Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 15 June 2011

Fear of Freedom

To understand society—sociology—we ought to understand the individual people who comprise it—psychology—but to understand individual people we have to understand the culture of the society that raises them. It is a feedback loop. Society—living socially—freed the individual person from fear, fear of predators, fear of starvation, fear of falling ill. They felt secure by being protected by society, but to be entitled to the protection of society—the voluntary protection of other human beings—each one had themselves to take on a duty of caring and sharing for others. Living socially gave people rights provided by society in exchange for each’s duty to contribute towards the common good—the commonwealth. No one then is free! People who live in a society cannot be free because of their duty towards the commonwealth.

Men are largely interdependent, and no man’s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way. “Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows”, the liberty of some must depend on the restraint of others.

I Berlin

Yet the constant demand in western society is for “freedom”, even though if everyone had it fully, no society could exist. Indeed, the freedom that we have in modern western countries means for many the opposite of security, it means a sense of powerlessness, isolation and anxiety. It suggests the loss of the security that was the evolutionary purpose of sociality, scarcely a good advertisement for western democracy and capitalism. People have evolved to enjoy a type of society that provides for them on the basis of reciprocity. Modern societies do not match up to it.

Human beings evolved in much smaller groups than modern nation states, or even cities, so there seems no way that the clock could be turned back to those times, unless it happens spontaneously with the utter break down of society, one of the possibilities foreseen by Marx as the outcome of class struggle. Alternatively, we seem to have a tendency to seek a paradoxical form of security in totalitarianism. Erich Fromm, the psychologist, thought our anxiety with freedom was what propelled us time and time again into the hands of the dictators. A command society reduces the uncertainties of personal freedom in large scale democracies, offering security in certainty and a stable place in the community for those willing to sacrifice some of their freedom in exchange.

The USA boasts of being the bastion of the “Free World”, but places like the former Soviet Union and China are not free. Yet in the USA, millions are full of angst at their prospects of getting employment or remaining employed, and of getting ill or not being able to afford their health insurance premiums, and of their children being improperly educated, and of the falling value of their savings—to mention but a few sources of their anxiety. In western societies, being free is often being free to worry about living. The USA is quite capable of alleviating most of these worries, which are largely the fault of the distribution of wealth being grossly skewed. Something is wrong when a few thousand people own most of the wealth and want even more. The resources available to the rest are then unevenly distributed between them, with a substantial number comfortably off, and the majority not at all well off, or poor. Most of these people are perpetually anxious, the only relief coming from trivial amusements aimed at temporarily distracting them from their worries.

The most important such distraction is religion. Christianity promises that this place of distress and vexation is only temporary itself—a vale of woe to be stoically endured for a lifetime, whereupon the faithful, obedient Christian will be rewarded with eternal bliss. It is a promise without any proof of its validity, for at the end of one’s life one shows every indication of being dead, for good and all—not gearing up for everlasting partying. Of course, the excuse is that the eternal life is spiritual, an unreal sphere quite removed from the material world we experience in our lives of worry and doubt. So far as we are concerned living in the real world, the spiritual world is imaginary, it betrays so few signs of existence that all we can deduce is its nonexistence, so quite how anyone can promise it is hard to understand.

Even so, people feel so oppressed by their worries and problems in this familiar real and material world that they are ready to accept these unverifiable promises that they will be forever free of all anxiety and suffering as long as they uncomplainingly put up with it now. And strictly speaking that is the truth of the promise! Death does relieve us of all the stress of life, but it is not because we are reborn into a wonderful spiritual life, it is because a dead brain is incapable of worrying, or doing anything else that it used to do in life! It has ceased to function, so death kills all one’s worries as well as every aspect of one’s personality. That leaves us in the perfect bliss of mental blankness we enjoyed before we were born. The everlasting life of bliss is an everlasting death of bliss.

This faith in religion, and its promises, is one solution to anguish or Kierkegaard’s existential angst. It is a throwback to earlier times when after about two million years of small group living, the human group started to grow in size to build tribes, cities and eventually nation states and empires. Greater size meant less certainty, less assurance, less personal attention and care, and more anxiety and reason for mistrust of others. In this phase of human development, religion separated from the culture of the human group, and God ceased to be simply a personification of it. Instead religion increasingly became an instrument of control, and God became a supernatural threat of punishment for disobedience. Those who benefit from this arrangement, those with powerful vested interests, are preserving for their own selfish reasons ancient habits we should long ago have cast aside.

