THE FREE INDIVIDUAL
THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMAGINATION
AUGUST 7, 2011. Long-time readers of mine know I have, many times, asked and answered the question: WHAT IS FREEDOM FOR?
Answer: the widest possible use, with great intensity and power, of endless IMAGINATION.
Freedom is the platform that allows imagination to flourish.
To establish the framework for the triumph of imagination, in a world where repetition and ironclad system are worshiped like gods, we have to re-explore FREEDOM.
That is what this essay does.
The free, powerful, intensely creative, and moral individual is the ideal that flows from the meaning of the American Republic.
When that ideal is abandoned, what replaces it is the individual who has the LICENSE to do anything—to diminish, manipulate, and control the freedom of another.
The difference between freedom and license is the difference between living blood in the veins, versus a synthetic plastic approximation. The android thus created always yearns for the real thing, and in its absence, he drives himself into a state of anarchic frustration, violence, and the desire to enact revenge.
The “man of license,” not freedom, forms a character that is at once servile and self-assertive, meek and bloated, guilt-ridden and criminally aggressive.
And what flows from that? The entirely artificial, enterprising, cheating, skulking, compromising, self-flagellating, miserable, brutal, aggrandizing, masochistic citizen—often found in, among many other places, positions of leadership. In government, business, law, academia.
Do you need a better formula for creating criminals?
A society packed with such persons is going to carry out the vision of a self-sufficient nation and individual at about the same rate of success as a colony of primates is going to give birth to Thomas Paine.
From “the man of license” came a parade of crimes:
The rise of the robber barons, the slave-wage conditions in factories; the continuation of black slavery; Indian conquests; the monopolistic practices that led to secret control over entire industries; the capture of the US financial system; the yellow/tabloid American press; criminal corporate adventurism in foreign lands; the support of foreign dictatorships; so-called nation-building; false-flag operations aimed at casting blame on the wrong parties; endless wars; covert intelligence operations targeting both foreign opponents and American citizens; support of death squads to forward US corporate goals abroad; the surrender of our borders; the rise of massive entitlements; the enshrinement of victimhood; rigged elections; the bankrupting of the nation; the manipulation of markets; engineered recessions and depressions; misplaced tolerance shown toward war-making religious fundamentalisms; the descent into state corporatism and socialism; shadow governments…
These and other acts all stem from one basic cause: the flight from the notion and reality of the free, powerful, and intensely creative individual. And the substitution of the man of license.
The doors were opened to manipulation on every level. The crimes and the conspiracies to commit crimes have not ended and will never end, so long as the truly free individual is a dead issue in the eyes of walking dead men.
Few historians have grasped the import of George Washington’s final warning, to the American people, to avoid entangling foreign alliances. The ignorance on this point is staggering.
It is clear that America could have found a way to remove itself from foreign affairs to such a degree that it could have constructed, at home, a society the likes of which has never been seen on the face of the Earth:
A moral and ethical society, devoted to the inculcation of as many free and powerful individuals as possible, none of whom would be tempted to cheat, lie, and steal his way “to the top.” Which is to say, a SELF-SUFFICIENT country, in all conceivable ways. Raw materials, manufacturing, industry, agriculture, technology.
And in this society, there would have been swift and strong punishment for any person, company, or corporation that decided to circumvent the law and commit criminal acts by hindering or fraudulently repressing any individual.
A free and powerful and creative individual, contrary to popular myths, has an ethical stature which legislates against perverse actions undertaken at the expense of others.
Let me present a theoretical, fictional example of what George Washington called foreign entanglement—except I’ll cast it in the form of US corporate action. We have a nation, X. In X, for a thousand years, land ownership has been a matter of tribal squabbles and bloody conflicts, and periodic land takeovers by strong-armed government administrations, many of which administrations have fallen as a result of revolutions. We also have a few powerful families who have owned the bulk of the nation’s arable land for several centuries and employ private armies and death squads to maintain control of the land and the virtual slaves who work it. Into this situation steps US corporation Y. It is seeking to purchase and lease land for the production of grain. It has to deal with the present dictator, who is more than happy to make an arrangement, for the right price (bribe). He will also help defend these lands with his army and repel invaders by killing them.
A fine beginning. Corporation Y also pays off several tribal leaders to stay away from these leased lands. The tribal leaders will, of course, need better weapons. These are forthcoming. The tribes will kill each other with them, on the side. Then the corporation hires a security group which supplies mercenaries. Then the dictator, who is basically a bloodthirsty lunatic, decides he wants bigger bribe money, and a new highway built from the central airport right to his palace. Eventually, corporation Y, which is receiving intelligence from a local CIA bureau, decides the dictator is too large a headache, so discussions begin about a military coup. However, the first choice of a new leader has close ties to a group that wants to nationalize oil fields. In this takeover, new leader would be supported by several terrorist regimes who have already paid him large sums of money…
FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS
There was no way to avoid these realities once corporation Y entered the scene, if they wanted to make a handsome profit on their investment. They had come into a society that was brutal and criminal on many levels.
Are we really to believe that Washington, Jefferson, Paine, and Madison would have sanctioned and applauded this kind of dealing as “the expression of free enterprise?”
What is the alternative?
Through the propaganda mills, we are fed a constant stream of persuasion masked as fact, which assures us that, without each other, globally, we will all go down. The whole world. We are one planet with one need—each other. The idea that one people in one country could achieve an overall self-sufficiency is considered dangerous lunacy.
Instead, we must somehow merge with peoples and nations who have a long history of oppression, violence, murder, and a grossly limited or absent concept of individual freedom.
Behind this propaganda operation sits the aim of melting us down into one mass of humanity. No one stands out. We all are reduced down to lowest common denominators. No one has power. No one is truly free, because freedom is ALWAYS taken at the expense of someone else. Freedom means criminality.
This is the myth.
Against all this, let me juxtapose another fictional illustration, an entry written in a journal by an educated American citizen in the year 1880—living in a nation that had rejected ANY business or government dealing with any foreign country, that had remained, yes, completely isolated, and had dedicated itself to the free, powerful, moral, and intensely creative individual, as the ideal of the Republic. In this alternative America, the “man of license” had been squashed and sidelined:
“It was apparent to us, from the beginning of the Republic, that, in order to carry out the mandate of freedom, difficult choices would have to be made.
“Tom Paine eventually carried the banner of George Washington by convincing us that engaging in foreign trade, any foreign trade, would be a mistake that would compound into further, more serious errors. Not through government, but through business, we would inevitably be drawn back into the circle of corruption and old enmities among groups and nations. How could we walk into a decadent swamp without incurring infection?
“The debates on this point were heated. In the end, Paine and Madison gave us a picture of an alternative: We would turn inward and utilize our burgeoning productive capacity to do business within our own borders, thus enriching the lives of our own citizens. It would be a step, Paine said, toward the establishment of the first wholly self-sufficient nation in human history—and this example would shine brightly for the rest of the world.
“An equally difficult problem was the so-called Indian Proposition, because it involved negotiating and signing land and border treaties with a number of tribes. The expansion westward had provoked armed conflicts with several of these tribes. In the aftermath, a group of us was able to influence Congress to declare a cessation of warfare, on the notion that no ethical people should countenance bloodshed when diplomacy might carry the day. In the end, diplomacy did, and I firmly believe we are the better for it. Does the new free man on this continent wish to carry on the warring tradition of his European ancestors? Is that what we stand for?
“The abolition of slavery in 1807, again led by Paine, who had spoken out against it years earlier, during the Constitutional debates, provoked a radical alteration in the economy of the South. Many cotton plantations were converted into farms, fruit orchards, and cattle ranches, and the South, accepting workers from the North as long-term leaseholders and part-owners of their own acreage, became the Food Basket of the nation, wealthy beyond all expectation.
“Now, we have a new enterprise, and it may bring us all into an unimaginable future. Following experiments conducted by several companies off the Northeast Coast, it has been announced that the flow of powerful currents in ocean narrows can be harnessed to produce immense quantities of electricity, and there is the prospect that this electricity can be transmitted considerable distances over land. Nearly a hundred promising locations on the East Coast and along our Southern shores are candidates for the innovation. There is the vision of thus developing enough energy for the entire Republic.
“I recall some words written by Mr. Paine shortly before his death: ‘There will come a day when we Americans, through our ingenuity, make scientific discoveries that stagger the soul and delight the mind. Our first tendency will be to profit from these inventions by peddling them abroad, in violation of our promise to resist foreign trade of any kind. Instead, this is what I suggest, and I believe it will make a point. Offer the theoretical innovations, the blueprints, in pure unrealized form, to the rest of the world, as our gift, and let them make of it what they will. My calculation is they will further their intentions to benefit the few at the expense of the many, because that is their way, the old way. Let them. To withhold our advances and try to protect them against all outside discovery will only raise the enmity of others toward us, and it will tempt some of us to deliver this knowledge in secrecy—a thing to be avoided at all cost.’
“Mr. Paine concluded: ‘We are a nation of builders and creators, and we have inherited this ability from our own joy in discovering what true freedom is, and enshrining it in the highest ramparts of our imaginations. We are close on the time when the entire territory of these United States will be blooming with abundance of every type. The greatness of this present campaign, I note, has come with never a sacrifice of the individual to the mob. In fact, it was and is individual genius that has sustained us all along, and will continue to reflect our devotion to that very principle, against which we may judge the propriety, reason, and common sense of any action. Our nation is alive at the very core, and may it always remain so.’
“In certain respects, Mr. Paine’s prediction was correct. As we have made our brilliant scientific inventions available to foreign nations, in blueprint form, those nations have utilized them to the ends tyrannies always do. But gradually, there has arisen, abroad, a notion that America needs to be understood at a more profound level. It is not so much that the fruits from our tree of liberty should be plucked at random; instead, these foreign peoples are learning that they must undergo a revolution of mind. They must dedicate themselves to the free individual, just as we did. They must engage in a new philosophy, whereby Free, Powerful, Moral, Creative, Individual are all the joining fires of their own liberty. They are heartened. They realize this philosophy is more than mere dreaming and useless speculation, because for the first time in human history, a nation has brought these ideas to life and sustained them, on its own soil. Our isolation was never bound in hatred of the human being, but only constituted an aversion to the age-old practices that brought pain, suffering, and destruction, as men considered they had License to commit any crimes and call those crimes just and proper. This is what we built walls against. And now we are the example, the living proof of a different way.
