True Freedoms

I finished the amazing book On Freedom by Tim Snyder and it really gets one thinking

I just finished the book "On Freedom" by Timothy Snyder and it is one of the very rare books I can say was "transformational"..due to the confluence of its subject, its thesis and of course the timing of current events We are all at a point of facing our "red lines" beyond which we cannot personally and probably collectively tolerate a transgression. Whether that is related to free speech, wrongful incarceration, denial of payments and healthcare to seniors and those in need, anti-whateverism policy, etc......the critical search is for the essential truths that most of us, regardless of who or how we voted, can agree on. I believe it is clear that we in the USA need to find the few things upon which the vast majority of us would agree fundamentally, and then work our way up from there to the things we have healthy differences in perspective due to relative value judgments or logical process, all the way up to the point of alienation that is based upon a disagreement of what is fact and true. Rather than starting to find common ground on the latter types of divisive issues, we need to start with the things upon which there is really no division in anyone who believes that it is good for them to be an American.

If you start anywhere other than the individual you end up in a prejudicial rabbit hole very quickly and risk losing any effective dialogue at the border of the we-they. Beyond that boundary all of us can check our coats, sit in whatever table we are comfortable with, but then just wait for the fire to smoke all of us out of the restaurant, regardless of how much we paid or suffered in order to get in.

And....at a time in the world, not just America, in which we desperately need the next transcendant voice (a Martin Luther King, Gandhi, whatever is one's mental and historical model) to help heal, guide and unite us, this will have to start with our we think.

Dr Snyder sets the foundational structure of individual freedom as the core ingredient on collective freedom. One cannot exist without the other. He lays out a way of structuring this as based on individual Sovereignty, Unpredictability, Mobility, Factuality and Solidarity. If you read the book carefully and follow those threads, this becomes an enlightenment moment similar to those experienced in first reading Freud, or Quantum Mechanics, or Freakonomics, or the principles of Buddhism. Most of us could add to that list, but the concept is the same.

From this point forward, rather than using the word Freedom, one can immediately envision a holographic image with these 5 dimensions (add more or less, that is not the point) rather than a word or term needing a singular definition. This is how words develop organic life and enable us to start the re-imagining of our civilization. That may sound rather dramatic, but it is what settled out in the bottom of the flask once I was done with this amazing treatise on the essence of ourselves.

So I would like to apply this structure to the pursuit of what is common to anyone with a truly free and rational mind...whatever that actually means!

Let's just imagine a group of 100 people from every different red-blue-purple-conservative-liberal-progressive-libertarian-capitalist-communistic-socialistic-religious-agnostic-atheistic perspective on any array of issues. Lets all sit virtually at a big table and ask ourselves a series of questions:

Is it ever acceptable to have another human being imprisoned with no process other than the assumptions and power of the accuser to do so? And if we can come up with the example or scenario in which that is not acceptable on any moral basis, what are we as individuals or as a collective to do about it?

Context: the recent surreptitious deportation of presumed gang members to a prison in El Salvador, followed by the detention and threatened deportation of college campus dissenters...it does not take much imagination to extend that in light of what we know in history and what we know of human fallibility.

Is there anything, or any situation that would make you comfortable and supportive of any governmental authority taking someone from their home or off the street, charging them with a crime, holding them without representation, bypassing their right to any trial or hearing, accusing them of whatever horrendous or insignificant crime imaginable.....and then putting them on a plane to "disappear" that person into a prison outside of the legal jurisdiction of your state/country. You can imagine whatever horrendous action you want about that individual, whatever prior history you are told about, whatever proximity to your own town, family or life. And in order to answer that question please imagine yourself being that individual because of a manufactured story by whoever had the right to do that.

In order to think about this one has to assume that there IS in fact a legal process that could be expedited instantly yet still be fair, and that there IS a way to detain someone off the streets for the immediate personal safety of others...so as not to be biased by an assumption that any of what was described above was essential for national, social or personal security.

Can anyone in this room imagine any scenario that meets all those elements in which your response would be anything but horror at the egregious violation of personal freedom that represents? I am a retired neurologist, not a lawyer. But this is really not a matter of the law at this stage of exploration. This is about trying to get at a foundational truth.

But...if we initially have alot of argument in the room, that is a good thing. Without the open argument, we are all left with our internal assumptions and biases, not just about the issue but about each other. With the argument we all have an opportunity to actually determine what is a collective FACT and TRUTH. We can work from there.

Maybe this could be the first Universal Freedom in the new foundational "bill of rights" and we can move on from here to discuss freedom of speech, thought, assembly, bearing arms, voting, etc. As Dr Snyder has done so well, the first step is to boil down what appears initially as some difference of opinion about a policy, and to collectively look at what is left when the steam of opinion evaporates and we are all staring at the same liquid in the bottom of the pot.

More to come