Old myths cannot help us with our existential dread. No heavenly Father can help or punish us. But the idea of God as it arose, as the personification of society remains true. God is society, and it is to society that we must turn to end our anguish. Big society is what people tend not to like, quite naturally as we evolved for small group living, but big society has the resources, the knowledge and wealth to relieve our distress. A beast blocks the way. We must kill the beast—the power of the selfish, antisocial rich!

Curiously, Christianity was explaining all this, albeit in a manner that applied to people with the supernatural preconceptions of 2000 years ago. In practice, Christ knew and taught that the rich were the problem—they were not to enjoy the benefits of eternal life, because they had already, through their greed and exploitation of the poor, enjoyed benefits in the real material world that were denied to the poor. It was the poor who went to heaven! Lazarus, the poor man, covered in sores licked by dogs, had eternal bliss. Dives, the rich man, at whose gate Lazarus sat, could have helped him, but did not, so he ended up in hell fire, suffering eternal torment.

Yet in modern America, the rich act just like Dives, and still think—or pretend, for the sake of the ignorant—that they will get to God’s kingdom. “No chance”, said the rebel Christ. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” In short, it is impossible! Christ spelled out the morality that is instinctive in human beings—love of one’s neighbors. It is the morality that enables us to live together successfully, the morality of the Golden Rule that is essential to perpetuate the human group. But it has been transformed—again by those who benefit from a society divided into haves and have nots—into a labyrinth of superstition, ritual, and false morality. Rich people promote religion because it has been metamorphosed into a buttress of the status quo.

No progress can be made in resolving the fear of freedom unless people begin to appreciate that they are being deliberately kept confused, deliberately held back, by those with the power to do it—the rich with their control over communications and the political and judicial processes. No one was rich in the original human small group societies. Not that everyone was strictly equal—leaders were treated with honor by the rest, and granted some privileges because of the responsibilities that leadership brought, but even the privileged leaders would be attentive to the needs of someone in the group who was ill, injured or disabled. Sharing and caring was common to all.

From Freedom To Fascism

Abstract freedom has only become an important issue, something fought for and defended, in the few centuries leading up to the twentieth century. We evolved our sociality over 2 million years of group living. To live in the security of a human group, we each had the duty to contribute to that security by caring for and sharing with the others in the group. Failure to do so would result in punishment and even expulsion which would probably be fatal. Consequently, over that length of time, the ones who remained acceptable to the group were those whose instinct was to do our duty for the group.

In the later period of city, state and imperial stages of community development, our relationship with many of the people in the much larger group was more distant, less dutiful and less trusting. Religions and law were used to make people feel an obligation to follow group norms which need not only have been the instinctive ones, but also included ones that suited the ruling class of that group. It left us feeling empty and anxious because the security of the small ur-group of human evolution which followed instinctive morals was diluted with the growth of society and the growth of institutional morality and law. To be freed of such values and conventions, leaves us only with the residual anxiety from the loss of the security of the social group. It will not abate until we use our “freedom to” and get a replacement for the old order. Regrettably, one way in which people seek that security is in a strong state, an authoritarian system that replaces the old order by eliminating uncertainty by prescribing what to think and how to act. If this is to be done without recourse to authoritarianism, freedom and democracy have to be rethought.

The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was much concerned with freedom because, for more than a millennium before, most Europeans had effectively been slaves to the land owning nobility and Catholic Church. This social system—Feudalism—began to give way as the new class of merchants and and manufacturers slowly became more important, and a migration from country to town gradually gained momentum.

The rise of capital led to the Protestant Reformation. Personal freedom was a necessity if workers were to be free to go where the work was, and not be confined to the village and the land of a noble as effectively slaves. The absolute authority of the Catholic Church, which had survived the challenge of Catharism with bloody genocide, was opposed anew by Luther and Calvin in the Protestant Reformation, and the remaining political constraints of the Old Regime crumbled to the revolutions and the Enlightenment demanding a widening of freedom in every sense and for everyone.

Luther taught that anyone could have a personal relationship with God free of the regulation of a church. Calvin taught that everyone’s fate had to be predestined by an omniscient God, so anything that people tried to change their predestined fate was useless. But no one knew what God knew, namely what they had been predestined for! They could, though, get an idea by trying to live a holy life of hard work and frugality, traits thought indicative of righteousness. The ordinary person was therefore free of the constraints of the landlord, the village, the church, and yet urged to be hard working and upright—ideal workers for the growing capitalist system—the Protestant ethic.

The demand for freedom has defined the modern world in the west, so that now—although political and economic freedom are being curtailed at home—the US and its European allies have taken on the Captain America role of defenders of freedom throughout the world. External wars are fought nominally in defense of freedom for the unfree when in reality their purpose is purely imperialist—to enslave them and grab their resources, particularly oil—and when our own people are increasingly oppressed by our own governments who are ruling, not for the majority, but for the tiny minority of rich plutocrats.

So, negative freedom, with its accompanying existential angst, is not something anyone would prefer. They react against it, becoming authoritarian, wanting to control people to relieve their anxieties, while being willing to accept a higher control, which may be God, some demagogue or an authoritarian party, or becoming destructive, wanting to destroy whatever they can blame for their angst out of frustration, stress and anxiety, or simply becoming passive by agreeing with their peers and public opinion. Many prefer the sense of security they have lost with the growth of large society and big government.

Real battles for freedom are fought by those who are oppressed and seeking liberty, not by mountebanks who offer a prescription for it. Freedom cannot be imposed, for those whom are imposed upon are not free by definition. It is no coincidence that we are suppressing freedom at home and doing the same abroad, albeit in the name of freedom. Western plutocrats are using their vast wealth to buy professional politicians who pretend to represent the people. We are increasingly oppressed by these hypocritical politicians and their paymasters.

Does it mean the Enlightenment is dead? Perhaps. It depends on our response. We have to emulate our forebears and fight for the liberties being taken from us by those with a surfeit of privilege. Fighting for our own freedom is the way to spread freedom, not by the oxymoronic slogan of fighting to make someone else free. But fighting for our own freedom never ends. That may be the mistake we have made—being too smug about liberty. Plainly, it has not ended for we are realizing we have to fight for it again.

People have to be alert to the fact that powerful and rich people are never satisfied with partial control, and always use their power to get absolute control. Even though they pull the democratic and political strings, the pretence of universal freedom is for them a constraint they would prefer to be free of! They want a return to the Old Regime in which they will be aristocrats and everyone else will be slaves. Following their guru of the Chicago School, Leo Strauss, it is openly the agenda of the neoconservatives.

The general population are not on their guard. They are beguiled by the plutocratically controlled media and distracted into trivia, into believing transparent lies (myths to neocons), disdaining honesty and intelligent analysis, and favoring celebrity and the cult of personality. Freedom is easily given away. The Italians of 1920 and the Germans of 1933 prove it. Of course, our modern politicians are not fascists… are they? Fascism is an authoritarian elitism in which nationalism is a prominent uniting factor. Sounds pretty much like the USA today, and indeed several other western European countries that wish to be associated with the USA as allies in its “coalitions” to justify attacking other countries. And, in any case:

Freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-fascism, than in that of outright fascism.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1942

The American philosopher, John Dewey, earlier said much the same in Freedom and Culture (1939). What was true then is still true today, and more so. Yet, if freedom is so easily given away, do people really want it? Is freedom the absence of all the constraints that prevent them from doing just as they wish, or are some constraints necessary? Does something have to be added, to be present, in addition to the absence of restrictions, for us to appreciate freedom without fear?

One might argue that freedom is the unconstrained ability to pursue one’s self interest to wherever it might lead. But whereas most people might like the thought of becoming a ruler, or a rich member of the aristocracy, most of us realize it is impossible. The American Dream can only be a dream for all but about one in a million or so Americans, and it is, of course, getting harder as the wealth and power of the rich grows, and all the plum jobs are reserved for the sons of fat cats! What is more important for the average man and woman is to make sure they cannot be enslaved, or treated with disdain as an unimportant under class by those at the top of society. Unity is much more important than all the impossible carrots dangled before us.

