Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

The mass media has once again turned its spotlight of approval on the symbols of freedom. Hoping to sell a few more copies and commercials before this latest assault on reason loses the bright sparkly newness that has momentarily attracted the public's attention, the media has sought to move as much "patriotic product" as possible while public interest in the fad lasts.

The media has approached the crisis currently threatening the foundations of civilization as little more than just the latest vein of news bytes waiting to be strip-mined for their maximum short term yield before being abandoned when the next big news strike is discovered. Until then, the media will continue industriously sorting, spinning, and repackaging the crisis into "new and improved information products" that have been carefully crafted to momentarily attract the public's morbid fascination with the latest greatest mass murder, or feed the superficial patriotism of those seeking reflected glory by claiming for themselves the tragedies of others.

In order to "work the freedom angle", the media has attempted to frame the concept of freedom within the attention spans of viewers conditioned to perceive the world as strobe light vignettes pulsing through the mind numbing kaleidoscopic haze of a music video. As a result of the trivialization of freedom in the media, the public understanding of freedom has become a hollow veneer as superficial as the plastic fantastic celluloid heroes so many turn to in order to keep from admitting that they're incapable of finding a life worth living within their own lives.

While Hollywood's video heroes are often promoted as rebels, the glorious battles they wage are often in defense of superficial freedoms, conducted with tactics and objectives that undermine profound freedoms. Profound freedoms aren't easy to project through the "big screen's" pin-hole camera world view, and a couple of hours is hardly enough time to communicate an understanding of such a profound subject to the audience - even if most of the running time didn't have to be allocated to the superficial sex and violence required to fill theater seats.

An accurate treatment of profound freedom is also unlikely to provide the kind of fast action story lines, and clear triumph of superficial good over superficial evil so beloved by ticket buying audiences. Those who prefer the dysfunctional delusions of the empty egos of Hollywood to the lives they've made for themselves, are likely to find the prospect of profound freedom far more terrifying than the temporary disruption of adapting to a "new and improved" slave master.

Just as the media's condensation of real life into 10 second media bytes has reduced much of our understanding of each other to the most superficial levels, so too the media's version of freedom has encouraged a superficial understanding of freedom among the public - especially the younger generations. An understanding of profound freedom is a prerequisite for truly appreciating the meaning of life's journey, let alone seeking a meaningful direction for a life. Profound freedom isn't an objective, but rather the means of having an objective. It isn't the destination at the end of a journey, but rather the threshold marking the start of the real journey of a meaningful life.

From a superficial perspective, civilization appears to be little more than the imposition of a seemingly arbitrary set of artificial social, cultural, and technological constraints on the natural freedoms of individuals. On a more profound level, civilization is composed of multiple layers of interrelated artificial systems that can only function as long as the individual participants agree to cooperate within those artificial systems. We communicate through a cooperative system of abstract symbols with mutually agreed meanings, arranged in a mutually agreed syntax and format. Our socioeconomic system is based on the mutually agreed constraints of contractual obligations, property rights, and symbolic representations of relative value. Our personal interactions are dominated by a complex system of relationships and social mores that provide the minimal level of predictability needed for individuals to live in groups. Each system requires that the participants give up some superficial freedoms, but in return makes profound freedoms possible.

The essence of a free society is defined by the voluntary concessions by the participants of certain of their superficial freedoms, in order to cooperatively create the opportunity for profound freedom - profound freedom that each participant is then free to exercise or simply possess as they individually see fit. The original definition of anarchism was that reasonable individuals, motivated solely by enlightened self-interest, should be able to maintain a peaceful and mutually respectful voluntary society without any need for the artificial coercive violence of statist authority to enforce their social contract. Today, the mass media is seemingly incapable of even considering that any kind of viable social contract is possible without the coercive authority of the state. According to the mass media, "anarchy" can only refer to the social chaos and mindless destruction into which otherwise peaceful cooperative citizens inevitably degenerate in the absence of the civilizing effects of ever more intrusive government.

But everyday life for most of us is composed of any number of nonviolent self-regulated interactions with other individuals that take place outside of the direct mediation of an external authority. The vast majority of us don't spend every day we're not physically restrained, drenched in the blood and gore of our murdered neighbors. To the contrary, most of us exhibit a strong preference for a more productive approach to life in spite of countless missed opportunities to degenerate into mindless primitives.

Consider how most of us conduct our lives when we're outside of the direct supervision of external authority - when there aren't any police officers, child welfare caseworkers, IRS agents, or OSHA inspectors handy to monitor our behavior. We transact personal and professional business with other individuals and businesses. We share meals and conversations with friends and associates. We also conduct countless largely subconscious momentary negotiations over the endless details of modern life with familiar faces and total strangers - from navigating a crowded public sidewalk to queuing up in the checkout lane. And somehow we routinely manage it all without the need for the direct intervention of an external authority to forcibly restrain us from turning on each others like mad dogs at every opportunity. More importantly, enough members of the productive sector are still able to convince themselves that continuing to voluntarily participate in what's left of our social contract is still at least marginally in their enlightened self-interest, to make the largely peaceful society we enjoy today possible.

