The perils of freedom
People need to know how freedom can be used and where its application ends, and this can only be achieved through institutional education on ethical matters, something European nations tend to shy away from.
Andy West, The Malay Mail
The harrowing, shocking and imbecilic murders of Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris this week have provoked a rightly outraged reaction, with the most prominent message to arise being a defiant insistence that our values of freedom must not be threatened by such callous acts of terrorism.
This is a more complex topic than it first appears, however, because “freedom” can only be relative: we are social animals and it is impossible for any human being to exist in a state of absolute freedom.
In modern Western societies, for example, it is acceptable for a newspaper’s editorial team to express their freedom by publishing satirical cartoons mocking Mohamed, but it is not acceptable for anyone who happens to be offended by those cartoons to express their freedom by storming into the newspaper’s offices and brutally murdering the people responsible.
Freedom has — inevitably must have — its limits, and knowing where freedom ends is not always an easy line to discern.
This is not at all intended to defend the cruel and moronic actions of the deranged halfwits who carried out this week’s atrocities in Paris, but the great problem with freedom is that it is not easy.
Living in a condition of freedom demands individuals to have the mental capacity to form their own opinions, make their own value judgments, establish their own philosophical beliefs and forge their own identities.
Crucially, however, for freedom to function effectively within a society, it also requires members of that society to be broad-minded enough to understand and accept that while they are free to make their own choices, so too are other people; and that it is permissible for other people to hold opinions, values and beliefs that differ from one’s own.
A great number of people are simply not capable of taking this position, possessing insufficient mental and/or emotional intelligence to escape the dangerous belief that they are right and that only they are right – a mindset which can eventually lead, in extreme cases, to the kind of brutality we have seen this week.
To put it bluntly, a great number of people are too stupid or emotionally imbalanced — whether through a lack of education or a natural disposition — to live in a state of freedom. Anyone idiotic or brainwashed enough to believe that brutally killing fellow human beings will receive the blessing of their god clearly is not capable of living in a state of freedom and does not deserve to have it in the first place.
In Europe’s past, freedom didn’t really exist in the modern perception of the word prevailed. The vast majority of people were uneducated and answerable to lords and masters who controlled their day-to-day economic, social and cultural activities. Their mental activities, meanwhile, were dominated by the church: religious belief was not a self-conscious choice as it is now; it was a matter of pre-ordained compulsion.
Since the widespread rejection of institutional, enforced religion and the move towards a secular society, however, those old ways of living have been rejected and the concept of “freedom” for the masses has been introduced.