“We are strong. Our defenses against invasion and subterfuge are unshakable. (We entertain no illusions that our very example to the rest of the world is alone sufficient to protect us.) We go about our lives and our work, knowing how great our freedom is, and we look forward to the day when other peoples and nations will show us that they, too, have crossed their own chasms of despair. On that day, there will be no need for treaties or alliances. Firm friendship will suffice.
“To the rest of the world we say: This is who we are. This is what we have done. Our hopes go out to you. There is no sacrifice we can make to bring you into a new state of mind. That is your own prospect. Your attainments must be your own. There is no other path, because freedom, by its very nature, cannot be a gift. Build your own compass and navigate by it. If we are your North Star, our innate happiness is thereby increased…”
And now, back to the reality of 2011…
As society and government and media produce more turmoil and junk information, it’s easier to forget there are first principles. Well, most of the time, people can manage to forget first principles anyway. Who needs them? They just get in the way of a relatively smooth life, in which authentic thought plays a minor role.
One could say the prevailing philosophy is not to have a philosophy. However, as it turns out, this takes more effort than one might suppose. There is so much to forget, so much to ignore, so much to lay aside in a remote space in the cellar.
With the onset of a pseudo-philosophy called Pragmatism, designed for “the common man,” pundits declared they had found the key to America’s success. Its citizens had unburdened themselves of all the unnecessary mental clap-trap that legislated against pure action. Americans were stripped-down goal seekers.
Of course, emptying the mind meant the founding principles of the republic went begging. This was unfortunate collateral damage—but why worry about freedom when you were already acting on it, when you were already in the heat of the battle to bring the good life to fruition?
A specious argument—and we can see the results of it all around us.
So let us return to principle…
The free individual is moral in the sense that he chooses—as seen through his own eyes—the highest work possible. Therefore, he is not competing for a prize others seek. He isn’t scrabbling for a fake pearl. He isn’t contemplating crimes that will help him arrive at a destination before others can.
And this notion of “the highest work possible” doesn’t involve leaving one’s desire behind, in order to become the servant of a cause. One doesn’t suddenly develop an egoless and empty personality in order to “connect” with a goal that floats in a heavenly sector.
The psychology of the free individual is really no psychology at all. It doesn’t hang on levers of past events. It doesn’t depend on clandestine “negative motives.”
The free individual isn’t shaped. He shapes.
He doesn’t seek compromise. He doesn’t begin with the possibility of public acceptance and rationalize his actions back from that hoped-for outcome.
Meanwhile, the mob, the herd operates on debt, obligation, guilt, and the pretense of admiration. These are its currencies.
The mob, while it seeks some reflection of its unformed desire, struggles to reach a group consensus that will construct a social order based on need—and that need will be supplied, through coercion if necessary, by those who already have More.
This need, and the proposition that the mob deserves its satisfaction, creates a worldwide industry.
Among the industry’s most passionate and venal supporters are those who, a priori, are quite certain that the human being is a tainted vile creature. Such supporters, of course, are sensing their own reflections.
The great psychological factor in any life is THE DESERTION OF INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM. Afterwards, the individual creates shadows and monsters and fears around that crossroad. To vaporize them, he needs to choose his own freedom again. That’s the long and short of it.
Freedom is the space and the setting, from which the individual can generate the thought and the energy- pulse of a great self-chosen objective.
In that place, there is no crowding or oppressive necessity. There is choice. There is desire. There is thought.
This was the starting point of the American Revolution. It is still the starting point.
It doesn’t require consensus. It doesn’t require legislation or any other form of permission.
“Being absorbed in a greater whole” isn’t an ambition or philosophical prospect for the free individual. He sees that fixation as an abject surrender of self.
The Collective, whether envisioned as a down-to-earth or mystical group, promises a release from self. This grand solution to problems is a ruse designed to keep humans in a herd. After all, how are you going to control and eventually enslave people if you promote the notion that each individual has freedom and free choice? The abnegation of self is a workable tactic, as along as it is dressed up with false idols and perverted ideals.
The release from self is a fabrication. At bottom, it is choosing another role in the play, the drama. It is a character, called “non-self.” It can be fleshed out and outfitted in a number of ways.
Traditionally, non-self envisions apocalyptic events that will change everything and bring ultimate rewards and/or punishments. Non-self is wedded to “higher mystical forces” because, since self has been rejected, there has to be a different causative principle.
Self is fundamentally creative, dynamic, forward-looking, energetic, powerful, engaged. The Collective looks for those qualities in the government as its source of survival. In turn, the government takes whatever it can from the free individual, to supply the needs of the Collective.
This arrangement is a diminishing vortex that, in time, approaches zero output, like an engine running out of fuel.
But the free individual goes on.
And in doing so, he employs greater and wider imagination to surpass his former view of existence…
JON RAPPOPORT