What is freedom? The Oxford Dictionary defines it as:
“The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants; Absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government; The power of self-determination attributed to the will; the quality of being independent of fate or necessity; The state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.”
A brief history of freedom
Freedom, as a political and social concept, has existed for only a very brief portion of the estimated 200,000 years of human history. Until the 19th century, humanity was, in general, divided into two classes: the elites, and the masses. Until that time, the elites got to be elite by means of either brute force, heredity, or cultural intimidation. Rulers and their underlings got to rule by means of violent conquest, or because of their family lineage, either by blood or marriage. In other cases, rulers acquired power through their claims of divine guidance; that only they knew the ways of the physical and spiritual world, and only those who adopted their beliefs and practices would achieve salvation in an afterlife.
The rest of humanity was left to struggle to survive amid life that, in general, as described by Thomas Hobbes in 1651, was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution and later, the American Revolution, the stage was set, as Thomas Jefferson described:
“To burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
Of course, Jefferson still owned several hundred human slaves at the time he wrote these soaring words. But as he expressed in numerous other written items over the span of fifty years, although he could not convince his fellow Founders to outlaw slavery (he tried, repeatedly), his hope was that the principles that undergirded his Declaration of American Independence, and the U.S. Constitution would set the stage by which other revolutions could occur, for the purpose of liberating all human beings.
Over the next two hundred years, the Western civilization that America’s Founders forged produced an explosion of advancement in every rational quality-of-life measure. One analysis found that:
“There has been more improvement in the human condition for people living in the United States in this century than for all people in all previous centuries of human history combined.”
Another study, documented in the short video below, shows how over 200 years Western civilization dramatically increased both humans’ lifespans and wealth – meaning, the ability to live without toiling in backbreaking labor just to survive:
Eventually, the same natural rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration, were legally applied to those it originally excluded — specifically black Americans, women, Native Americans and others. And since then, America has led the way in terms of creating more wealth, more economic opportunity, more advancements in life-saving, life-enriching and life-extending technologies than all other nations combined.
The retreat of freedom in America — and beyond
Despite the groundbreaking results produced by freedom, our world is not just receding back into an unfree state, but a far more dangerous one than ever before, for a variety of reasons:
In the past, tyrannical rulers and regimes had only the ability to wage war with conventional weapons, such as guns, tanks and planes. Now many of the most oppressive regimes have nuclear, biological and/or chemical weapons, giving them the ability to murder on a massive scale.
Unlike in the past, in which the superpowers (the U.S., Soviet Union, China) wanted to survive in their own forms, in the past forty years, messianic totalitarian regimes have emerged that possess WMDs (and which, like Iran, are on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons), and believe that by exterminating people who don’t share their faith, they are doing the work of their god.
Those are the visible, well-known threats to freedom. Beneath the surface, though, is the force and trend that made those threats possible; namely, the fact that our “educational” institutions are:
- Not teaching the essential facts of history, or of the nature, requirements and preciousness of freedom
- Instilling in our children such an upside down conception of history that they emerge supporting the oppressive ideologies that caused the most mass murder in human history — namely socialism, fascism and totalitarianism
- Allowing our children to graduate from primary and secondary schools with little or no awareness of the mass, institutionalized slavery that exists in our world (including rape slavery) — or worse, with the belief that America invented slavery, instead of inheriting it from our ancestors
- Allowing massive financial donations from the most oppressive regimes in the world, and the emplacement of propagandists for their ideologies
- Adopting oppressive speech codes, and tolerating fascistic suppression of dissenting viewpoints, that are beginning to resemble the schools that are operated by oppressive regimes
Do you doubt these facts? Consider:
America spends more per-pupil than any nation in the world on our “educational” system. And what are the results, of our government-run, government-controlled system of public “education”? Take a look:
- 95% of American adults cannot correctly answer ten of the most basic questions about the U.S. Constitution.
- Less than 50% understand the basic purpose of the Constitution, or can identify even one of their rights under it. [6]-[10]
- 83% of college graduates and 68% of elected officials cannot identify the functional differences between the free market and totalitarianism [centralized planning]. [17]
- 80% of seniors at America’s most elite colleges and universities cannot pass a basic high school history test, yet all will be able to graduate without having taken a single history class of any kind. [11]
- — Most American adults today believe the U.S. Constitution contains Karl Marx’s core doctrine, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (or don’t know if it does or doesn’t). The number who believe it does (or don’t know) rose from 45% in 1987, to 69% in 2002. [1]
- — 50% of American adults cannot read above an 8th-grade level, and 25% cannot read above a 4th-grade level (functional illiteracy). [31]
- — Half the students at 4-year colleges, and 75% at community colleges, cannot perform complex but common literacy tasks, such as understanding the arguments in a newspaper editorial, or comparing the cost-per-ounce of food. [32]
- — Approximately one-third of freshmen at four-year colleges, and 42% of those at two-year colleges, had to take at least one remedial class in math, English or reading in 2007. [33] As of 2004, annual corporate spending on remedial writing literacy exceeded $3 billion. [34]
Sources, and more, at:
Additional research shows that elected politicians score even lower than most Americans on a test of basic civic knowledge. On a 2008 test [21] covering many of the elements cited above, while American adults averaged 49% correct answers, elected politicians (at all levels) averaged only 44%. Examples:
Only 32% can accurately describe the free enterprise system.
Nearly 50% do not know that only Congress can declare war.
Nearly 80% do not know that the Constitution prevents government from establishing an official religion.
More than 25% cannot name even one right contained in the First Amendment
http://www.americancivicliteracy.org/2008/summary_summary.html
From here: http://www.jonsutz.com/advocacy-media/liberty/the-obstacles/
As Jefferson said, it would be far preferable if our children graduated from our schools with no knowledge about anything, rather than the ideas and perceptions they are, because:
“The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows is nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
We are also not teaching our kids about, or even discussing among ourselves, the fact that mass slavery, repression of females, gays, lesbians and other vulnerable minorities still exist in our world — and that in some cases, money is deducted from free people’s paychecks in order to subsidize it. For example: