a friend of mine responded back to me with this question. "i'm come to realize that freedom and independence are
extremely overvalued in our culture and generation, and are often used to rationalize selfishness."
Is it really? i think if someone claimed their selfishness as freedom or independence, i would say they probably misuse the term or didn't understand what freedom means or what independence means.....
freedom: from wiki: as a philosophy, it means the ability to act consciously, in a well-balanced manner and with self control in a given constructive direction. politically, it means the right or the capacity of self-determination as an expression of the individual will. When I say freedom, i mean more the first definition. Freedom doesn't mean you can destroy yourself at your free will or selfishness...however, i do admit that this is hard concept to define...what is freedom truly....i like Karl Marx concept around freedom....
"Marx was concerned ultimately with human freedom, reviving the ancient concept of communism, wherein human beings could fulfill their cooperative roles within society without fear of exploitation." (from victorianweb org, brown university). Of course, his concept for freedom is related to insidious modern capitalism. Capitalism can provide illusion of freedom to human being and at the same time, the system will exploit labor...when he talked about freedom, it is originally from consciousness of men...my question is who determine this consciousness? we believe we determine something consciously, however, is this truly from us? or from our society? is our free-wll truly from us? or even that is defined from our generation?
one thing I cannot forget from G. Orwell's 1984, winston smith's last words (I don't remember exactly though), "I love big brother....." what really is freedom to us?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment