How to Re-Organize Society from Top to Bottom- Chapter 10
Last time we explored the concept of Justice and how best to administer it.
Justice, we saw is inborn, where we see babies as young as 3 months old had a sense of empathy, of sharing with other babies, a sense of Justice. We then explored how best to implement that sense of justice and by whom it should and could be done.
We did not express a preference at that point as to who it should be assigned to and choose to come back to that question later.
We then moved on to the question of Freedom, identifying one of its permutations is the question of who is allowed to participate in government and in the polity.
We reviewed that history in the United States in form of the franchise identifying who in our history was allowed to vote and who was not and why.
But implicit in this notion of who is allowed to vote is also a notion freedom. Now we turn to explicit notions of freedom we find in the American example.
Freedom From, Freedom To, Freedom To Travel, On the Road, and Freedom to Become Rich.
Freedom From is notion that we in America came here and are free from the shackles of the old order in Europe, from the confines and authority of Lords, Masters and Kings, where many of the serfs and peons were able to leave to go off to a new world where they have this incredible ability to throw off centuries of rule by warlords, the church, most authority, and go off into the new world wilderness to start a new life, with land there for the taking, and gold, gold enough to make all rich.
This was the dream of many, if not most, who took all their belongings, left Europe and struck out for the new world beginning in the 16th century.
It was the idea of being away, from old authority, old rules, Freedom From.
What content in this new freedom was to be as varied as those who came, and the reasons they came.
Freedom of religion, of the press, to express new ideas, of a new humanism, of the enlightenment, to grow rich, varied among them in great variety.
American history is their working out these new Freedom From ideas.
That experiment is still underway.
Freedom To
Yet another variation are those who wanted Freedom To-practice a new religion outlawed in Europe not in favor in the old country. Freedom to became their notion and ideas--where theyd dotted the country with religious communities, Utopian schemes, baptists, preachers leading their flocks of Catholics, Protestants, Methodists, Calvinists- in a bewildering array of faiths.
But a second larger group was those who wanted to be rich as the Lords, Kings, and Masters they left behind. The new world to them represented wealth.
With capitalism providing new funds from slavery, trade and guns money was raised to create new railroads, new enterprises, unfettered by the old practice where the Crown could decide who was to monopolize a given activity, or industry.
Anyone with capital could start a new enterprise, and they did in their thousands.
Freedom To grow rich, was a notion of freedom these new Americans embraced and nurtured.
That dream, opportunity for all has now given ue opportunity for a few where we can see has now given us an enormous amount of inequality, of massive greed, poverty, imbalance, and a possiblity where we can destroy the planet itself.
Next time, we explore other notions of freedom these Americans exhibit and intermingle in the American context.