Human beings are capable of rational thought but westerners are besotted by the idea that freedom, now it is here, is necessarily here to stay, that the forces of wickedness in our own countries have been defeated for good and all, so all the remaining dangers are external. It is among the myths meant to put us off guard. After World War II, no one would have imagined that the glorious victors, only a few decades later, would be acting just like the Nazis and the Knights of the Bushido were—invading other countries quite incapable of harming us, even if they wanted to.

The media spread the upper crust message that it is all right, we are spreading freedom—invading Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya is for their own good. We kill them for their own good? Well, we are told, we don’t kill them on purpose. They are “colateral” damage. They should not have stood in the way! We only want to kill the “bad guys”. Strange then that the dead people of Iraq are uncountable, that no one is willing to say how many people are killed as colateral damage in Afghanistan, and that we are bombing Libyans to stop Gaddafi from bombing them! And who is protesting? We are free here in the west, are we not? We are allowed to object to our leaders’ murdering people. Of course, but everyone agrees with the media line and that is what suits those who get richer through warfare.

The media also condition us to praise “our boys” as “heroes” for killing people in their own homes and fields, people thousands of miles away who have done nothing to us, and just want to reclaim what is theirs. It is fascism. We feel free to kill innocents abroad. Did our ancestors give their lives for us to be free to do this? No! We do not benefit. In reality, it makes a few thousand very rich people even richer. Well, the ones being killed are Moslems, an evil bunch, the media tell us. It was the argument used by Hitler against the Jews. Fascism! And implemented by democracies.

As Dewey and Fromm said, fascist acts can happen under the guise of antifascism, once we cease to guard our freedoms, and yield them up to a minority elite.

Instinct and Sociality

Freud thought human beings were essentially antisocial and egotistical, interacting with other people only as objects of their desires, and so needing to be socialized by the taming of their basic animal drives. Actually, human beings could never have evolved unless they had a deep instinct to be sociable. Modern psychological studies show we have evolved as social beings for whom interaction with other humans is essential for the emergence of our humanity. That social instinct is the root of human morality. Human nature is not essentially evil or bestial as Christians and Freud respectively taught. Only religious or social norms can, on this hypothesis, curb our deep desire to be evil, or at least animal. Freud had an elaborate hypothesis that the animal drives innate to us, when suppressed by society—our parents and guardians—sublimated into civilized behavior—the very behavior that is, in fact, innate in us. Of course, we are all helpless as children, we are unable to do much at all, but psychologists know that children have many positive responses from an early age—too early for them to have been taught.

These responses reflect our instincts, and in particular our moral instinct, our instinct to be sociable. In evolutionary terms, these instincts are not deep and need encouragement from our society, from our culture. Thus any developing tendency to antisocial behavior in children needs to be corrected, and disapproval is usually sufficient to do it, because we have the instinct to be social, and another to want to be approved by society, so together they make it easy for children to be social. It is not teaching something unknown, but showing children that their instinctive feelings are valued by society.

Though disapproval suffices, sometimes parents or guardians can be excessive, and become abusive, with the danger of harming the child causing neuroses and even psychoses. The Freudian approach, like the capitalist approach, sees other people only as a means to satisfy selfish desires. The capitalist sees people as customers, essentially to be exploited for profit, or as workers similarly to be exploited. To get money out of customers and to underpay workers are the objectives of the capitalist, and the more they can get, the more profitable they are.

For Freud, all this is human because we have base instincts towards our neighbors. But it is not so, and treating others thus is the cause of modern existential angst. People instinctively treat other people with compassion, but capitalist society—not instinct—tells them it is a sign of weakness. Modern capitalist culture contradicts our natural mentality, leaving us confused and stressed out. Our relationships with other people are merely a means to an end—the satisfaction of our greed and selfishness in modern society, but that is what is destructive. Society is quite the opposite of that. It requires what Christians call love. When culture opposes our natural instincts then what can emerge but anxiety? Capitalist society makes us neurotic!

The intense desire to work that constituted the Protestant Work ethic from the sixteenth century on, and that we are taught is normal for human behavior, did not exist before then. Work was necessary, but it was not noble. Today governments want to force people to work unnecessarily, and employers want them to work for as long as possible for as little in payment as they can get away with. Yet these governments and employers do not have enough work for everyone they think ought to work, and people, forced to work for almost nothing if they are to work at all, rightly object and react by opting to live on benefits, little as they are, and feel free to choose what they do with the time now available to them. Of course, if they accept society’s motivation, greed, and cannot satisfy it with the work available to them, some will turn to crime to satisfy their acquisitiveness. As they see governments giving greedy bankers $trillions to reward them for their irresponsibility, an ordinary criminal no doubt feels no great sinner by comparison.

