THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FREE INDIVIDUAL
VERSUS “THE INDIVIDUAL OF LICENSE”
NOVEMBER 9, 2010. In Why Is It Called Freedom, I described the free individual, and the corruption that occurs when the license to act “as if free” is substituted on a grand scale.
I want to expand on those ideas.
THE IDEAL CALLED THE FREE INDIVIDUAL—THE FULFILLMENT OF THE UNDERLYING VISION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC
The free individual is driven by his own choices. He envisions his highest objectives and acts, with power and energy and will, to bring them about, in the world.
The free individual is intensely creative. He isn’t a follower. He breaks new ground. He doesn’t cater to the collective. He doesn’t compromise to satisfy the wishes of the group.
As a matter of course, what he invents does spill over and benefit others. But he isn’t tethered and bound and lashed to the group.
The free individual rejects the notion that he is limited by his past.
He doesn’t navigate his life by the “needs of others.”
He rejects the premise that humanity is one “melted-down” Whole that must be served.
The free individual recognizes that the Collective accumulates its catalogue of “needs” based on the desire to obtain something for nothing—and he pays no attention to this campaign.
Likewise, the free individual is aware that certain leaders, who have attained their position through clever strategies, manipulate the needs of the Collective to advance their own position. He does not serve these leaders.
The free individual doesn’t engage in actions whose purpose is to limit the freedom of others.
Unlike the free individual, the individual of license interprets freedom to mean he has broad latitude to trample on others, to lie, cheat, connive, and steal, in order to achieve his ends.
To outward appearances, he is carrying out a program based on freedom, but he is not. Inevitably, his actions involve repressing the liberty of others.
He calls his actions “part of the free market.”
In this way, over time, freedom of commerce accumulates more degradation.
The man of license doesn’t see beyond the end of his nose. He is operating on the basis of how he envisions freedom. To him, freedom IS license. There is no distinction. Freedom becomes his permission to roam the landscape and extract profit from “targets of opportunity.”
He rationalizes his actions away on the basis that “humanity can’t attain to anything better.”
In truth, he spends a certain amount of time convincing himself that this rationalization is accurate. This is the extent of his “philosophy.”
In a nation where there is a preponderance of people of license, the society declines, and its memory of what freedom is deteriorates.
The idealization of freedom was distorted into license and a slanted understanding of the free market.
Although the Republic had broken away from the oppressions of Europe, there was no way it could automatically endow its citizens with an incorruptible nature.
Except through education. But such education would have had to delve further than a literal understanding of the founding documents of the nation. Thomas Paine once remarked that a constitution is an explication of underlying principle. And this is the case.
The explanation, envisioning, and unearthing of the free individual as an ideal is a legitimate and necessary purpose of education.
How do you teach a student a higher concept than he is accustomed to imagining? This is the challenge, and of course the teacher must be ready for such an undertaking.
It is not rote learning. It isn’t the casual transmission of superficial ideas.
In America, the ideal of the free individual has taken a back seat to the philosophy that large numbers of people have needs, and those needs must be satisfied through government-enforced initiatives.
The circle is closed when enough students—having never learned what the free individual really is—perceive themselves in the default position of being needy. Then they readily accept the substitute philosophy.
People of license feed off the populations of people of need.
Reinstating the idea of the free individual is the highest of priorities.
Attempting to curtail, by enforcement of law, all the instances of crimes committed by people of license is futile—because there is no higher ideal to attain to. That ideal has been scrubbed from the culture.
I’m not so naïve that I believe every single human being can or will become a truly free individual in a given period of time. But if the ideal were omnipresent in the society, at the very least there would be enough reflections of it to view, so that some semblance of a standard could sustain us.
As things stand now, young people have very few references.
The Republic has become smaller in its insight and imagination, and this condition is not curable by law.
However, each one of us has enough freedom to build, in our own minds, the vision of the free individual. What springs from that is unpredictable, and good.
It turns out that the most profound meaning of freedom never dies. It can be shuttled off to a remote spot in the psyche, but it continues to have fire.
No one can hand off the responsibility to resuscitate the ideal of the free individual to another. That is simply an act of surrender.
Freedom continues to ring its bell. This is what drives the most morbid people of license to the brink of despair. Every time they believe they have forced away the vestiges of the free individual, something happens. Something reminds them that their control is faltering. Their venal philosophy, which they forward under cover of darkness, has been exposed.
As a side effect, people who could help resuscitate the ideal of the free individual sit back and take heart, thinking that other people will always be there to provide hope.
Ah yes. The people of license, the people of need, and the people of hope.
JON RAPPOPORT
Jon Rappoport is the author of a unique course for home schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS. For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com