Someone said:
'we must preserve our illusions of freedom and self-determination.'
The speaker embarks on an impossible task, defeated at the outset by
acceptance of the premise that freedom and self-determination are illusory.
If freedom and self-determination are an illusion, then as with any other
illusion they will quickly collapse on examination. For one brief moment,
view money as illusion. The dollar bill is presumed to have value as a
medium of trade, yet it is only paper. The more of it we print the less
'value' it has - it has no worth of its own. It has value only because we
agree that it does, and because we agree not to print too much of it at any
one time, or steal too much of it from any one person, group or entity,
thereby receiving 'value' for nothing, giving lie to the illusion. Every
instance of hyper-inflation and economic collapse is a graphic demonstration
of the demise of illusion.
Freedom and self-determination are not illusion. They are something we are
born with, destined to grow into, though human society may do all it can to
proscribe and constrain these gifts. This is the freedom we are given, which
none may take away:
We are free to seek wisdom in an empty
glass and fill it full to overflowing,
though all the world perceive it as barren.
We are free to accept the human condition as
we find it, or we are free to do all within our
power to over come it.
If two or more people agree that freedom and self-determination are illusory,
then each of the individuals entering into this agreement has embarked upon a
mutually supporting ideological construct leading inevitably into bondage.
History demonstrates that power seeks to limit self-determination, for
self-determination is itself a hindrance to the accumulation of power. If
freedom and self-determination are thought of as illusory, then the proofs of
this illusion need not be questioned when and as they arise, as certainly they
must, in the accumulation of power.
If freedom and self-determination are thought of as an illusion that must be
preserved, then any such proofs will be quietly accepted without protest.
Accepted without examination. Accepted in silence, with no thought to the
consequence.
People condemned to such a journey of self-destruction invariably point to
physical laws and the constraints of biology to justify their course. They
claim that freedom is a human concept, giving rise to the democratic polity,
a human construct, all designed to preserve the illusion of freedom and
self-determination even as it places limits on each of us to ensure that none
of us carry our notions of freedom and self-determination too far.
Some committed to this course of self-destruction have designed elaborate
scientific proofs establishing that all human experience is nothing more nor
less than the result of stimulus/response:
There is no choice. There is only reaction.
Each experience produces both thought and
emotion. Any effort to interact with and alter
personal emotive response is only the result
of previous stimulus which has provoked the
urge to control, to dominate, one's emotion
with reason. Likewise, any intellectual
response provoked by any given stimulus is
the result of biology and previous learning,
aimed at achieving the greatest reward.
In creating proofs of such concepts they have demonstrated their own freedom,
their own power to chose, their own will to overcome the human condition.
They have done so by violating the very principles the democratic polity was
specifically designed to preserve, and in the process they have adroitly avoided
any conscientious objections, quietly reassuring themselves that really, they too
have no choice.
But there is a weakness in their argument. They will not speak openly of their
proofs. If they did, they would find their freedom, their power to choose, to
create, suddenly constrained. They would find the proof of their convictions
foisted upon them, their own hands enslaved. They elect instead for a different
kind of bondage, the bondage of fear. They live in terror that one day all they
have done may be exposed to the light. They live with the fear that all
their convictions and beliefs, the sum of their lives, have been nothing but lies.
They seek to instill us with their fear as a safeguard to their own power to
choose - including their choice over what we will believe about the nature of
freedom.
Who are these people who would seek to enslave us with such self-defeating
concepts of freedom? Many parade under a banner of intellectual conservatism.
Many are behaviorists and neural linguists, who perceive all communication as a
form of symbolism. These people see all stimulus as a form of communication,
and therefore symbolic. They have quantified the interaction of the external
environment with the central nervous system in amazing detail. They see stimulus
imprinted on the mind as a form of encoding, and in this sense they are code
breakers, able to lay bare the secrets of the mind.
We cannot think to preserve our freedom in the acceptance of the premise that
self-determination is an illusion, and that as such it must be preserved. We
must shatter this myth. We must demand an explanation of their proofs. We must
demand accountability for the consequences of their behavior.
Therefore I ask:
What are predictive behavioral models? What is Neural Linguisitic Reprogramming?
Who uses such tools? How and why are they used to enslave and destroy human
beings? People like James Quarles, who died in a mall, terrified, holding a
knife, surrounded by people with cameras who screamed at the officer who killed
him, "don't shoot that man." People like Marty Hopkins and Tina Davis, who,
returning home from a funeral in California by train, were consumed by such
fear that, somewhere in Nebraska, they had to get off, and while traveling at
over 70 miles an hour, leapt to their deaths. People like Robert Woodward,
who, though he exhibited no previous evidence of mental illness, became so
overwhelmed with fear that he sought political asylum in a church, and was
subsequently shot to death by police as he stood at the alter.
These people were essentially no different from you or me. These are not
proofs. These are incentives to fear.
D. Winter
Burlington, Vermont
January 18, 2002
