The chains of the Tribe

(The Daddy-Society)



Society (the tribe) plays to the adult a role similar to that of parents about the child, providing care and guidance, supplying context, limits and support. But just as parents are good, mediocre and bad, so does societies.

Probably a large majority of you are nowadays in agreement about that extremely overprotecting parents can be enormously damaging for their children. But the same majority seems to agree that the more protective it is a society with its members it is better. What not everyone perceives is the inverse relationship that inexorably exists between the social protection (control) and freedom.
The axis protection/control sooner or later ends up suffocating the axis freedom/responsibility, exactly as it happens in the relationship between parents and children.

Fleeing the often pathetic history of South America, I am living for now some time in the United States, a country that 200 years ago, just yesterday in historical time, was born as a symbol of freedom and individual rights (the real human rights) against the absolutism and collectivism of the old monarchical Europe.
But in the last 100 years it began to imperceptibly derive into the collectivism of a society which is becoming everyday a little bit more oppressive and controlling (it's still more free that South America and Europe, not to mention Middle Eastern countries and other semi-medieval cultures)

United States, once the bastion of freedom is going slowly and perhaps inexorably in the same direction they took (and failed in) the great collectivist experiments that delineated much of the macabre story of the 20th century of genocide and massive unnameable deprivation: The National Socialism of Adolf Hitler, the Fascism of Benito Mussolini, and the Communists of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, just to name a few.

Why?
Why the vast majority ends up preferring safety over freedom?
Is there finally a civilized way to protect minorities from the majority? (being the individual the smallest minority)
Constitutions are Amended and governments grow and grow as the decades pass, because people (the majority) is requesting this, and those same governments end up growing so much to crush the people who are supposed to protect.

All these people demanding more and more security and giving up in exchange their freedom, what a sadness...

They want the government-society-father to take care of their problems and provide everything necessary and even the unnecessary and then they duck his head obediently accepting orders for this same daddy who cares for us but of course also ends by telling us how we must live our lives and die our deaths.
The process of gradual loss of freedom in most western societies has been advanced over the years in a way similar to the "boiled frog syndrome"
A frog will jump out of the pot if thrown into the boiling water, however if the water is heated very slowly the frog does not realize and dies finally boiled.

In the ancient conflict between the pressure of the tribe and the individual, it appears that the individual continues to lose because he "needs" of the tribe to survive, as he needed from their parents when boy. When then will the great majority of humanity reach the majority of age?
That day will come some day? I hope yes

I hope that when my son is grown up they don’t come once again the dark centuries of the Inquisition or the Stone Age as they want all these ecologists- mystical-collectivists, dreaming to create a "perfect world" through decrees and laws and rules increasingly stifling our freedoms. Many even say they love the poor but they treat them as idiots

Fortunately the final and incorruptible judge was, is, and will be the Reality that accepts no magic solutions or whims so they are going to lose now or within 500 years, but how much evil they can do in the meantime? What kind of world will live my son into? I worry a lot, so I write.
As they should be worried the ghosts of over 100 million men, women and children who just talking about Hitler, Mao and Stalin were tortured and murdered in the name of a "Better World".
Better for whom?

They all started the same way: by telling people they had a "perfect solution" to the alleged social problems, that if people surrender their freedom they will take care of all.
And people believed them...

The Self-Help Guide to Living in a Free Society

(By Gen LaGreca from "The New Individualist" magazine)



Too many Americans are losing the ability to take care of themselves and are instead looking to the government to run their lives for them, in the tax-gouging, liberty-killing system called the welfare state.

Too many Americans seem willing to replace the life of a proud American eagle, flying alone and free, with that of a hapless chicken penned in a coop, waiting to be fed. The welfare state has all but squashed the essential skill of our survival: the skill of taking responsibility for our own lives.

Although we are besieged by self-help guides of every kind - from how to train a parakeet, to how to cook pasta, to how to combat addictions to alcohol, or obsessive 'Net surfing, or other disorders - there is one guide to personal improvement that is conspicuously absent from today's cultural scene. It's a guide that statist politicians and the groups that support them do not want us to discover. It's a guide to curing the worst dependency of all: the urge to satisfy one's needs by dipping his hand into the wallet of his taxpaying neighbor.