At the time of America's founding, a unique confluence of conditions and events resulted in an usually high awareness of the difference between superficial and profound freedoms among the general population. Attempts to create profound freedoms through the coercive violence of artificial authority inevitably fail since the contrariness of human nature compels those "burdened" with unappreciated freedoms to rebel against those freedoms. Only a voluntary society can provide its participants with the means of achieving profound freedom. America's grand experiment in profound freedom combined the lessons of the past with the inspired thoughts of a handful of enlightened minds, to create a voluntary society with the potential to provide its citizens with a far more profound degree of freedom than any before or since.

The prosperity that typically accompanies individual freedom tends to also encourage growth in the number of individuals participating in that society. Freedom, by its very nature, also tends to encourage a diverse citizenry, creating increasing complications in reaching a consensus on the proper role and purpose of the social contract. A victim of its own success, a prosperous free society will tend to expand beyond the functional limits of direct personal interactions as a means of implementing the social contract - while at the same time attracting increasing numbers of participants motivated by a desire to share in the superficial fruits of success, but lacking the profound understanding of individual freedom of its founders.

Our current prosperity is proof of the value of profound freedom. But generations of unprecedented prosperity have allowed the old hard questions to go unconsidered for too long. Freedom has become just another word to the pampered masses who have come to take the concept for granted. In these times of misguided moral equivalence, the distinction between superficial and profound has become blurred, and too many of us are now unable to judge which is of greater value. The distinction between voluntary concessions of superficial freedoms and authoritarian infringements on profound freedoms has also become blurred.

Unfortunately, in order for the velvet gloved iron fist of enlightened self-interest to succeed in creating a robust self-regulating society, the participants must fully understand their own self-interest. Those citizens who lack a profound understanding of how and why their society functions, will tend to be less willing to make the voluntary sacrifices that make their free society possible. The traditional first step onto the slippery slope of authoritarianism accompanies the seemingly reasonable idea of allowing the official structure of society a limited amount of coercive authority to ensure that the participants in society are complying with the terms of their voluntary social contract. Any formal structure that seeks to extend the concept of society beyond the voluntary participation of the citizens must by definition be a manifestation of artificial authority. And as a manifestation of authority, that formal structure will have a strong tendency to see the need for additional authoritarian intrusions into the lives of the citizens at every opportunity.

As increasingly overt authoritarian interventions corrupt the original concept of a voluntary society, the voluntary sacrifice of superficial freedom in order to achieve profound freedom is progressively transformed into arbitrary demands for the surrender of additional freedoms solely to serve the self-interested agenda of the expanding formal authority structure of society. Those who believe they benefit from the authoritarian corruption of voluntary society, in turn seek to defend their artificial power and status by claiming that enlightened self-interest is incapable of regulating the behaviors of common citizens, and that social order can only be maintained through authoritarian enforcement. The apparent elimination of the value of voluntary participation in society encourages individuals to become progressively more superficial in their understanding of how their society functions, which in turn makes them increasingly receptive to the fallacy that they are only capable of participating in a peaceful orderly society when under the supervision of a formal authority structure.

The change in the prevailing understanding of freedom that has occurred over the two centuries of America's existence is perhaps best demonstrated by our currently favored forms of rebellion against authority. Some level of rebellion is a natural aspect of human nature. Each generation traditionally questions the assumptions of their parents, rejecting some and eventually adopting those that still prove valid and useful. One of the traditional signs of maturity has been realizing that you've become your mother or father, adopting as your own many of the same social conventions as the previous generation, as your accumulating life experience provides a better understanding of their underlying purpose.

Those with only a superficial understanding of freedom tend to focus their rebellion on superficial constraints. Only those capable of understanding profound freedom are driven to question the kinds of authority that seek to constrain the exercise of profound freedom. It's a distressingly fair measure of the superficiality of today that rebellion against imaginary authority has acquired the moral equivalence of rebellion against real authority in the minds of those lacking any meaningful understanding of either.

Consider the dynamics involved in symbolic communication. The essence of communication is the transfer of information from one individual to another. In order for symbolic communication to succeed, both the author and reader must cooperate in a process of expressing information in abstract symbols that can be accurately interpreted by the reader to extract the encoded information. Language is largely an arbitrary set of mutually agreed rules and definitions enforced by the superficial authority of the expectations of our peers. The tool of language can be used to create the profound freedom of communicating ideas. Constraints on the profound freedoms possible through the use of language, such as censorship or fear of surveillance, tend to require the involvement of a formal authority structure.