These are symptoms of a failing society. If society expects everyone to work, then the work available should be divided fairly among those who are available to do it. When there are ten people available for every job and it requires the person hired to work 80 hours a week, then the ten could work 8 hours a week each instead. Meanwhile society could ensure that everyone had a basic wage for being in society. Those satisfied to live on the basic while learning how to write music, poems, blogs, paint pictures, make pots or furniture, or whatever else they decide to turn their lives to do, can do it. If they are able to sell the product of their work, then so much the better for them, and society. It is a free choice for everyone to work for others or to work for themselves. People are then free in a positive sense.

Society is essential too because we are now so socialized that we can no longer bear to be alone. Solitary confinement is a dreaded punishment for this very reason. The fear of being left alone as children is evidence of it. Loneliness in the modern world is rife, and is a feeling that can only assail social animals. Elderly people cut off by infirmity suffer it a lot, but younger people who have to move to a strange and unknown city, perhaps for work, feel it too. People are suspicious of strangers and do not always welcome incomers. But to feel isolated is as mentally damaging as starvation is physically.

Small scale society has gone forever, this side of an apocalypse, but villages, workplaces, church congregations, trades unions, and clubs and bars have preserved it within large scale society, not to mention the appropriately named “societies”, groups of people devoted to a particular interest. Such interests and beliefs serve to combat isolation and loneliness and keep people connected on a naturally human scale matching that of the early human groups.

The social history of man started with his emerging from a state of oneness with the natural world to an awareness of himself as an entity separate from surrounding nature and men. Yet this awareness remained very dim over long periods of history.

Erich Fromm

In these “long periods of history” each person remained much as they were before they had become conscious of themselves. They were more conscious of the importance to them of their social group than they were of themselves. They were more impressed by Nature—and society was to them a part of Nature—than they were of their individuality. The increasing awareness of oneself is called by psychologists “individuation”, and the process seemed to reach a tipping point around the Renaissance.

Individuation and “Freedom From”

The individual person from birth goes through a quite similar process of individuation as the early humans emerging into consciousness. The child begins as part of the mother, and, even after birth, remains tied to the mother for a long time. The mother of the individual is the parallel of the human group in evolutionary terms. Both mother and the group give the individual a sense of security and belonging, of having roots somewhere. Eventually ties with the mother are loosened and severed as the child becomes adult and leaves home. The personal security of the mother and immediate family go, but the security of the society remains to reassure the individuating person. If society itself were to malfunction or disappear, then the individual is left bereft of any help. They have returned to a state of solitary bestiality.

Part of the anguish of individuation is the separation of those familiar to you—the sense of loneliness. Most people have felt it if they ever left home as a child, or when they did for the first time as a young adult. It is homesickess. One has to face the world alone—a new and unpleasant experience. Yet, in the natural human small group, it does not happen. You never leave home, the whole group is home, although rites of passage may mean separation from one’s immediate family for a period. Such rites have the effect of artificially preparing the person for their new responsibilities as an adult.

Now, Fromm seemed to think that the ties of society restrict freedom, which indeed they plainly do, but the evolution of individuation by which these ties were severed were the advance of “freedom from”. Having escaped those ties, “freedom to” was then needed. What then was it? He called it the “spontaneous relationship of man and nature” which sounds like a reversion to the “brutal and short” state of nature, spontaneity requiring no thought or planning. But he went on to explain more fully that the relationship was one in which love and productive work integrate the total personality. Yet these are the objectives of society, of the human group. So Fromm seems to be suggesting a stuggle to escape the constraints of society into negative freedom (“freedom from”), only to wish that society or something equivalent should be reinstated in addition called positive freedom (“freedom to”). The curiosity is all the more because individuation itself leads to anxiety and insecurity, and that is because negative freedom is increasing separation from society. The consequent growing feeling of loss and isolation is desolating.

