How to Re-Organize Society from The Top to Bottom-Chapter 11

One of the definitions of freedom was freedom of movement. If you were a serf, or a vassal in the old country, you were used to restrictions in your movements. Most never lived or moved beyond 300 miles from your place of birth, and married someone within that same 300 mile range. If you tried to do more your Lord or his minions would come after you and return you to the manor since you were considered his property or at least beholden to him to raise crops and to tend his property. You were impoverished, a hustler, a prostitute, a returned soldier, disabled, diseased and only a few of you were able-bodied.

That is why traveling, especially if you were a second son and didn’t inherit, you saw the crusades, for example, as an opportunity to realize your dream to travel and see foreign lands. In England, going to sea was especially attractive, or going away, if possible, was a way to make your fortune in life and return to your small village triumphant.

Imagine then if you heard stories of an world where there were no restrictions on your movements, an entire continent available for you and yours to settle upon. But some saw travel itself as important in itself. Trappers, soldiers, scouts, explorers, loners, outlaws, cowboys saw freedom of movement as a goal in itself.

Compare that to today when we need passports, visas, confront borders, expense, soldiers all present barriers to free travel at least in the United States, and increasingly in the European Union.

Our love of travel, to feel free, out on the road is sustained by love of the auto, with help from General Motors, is still with us. Some feel most free when freed from the cubicle and the office and out on the road, traveling this country.

This love of the open road is a definition of freedom that has long been with us and has not gone away. To be away is what some feel is freedom, not tied down to bosses, to responsibility and the restrictions of our society.
Our romance with the Cowboy, the loner, constantly moving from town to town, in fact, all our superheroes, generally are not married, not tied down leaving them free to fight crime and alternately free to take over the world.

So that free spirit is now hunkered down in these large cities, fuming, feeling something has been taken away and longing to be out on the road as many of our ancestors did.

Freedom here is unfettered and unrestrained, by the restrictions of society, and in an allied form it is the lawlessness of the cowboy town and the rule of the six gun, taking anything we want; killing including native Americans, South Americans, anything that stands in our way.

The west was closed in 1880 but that wild spirit still lives in many encompassing vigilante justice, westerns, and our military policy abroad. Us Americans take what we want in foreign countries, and shoot first and ask questions second. We have the desires of the mob abroad, and we do not want restrains upon us. That frontier sense of “take what we want” has never left many in our population and it still lives in vigilante justice and in how we treat others, and in other countries and it has the instincts of the hunt.
It lives in many.

Next time: So what is the notion of real freedom?