The voluntary sacrifice of some measure of superficial freedom of expression, in order to achieve the profound freedom of communicating information, is the core concept of language. An author must concede some measure his freedom to use whatever abstract representations strike his fancy at the moment, and limit his expression of ideas to just those mutually agreed symbols and syntax he can reasonably expect will convey his intended meaning to his readers. In order to gain the greatest value from the author's words, readers are obliged to surrender some measure of their superficial freedom to interpret symbols as they please - they can only gain access to the author's ideas if they limit their interpretation of the author's words to just those meanings the author most clearly intended.

However, while establishing the ability to communicate requires the concession of superficial freedoms in the form and function of how we use symbols, the ability to communicate is a necessary prerequisite for creating the profound freedom to communicate abstract ideas between individual minds. The ability to communicate abstract ideas opens the door to far more profound levels of creativity and expression than would be possible without the voluntary concession of certain superficial freedoms of expression.

Ideally a living language adapts to the needs of its users over time. However, in order to provide the basic tools and infrastructure for meaningful symbolic communication, at any given moment in time there must still be a general consensus that certain symbols are intended to mean certain things when used in certain ways. The traditional way to provide a common reference standard for the current consensus is through dictionaries, grammar rules, and formatting conventions.

Those with only a superficial understanding of language often see dictionaries, grammar rules, and formatting conventions as intrusions on their "freedom of expression". They fail to understand that these illusions of authority are simply attempts to codify the means of communication in order to make it possible for an author to accurately convey his intended meaning to a reader. These attempts to define the current working standard are just a record of those conventions and concessions that have proven sufficiently useful over time to find broad acceptance among the users of the language. Their purpose is to facilitate communication by providing a consistent set of tools for accurately expressing and interpreting ideas. They impose seeming arbitrary restrictions on the use of words, syntax, and format in order to protect the usefulness of these tools in conveying the greatest possible diversity of ideas - to maximize the potential for the profound freedom of communicating information by defining those specific concessions of superficial freedoms of expression necessary to achieve it.

Those who rebel against the perceived oppressive authority of dictionaries, grammar rules, and formatting conventions are often convinced that they're leading the defense of freedom, and that those who refuse to join their superficial rebellion are somehow collaborating with authority to stifle freedom of expression. They mistake the desire of others to defend profound freedom by preserving the functions of the language tools necessary to exercise that profound freedom, for support of authoritarian infringements on the profound freedom of communicating ideas. Their focus on superficial freedoms, and lack of understanding of profound freedoms, makes it difficult for them to deal with the seeming hypocrisy of others claiming to be defending freedom of speech by defending seemingly arbitrary restrictions on their freedom of expression.

The tragic farce of freedoms being progressively burdened by authoritarian infringements on every level, while those claiming to be defending freedom neutralize each other's efforts as a result of their conflicting perspectives on the concept of freedom, isn't limited to freedom of speech. Most of our superficial and profound freedoms are under similar attack, and causing similar confusion among their defenders.

Further complicating the defense of freedom is the lack of obvious villains. Most of those on both sides of the struggle see themselves as the heroes of their own perspectives. Those whose lack of understanding turns what appears from their superficial perspective to be an impassioned defense of freedom, into unrealized support for infringements on freedom from a profound perspective, are hardly intending their exertions to advance the authoritarian agenda they think they're opposing. Most have had their understanding of their world crippled by government schools that find it difficult to provide our nation's children with even a distorted superficial understanding of our socioeconomic system, and an entertainment industry that has created a multi-billion dollar revenue stream out of combining its superficial vision of freedom with its similarly superficial perspectives on sex and violence.

Even those "at the top", who are arguably the best positioned to knowingly conspire to deny the profound freedoms of others, aren't trying to deny their own freedom, or those of whom they think can be trusted with freedom. They've no doubt convinced themselves that they're "doing the right thing" by protecting less capable individuals from inadvertently misusing their freedoms as a result of their naive childlike difficulty in understanding the "more complicated" aspects of life. There may be a few informed and aware intentional villains pulling strings behind the curtain, but the vast majority of the foot soldiers on both sides lack the profound understanding of the issue necessary to notice the contradictions in the positions they believe they're taking.

Which brings us back to the crisis threatening freedom in America today. The greatest danger today isn't the superficial freedoms that are being publicly infringed, but the profound freedoms that are being lost because we no longer understand we possess them. It's difficult to see how the various defenders of freedom can even join in their shared objectives unless the defenders of profound freedoms can somehow manage to forget their understanding of profound freedoms, or the defenders of superficial freedoms accept that there are unexpected additional dimensions to freedom, just as there are unexpected added dimensions to many other aspects of their lives.

Which is more impossible - to put the troublesome genie of knowledge back in the bottle once it's escaped into the world, or to convince a man who has been blind all of his life that he just doesn't understand how to see...