To combat this affliction and to rediscover the meaning of freedom we need a "Self Help Guide to Living in a Free Society." It might read something like this:

1. If you don't go to school and don't work hard to get ahead, don't expect the same rewards as those who do. You haven't earned them.

2. Don't expect others to pay for your foolishness. If you spill hot coffee on yourself, be more careful next time. Don't sue the restaurant that served you or push for a law to regulate the temerature of coffee. And if you're on a jury, don't award people huge sums for being irresponsible.

3. If you coose to live in a hurricane zone, then buy insurance or take your chances. Don't expect the taxpayers of Minnesota to cover your losses.

4. Drop the communal mentality that aims to force one course of action on everyone, paid for by one cosmic bank account: the taxpayers'. Don't ask, "Should we go to Mars?" If you want to go, go - as a private venture and stake claim when you get there.

5. Don't meddle in others' affirs. Don't ask, "Should we ban this drug for arthritis because it has side effects?" Consult your doctor, not the government, and let others decide for themselves how severe their arthritis is and the risks they're willing to take. Other peoples' joints are none of your business.

6. Don't expect the government to look after your health. If you think certain foods will clog your arteries, then don't eat them. Don't call for a battalion of bureaucrats to control other people's blood vessels

7. Don't try to force your personal living standards on everyone by pushing for the government to ban harmless activities. If you don't approve of gambling on the Internet, then don't do it. Leave others alone if they choose to gamble and are causing you no injury.

8. Don't try to get a home for free. It's not free. Get a job and pay for it. Don't force others to pay a premium on their homes so that you can get yours at their expense. If you want affordable housing, then support the deregulation of the industry, which will lower prices for everyone.

9. If you default on a loan, accept the consequences, lick your wounds and avoid making the same mistakes again. Don't expect the government to bail you out with money fleeced from the taxpayers who made a more prudent lending and borrowing decision.

10. Don't try to get ahead by forcing people to give you special privileges. Your sex or race doesn't qualify you for a degree or a job. Only merit does.

11. Don't look for a risk-free life. There is no such thing. If you buy a malfunctioning toaster, return it for a refund. If it is truly harmful, seek redress in court. But don't unleash a squadron of inspectors to regulate every toaster on the planet, just to protect you from one defective cord.

12. Don't instigate laws to stifle your competitors or to give your business special governmental favors. If you can't win customers by offering them the best products and services in a free market, then close up your shop and get a job working for a competitor who can.

13. Don't force people to support your pet causes. They are entitled to use their money to support their own causes. Look for private funding - not government grants - to find a cure for a disease, to produce a play, or to preserve an old mansion. The government has no business giving you charity with money that it uncharitably seizes from other taxpayers.

14. Don't support laws to control your employers. They're covered by the Constitution, too. They have the right to decide whom to hire, what to pay, and how long a lunch break will be in the businesses they own. If you don't like the terms, go elsewhere - and work to loosen the regulatory noose around business's neck, so you'll find better job opportunitites.

15. Don't expect any guarantees in life. There are none. You can lose your job, your investments can fail and your fiance can leave you. You have the right to pursue happiness, but no one ensures you'll attain it. Stop trying to use the government to shield you from life's risks.

16. Stop shouting, "Tax the rick!" The rich are also citizens whose rights are protected by the Constitution. The rich have the right to pursue their own happiness, not yours; and they are entitled to the fruits of their labor, just as you are to yours. Instead of chipping away at the rights of the rich, redirect your engery to creating wealth and joining their ranks.

17. Don't campaign for the government to give you things for free. If it pays your medical bills, then it controls the treatment you'll get or wont get. There is no such thing as a free lunch, but there is such a thing as being swallowed by a shark.

18. In short, recognize that every person - not just you - has an absolute right to his own life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness. Being a good citizen is like being a good neighbor: You live your life privately and you respect others' rights to do the same. You keep what you make, and they keep what they make. You don't force your opinions, causes, needs, or problems on your neighbors, and they don't force theirs on you.

To live in a free society, each person must embrace the responsiblity for his own life that comes with freedom. To defeat the creeping tyranny of the welfare state, we must rediscover the founding principle of America: the power, the moral rightness, and the glory of the individual as the master of his fate and the captain of his soul.