Fromm’s view of instincts seemed negative, except for those that were necessary like breathing and eating. He thought that instincts in higher animals, including especially humans, were disappearing. The distinction between negative and positive liberty was a measure of our evolution away from the base behavior of animal instincts towards our voluntary practice of good behavior. In the light of his Freudian understanding, he saw it as freedom from anyone’s feeling of control by their activities characterized by natural, albeit animal, instincts not yet socialized. Yet human society is just as necessary to a human being as is eating and breathing. If our social instincts were overcome, we would cease to be human, and could hardly survive as solitary beasts in permanent dire competition with each other. So, to say so boldly that human “existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable” must be wrong, for to be independent of society is to be in a solitary state and to be less than human. Sociality requires our social instincts which we cannot lose.

But Fromm is speaking of traditional freedom, or “freedom from”. He explained “freedom to” as being able to love and to help our fellows, implying that society is necessary for positive freedom, and negative freedom can never be sufficient. Negative freedom is appropriately named because, taken to its logical end, it must destroy us. Positive freedom amounts to choosing to emphasize our social purpose. It is acting out our socially oriented moral instincts—broadly Secular Christianity, the interpersonal morality taught and demonstrated in his life by Christ.

Fromm saw the story of the “fall of man” as a parable about humanity defying God—authority—to be free, to exercise his free will, for which God punishes him. Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is the first act of freedom, the first act of reason against blind conformity—against acting only as an unthinking automaton. Perhaps! But as Fromm himself points out, most humans showed little interest in freedom until around the sixteenth century, so it seems unlikely that a parable should be noting it 3000 years ago. Bearing in mind that God was, for early people, a personification of the benefits conferred by society, the fall of man can be seen more clearly as a warning against acting independently of the wishes of society. The ultimate sanction for it was expulsion, precisely what Adam and his clan suffered.

Having lost the original small group, humanity then has to struggle to try to regain it—to regain “Paradise”—so far without succeeding. Without the security of a stable society, humans feel naked and ashamed, free perhaps, but alone, powerless, and afraid. Such freedom is a curse. Humanity, personified as Adam, is free from the obligation to conform in Eden, a state of Paradise, but free of it, he is not free to govern himself, to be an individual. Humanity has swapped contentment for ambition.

From the state of original security, companionship, and easy living in Eden, mankind ended up with growing isolation and insecurity, incessant, unforgiving, individual labor, doubt about one’s purpose and the meaning of life, and lacking any sense of power, all for the sake of the presumed benefits of individuation. Such setbacks did not happen in original society, and the search for “freedom to” can only be to restore what we once had by developing society at a higher level to provide equivalent benefits to those of the ur-groups—solidarity with others, love and compassion towards others, spontaneous—that is instinctive—acts of kindness and creativity, and working willingly for the betterment of the commonwealth. It is a virtuous spiral upwards from small society to world society. The trouble is that immensely powerful people have a vested interest in stopping it.

Protestantism, Freedom and Public Opinion

The Protestant Reformation was an important step to freedom. The Catholic Church had replaced the old paternal gods that had stood for the primitive human group. It preserved and expressed the morals we humans have instinctively in our hearts, together with the same instinctive fears which it used to maintain submission and induce automaton compliance. The Protestant Reformation was the first successful challenge to the monolithic authority of the Church, which had been preserved for centuries, the Cathars being the most serious challenge it had faced hitherto—and had dealt with brutally. The Protestant Reformation turned out to be pretty brutal too, with warfare for decades in central Europe, but this time the Catholic Church could not suppress it.

So, people emerged able to choose Catholicism or Protestantism, and Protestantism offered the possibility of being totally free of any overweening moral authority—the possibility of using one’s own natural instinct to decide how one should treat others, without clerical coercion, and the bible as the only guide. A human being could be free. They could be “independent, self critical, and critical”, but, if they chose freedom, they were also more isolated, alone, and afraid. They needed no longer to be compliant, but the prospect of freedom meant greater self reliance and induced angst and confusion. Most avoided much of it by deciding to abide by the rules set by the new Protestant clergy who emphasized the bible, not just as a guide but as the source of obedience, whereas the Catholic Church had retained a lot of authority within the clergy via the pope, the tradition, and the Church divines.

