedom consists in the idea of personal and communal liberation from morality, responsibility and truth. It is what our nation’s founders expressly distinguished from liberty and condemned as “license.” The so-called freedom celebrated today by so many of our opinion-shaping elites in education, entertainment and the media is simply the license to do whatever one pleases. This false conception of freedom – false because disordered, disordered because detached from moral truth and civic responsibility – shackles those in its grip no less powerfully than did the chattel slavery of old. Enslavement to one’s own appetites and passions is no less brutal a form of bondage for being a slavery of the soul. It is no less tragic, indeed, it is in certain respects immeasurably more tragic, for being self-imposed. It is ironic, is it not, that people who celebrate slavery to appetite and passion call this bondage “freedom”?
Counterfeit freedom is worse than fraudulent. It is the mortal enemy of the real thing. Counterfeit freedom can provide no rational account or defense of its own normative claims. It speaks the language of rights, but in abandoning the ground of moral duty it provides no rational basis for anyone to respect the rights of others or to demand of others respect for one’s own rights. Rights without duties are meaningless. Where moral truth as the ground of duties is thrown overboard, the language of rights is so much idle chatter fit only for Hollywood cocktail parties and faculty lounges. Hadley Arkes, the great contemporary theorist of natural rights, has observed in relation to the movement for unfettered abortion that those who demand liberation from the moral law have talked themselves out of the moral premises of their own rights and liberties. If freedom is to be honored and respected, it must be because human freedom is what is required by the laws of nature and nature’s God; it cannot be because there are no laws of nature and there is no God.
The Danger of License
But counterfeit freedom poses greater dangers still. As our founders warned, a people given over to license will be incapable of sustaining republican government. For republican government – government by the people – requires a people who are prepared to take responsibility for the common good, including the preservation of the conditions of liberty.
Listen again to President Fairfield, speaking words at that ceremony on July 4, 1853, that are, if anything, still more urgent today:
Unrestrained freedom is anarchy. Restrained only by force and arms, is despotism; self-restrained is Republicanism. Wherever there is wanted the intelligence and virtue requisite for [self-restraint], Republicanism expires.
Slaves to appetite and passion, wanting in the understanding and virtue requisite for self-government, will surely lose it. They will look not to themselves but to government to provide for the satisfaction of their desires. Where counterfeit freedom prevails, the republican principle of limited government is inevitably sacrificed as people surrender personal and, ultimately, political liberty to whatever power promises to protect them from predation and supply the appeasement of their appetites. People are reduced from citizens to subjects to slaves. They trade their birthright of freedom for a mess of pottage. Yet, so long as the big-government-provided pottage functions as a suitable narcotic, they imagine themselves free.
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That you would then define freedom as its counterfeit, license, shows that you have an ill-conceived notion of freedom. To be frank, that's not a black mark on you personally as we have been socially conditioned to such a notion. As Dr. Thomas Sowell wrote, "The problem isn't that Johnny doesn't know how to read, the problem is that Johnny doesn't know how to think."
You can be sure that Chesty Puller didn't do what he did so snot-nosed little brats on some college campus could echo the propaganda he lost good Marines in fighting. You can also be very sure didn't do what he did so they could get into positions of power and bring the red tide to American shores as if a spring welling when struck with the Little Red Book. And you can be very, very sure he did not do what he did so that once in positions of power, they could eviscerate the Constitution and force Americans to submit to the same tyranny he and his Marines fought.
As per the moral issues, leaving aside the mere socio-political ones, is Oleg Atbashian crazy when he outlines in his book "Shakedown Socialism" how the Unions here do exactly what they did in his then native USSR both prior to the its formation and after? Is former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov crazy when he specifically says that the KGB waged a war on morality through Hollywood and other means in order to rip apart American society? What about Bella Dodd who testified before Congress that she was personally responsible for recruiting 1000 communists and homosexuals to enter Catholic seminaries in order to destroy the Church in America? There's a reason Vladimir Putin wields a heavy whip on groups like "Pussy Riot" -- as a former KGB agent he understands the detriment such moral laxity and free reign of all precious thoughts do to a society.
Col. Mike Mullane, former NASA astronaut, has a presentation titled "The Normalization of Deviance". In it, he discusses the process of deviance from a baseline standard of success becoming normalized. The example he uses to outline the titular concept revolves around the Challenger Disaster. First, the engineers told NASA if they EVER see anything wrong with the o-rings on the solid rocket boosters to IMMEDIATELY ground all flights until they can fix the issue because it would result in a catastrophic event. Second, pressure to perform as a program saw them ignore some small problems with booster o-rings after recovery. NASA did not ground all flights immediately, because hey, no catastrophe right? So this kept occuring until 7 lives, trusting in the authority of the entire NASA history of success, got blown the hell up thousands of feet above Cape Canaveral. All they had to do was return to the baseline as demanded by the engineers, and 7 people would have retained life.
As a nation, we had a baseline of morality founded in Natural Law. We even had a social baseline founded largely on Divine, Revealed Law for most of our history -- even if not at the organizational level and not totally as revealed. Simple things like "don't murder children in utero", "two people of the same sex engaging in physical relations are wrong", "enemies of the people are to be dealt with", etc. When we moved from the baseline, we moved towards disaster. Now, imagine if after a bunch of successful flights with o-ring malfunction/cracking/etc., we suddenly said, "Wait, ground all flights, this is deviating from baseline." It would have been hard to explain. Astronauts might have lost trust in NASA for not following the rules all those other flights, the people of the nation would have struggled to understand, Reagan's great idea about really showing up those commie bastards in Russia would have been imperiled, etc. So we normalized deviance and killed 7 people.
Suggesting we return to a baseline is indeed hard. Especially after we have not only normalized deviance, but have experienced catastrophe after catastrophe in the moral and social sphere. We've not only normalized deviance, we have enshrined it and raised it up on high.
We go from letting "their private business" be "their" business in plain public sight, i.e., gay bars, to men in chaps, glitter, and not much else parade around the streets. Our DOD even celebrates that crap in the month of June. God help you if you live in some place like San Francisco or Portland and express disgust at their unnatural behaviors.
We go from the idea of a woman being allowed to murder her child in utero under the mask of language conveying it as a blob of tissue (something no self-respecting medical professional would claim these days), in the context of her own mortality, rape or incest, to over 50 million children slaughtered out of mere convenience -- now THAT is something Chairman Mao, Hitler, and Stalin would have wet themselves over -- that the very people they wished to exterminate would do it to their own progeny.
We go from the idea of "well, we can't just lock up people with different ideas" to almost letting a student of Saul Alinsky, who dedicated a work to the Devil (Lucifer), enter the White House for the 2nd time (Obama being the first).
We go from "well, who really NEEDS machine guns or silencers anyway? Let them pay a tax so it can be investigated" to wondering if we'll even be allowed to own guns in a few years. And friend, make no mistake, we here are all on a list -- some of us, myself included, no doubt reside on multiple lists.
In my list I noted the repeal of NFA, etc. Doesn't it strike you as a little incongruous that if I wished for a simple majority rule that I would allow the enemy the ability to have such arms, with which to defend themselves against such a potential as becoming the Made in America version of Tank Man? However, when someone puts a gun to your head and says they're going to kill you, "Well, let's hear em out!" is a bit moronic. Should NAMBLA be allowed to express its point of view on pedophilia? Should Islam be allowed to set up shop to form its own "ISUS" movement, and nothing done until they actually do the things they say they will do? It's too late at that point. You can't un-blow up the Challenger.
So, if you served in the military in order to allow the licensing of vice, the destruction of America, and the dignity of your fellow citizens to be imperiled, I dare say great Americans like Chesty Puller would be unimpressed. I know the Founding Fathers sure would be.
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