Politics: Capitalism

("Give me liberty or give me death.")



In the following post I will analyze some concept/s of the essentials of the classical Objectivism as published in the ARI pages proposing expansions, complements and/or new thoughts about them.

Traditional Objectivism:

Politics
"The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that no man has the right to seek values from others by means of physical force—i.e., no man or group has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others. Men have the right to use force only in self-defense and only against those who initiate its use. Men must deal with one another as traders, giving value for value, by free, mutual consent to mutual benefit. The only social system that bars physical force from human relationships is laissez-faire capitalism. Capitalism is a system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which the only function of the government is to protect individual rights, i.e., to protect men from those who initiate the use of physical force." Thus Objectivism rejects any form of collectivism, such as fascism or socialism. It also rejects the current "mixed economy" notion that the government should regulate the economy and redistribute wealth.


Expanding the concept:

As I said in my previous post I was born in a country with a "mixed" quite socialized economy and I am a product of its public education and health systems without which my middle-low class family probably couldn't have had the possibility to afford my education and proper grown up when I was a child...

If I unreservedly support the Ayn Rand's doctrine of a full laissez-faire capitalism, am I going against my own historical survival as living organism?
It is probably a question that I will never be able to answer in the same way that nobody knows if Ayn Rand would have been the same person if she wouldn't have been educated in the Leningrad State University of the disappeared USSR. And when I say "the same person" I mean the same rational mind and the same hate against the socialism which she was a product of, the same hate that latter in her life impulsed her mind toward individualism and finally created the conditions for the discovery of Objectivism.
Destiny exists: It is what already happened...

Needless to say that in the big picture I support capitalism as (until now) the only political system capable of fully defending individual rights, and the freedom to grow based of your own effort and intelligence

But there is a detail in which I have some doubts about a full totally unregulated laissez-faire capitalism: Children
Almost every book, essay and principles of Objectivism are addressed to "persons" to men, to a man or better "the" Man, you, I.
Did you note that in Ayn Rand's novels there are almost no children?

So my central question is: Are children really "persons" in the full philosophical sense of the word about what Objectivism speaks?
Are they free to choose? Are they capable of bearing total responsibility for their acts? Can they be left to their own effort?
In any case at which age?

From my very personal point of view a person doesn't born as a person, it takes a process to become a person
This is by the way the main reason why I am not against abortion: an unborn baby is not yet a person in the total sense of the word, he is a "promise" for a future person.
Anyway at some hard-to-define point between 10 and 20 years old a child become a man depending on his life's circumstances, it is a slow gradual process that takes years to happen, from the very moment of the birth until you are capable to face existence by your own.
In fact in most countries the law says that you are some kind of "property" of your parents until at least 15 years old or more.
In most modern western cultures by example you are nor free to choose even the color of your shoes until you are 8 or 10 or your religion until you are 12, nor your high-school, your ideas, or your bedroom until you are 14 or more, and your parents are responsible for your crimes in front of the law until you are 16 or 18.

So it is reasonable letting these "persons-to-be" only in the hands of their parents? Are potentially bright children "guilty" of the eventual low capacity, poor educational level, or laziness of their parents?
On the other side it is reasonable that parents are full "proprietors" of their children? That they decide all about them from type of education to diet? I don't know if it "reasonable" but it seems to be fair, since children are born only by their decision, their desire, their sole responsibility and right. And after the children are born and for several years parents are the only supporters of their lives with their own effort hope and sometimes sacrifices. So it seems parents have earned the right and freedom to decide over their children's future, but for sure in modern societies this freedom shouldn't be the same unlimited kind of freedom that people have to decide about any other of their properties, since children are potentially and progressively persons, men.

What can then do a capitalist system or government in order to balance this delicate equation? And first of all should the government do anything at all about this?
In my opinion yes: Government should find the way to guarantee to these persons-in-formation gradually the same individual rights that must guarantee to grown men, including the fundamental right of freedom and defense against unjustified aggression of others.
But what freedom could there be in modern societies without education? I have always associated very closely freedom with knowledge. So I deeply believe that government should encourage an facilitate (not guarantee by law) the access of children to knowledge and education that from my point of view is probably the best form to guarantee their future freedom, and the best bet in order to ensure the continuity of the free capitalist system itself over the centuries