Protestants were free to read their bibles and find their practical morality—God—for themselves, but by aligning themselves with one Protestant sect or another, most yielded their new moral freedom back to the new clergy. Now, five hundred years on, in the USA principally, the Protestant clergy are as corrupt and greedy as the Catholic clergy were in the Middle Ages, yet they have almost complete control over ignorant congregations whose claims to be Christian, and even moral, are marginal. And the elements of the bible these clergy choose to emphasize are never the moral teachings of the Christian incarnated God, but they are the manifest obfuscation and contradiction of them by the apostle Paul.

Paul’s own emphasis was on ritual, sacraments, and mysticism—a magical faith in the body of Christ, with practical morality, love, merely a derivative of faith. So, whereas one’s natural moral instincts resonate with the teaching of Christ, the power of Paul’s teaching is that of a magical charm or cloak, saving people from the insecurity that freedom had left them with, and therefore actually leaving them tied to, and dependent on, the immorality—particularly the greed and opportunism—of the Protestant clergy to keep replenishing the magic, and whose power, in the USA, is consequently astonishing.

Freedom from the Catholic Church left people free to say things that previously could not have been easily said. Protestants could not only worship as they wished, and choose their beliefs, they could express them by saying what they wanted. Western countries now, especially the USA, boast of their freedom of speech, but actually very few people reach their own conclusions to be able to speak freely! They adopt a position—that of a sect, a political party, a lobby group, or that of a newspaper or TV channel, and often many of these have broadly similar lines anyway, so the free person ends up spouting someone else’s propaganda without a self critical thought in their heads.

Again what they spout on about as freedom is nothing of the sort. They are just willing slaves—willing slaves of those with the wealth to manipulate them politically. These free people even contribute their dollars in donations to the causes espoused by those who aim to enslave them. The owners of the means of communication have replaced the authority of the medieval Catholic Church by their own propaganda, which brooks no contradiction because it is obviously so. The media declare what is public opinion, and this is it. Deemed common sense, no one has the faculties or courage to challenge it for fear of peer pressure, the dictatorship of the majority opinion.

Freedom is therefore absent. The ruling kleptocracy through its propaganda machine has built up the invisible restrictions of public opinion, something that J S Mill (Liberty) warned about in the mid nineteenth century. Those who wish to use, say, their freedom of speech find it hard to do because the majority walk away, shut them down, or perhaps even threaten them for being unpatriotic or unamerican, unchristian, antisemitic, Islamic, communist, socialist, even just liberal, or whatever seems appropriate. Only the brave are willing to risk such opprobrium, for long anyway. Most just join the triumphal jeering of the popular crowd.

It is symptomatic of the fear, the existential angst that “freedom from” puts people in, by removing from them the reliance they once could put upon others around them—their society. Few can see the importance of positive freedom, or indeed, that that is what they are missing. It necessarily tells them that they are not managing the freedom they have, and they have been conditioned to resent it, and they have, too, been conditioned that anything other than the extreme of negative freedom is socialism or communism, and they have been conditioned to hate and fear both words without any consideration of whether their idea of either is nuanced or crudely propagandistic, let alone the far more subtle concept of positive freedom. So, their cricket call is always for more freedom, meaning negative freedom, which leads them to less practical freedom because they are so hidebound by an oppressive public opinion that has been manufactured. The makers of these myths are the neoconservative owners of the opinion factories. To honest analysts they are liars.

How can rule by lies be acceptable to a Christian? It has been possible for long periods in the past, and it is still easy. David Hume (On the Principles of Government, 1741) wrote:

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.

Hume saw that rulers only had “opinion” on their side… besides force! As long as the rulers’ opinions held sway, no ruler need fear. When the persuasive power of propaganda failed, then force was their weapon. But western rulers largely profess Christianity, and people concerned with the fate of their souls surely could not be cynical in the way they ruled. They are, so one concludes the fate of their souls is not uppermost of their concerns! What though of the ruled? They are usually easily convinced by the public profession of Christianity that the ruler is sincere. Rarely are they.

Practical Christian Morality and Salvation

The modern American Protestant view of Christianity is that merely professing Christianity is sufficient for salvation. Anyone who declares themself to be a Christian is one—a believer—and Paul, the apostle, unlike Christ, the God, taught that belief was sufficient for salvation. We have seen, it is mysticism. Anyone could declare themselves to be a Christian, yet would not thereby be a believer, and even if they were, they would not meet the criteria of salvation, which were more than mere belief. Any Christian, self professed or otherwise, is only saved if God chooses to save them. They can be a Calvinist and believe that those who are saved are predestined to it, but they do not know themselves that they are among those chosen. Yet Pastors flatter their congregations by assuring them they are saved just by wishing it. Their aim is, of course, the same as that of Gipsy Rose Lee—the vulgar coinage that crosses their palms.

Christians are actually those who hold to the practical morality of Christ. Those who do not, are not Christian, and cannot be Christians until they repent sincerely, and determine thereafter to live morally. That means morally! Any blemish required a new repentance, again sincere, and a new commitment to Christ’s practical morals.

Christ left no reasonable doubt that rich people could not be Christians under any circumstances. Only those trying to dilute Christ’s stern morality tried to find ways of exempting the rich by scrutinizing the bible. That they should want to do it proves they have zero degrees of faith, for they think that by finding imagined exemptions they will be exempt! Anything might be possible for God, but when that same God appeared incarnate on earth, he gave no convincing indication that He was willing to exempt anyone who was rich. There are odd places that do not match his strictness elsewhere, but they are plainly later modifications inserted to make Christianity more attractive to rich Romans, for this prohibition of the rich would have left the clergy forever impoverished and they quickly found they did not have the faith for it. So, we can be sure that Christ meant what he said, and the opportunistic Hellenized Jewish and gentile bishops, having spread abroad in the trail of Paul and other Hellenized Jews, after Christ’s death, and now disciples of Paul’s Antichristianity, pedalled their ointment for the soul like all the other goëtae of the time.

What was Christ’s plain instruction to the rich young man to have Christian salvation? Providing that he loved God and his fellow humans, he had to give away his wealth to the poor! He could not part with his wealth, so he departed not saved. The point is surely clear. The rich are interested only in their money, and ultimately will do whatever is needed to get and keep it. Christ, the God of the Christians, knew it, and tried to tell people about it, but they were not willing to listen.

They still are not. Telling lies through their well paid media moguls is hardly going to look like a major crime to a rich Christian, but it is precisely the trouble that Christ foresaw. Lies are easy, but, when push comes to shove, they’ll kill for it! They send our armies abroad to do it to others, so it has to be extremely naïve to imagine that they will never do it at home. They already do, on a small scale! These rich capitalists are immoral, and they have conditioned many ordinary people into supporting their immorality through their control of propaganda, spread around as public opinion—unarguable common sense.

Love, Capitalism and the Over Rich

In any hierarchical society, culture is determined by those people who are most powerful, because they are in control. In our society, they control the media and therefore public opinion, but they also control candidates for office, mainly opportunists and sociopaths. No counter voice has the power to be heard, though the internet can provide a lot of background twitter. The carrot dangled before us, the American Dream, adds to the respect of the kleptocracy—everyone wants to join it, so it must be good. It isn’t! It will destroy society, if society does not take it into its control somehow, and, believe it or not, heavy taxation of the rich and a fairer system of distributing the benefits of social production are essential to it.

One basis of the Protestant Revolution was frugality. Even successful men accepted that it was not Christian to flaunt their riches, so they took to investing their unspent profits back into the business, thereby accumulating capital. Charles Dickens’s character, Scrooge, the miserly capitalist in his story, A Christmas Carol, illustrates the type. Scrooge had lost his humanity, his moral instinct to be sociable in his drive to accumulate. But Scrooge’s natural moral feelings bubbling their way into his dyspeptic dreams of anxiety eventually showed him what he was losing, or had almost lost, through his individualistic greed. The happy ending is that he reforms overnight and brings sociability and generosity back into his life and those of his own family and his employee.

Of course, it is a story. Few of them do change, and those that do, make no effort despite their wealth and power to change things permanently for the better. Handing out charity suffices for these few to ease their black consciences. They will pay to have poor people innoculated against disease, thereby condemning more of them to suffering, because the additional survivors of an early death still have no means of supporting themselves as adults. These do gooders among the capitalist class cannot face up to the fact that capitalism is the problem, not the solution.

It is love that shows that capitalism is totally wrong, and out of synchronization with humanity in general and the much vaunted western system of religion, Christianity. Christ urged us to love one another, quite rightly, because it is an essential part of our humanity. How can anyone exploit someone they love for a personal advantage? Only feigning love, and confidence tricksterism allows it.

Love here is, of course, not an attraction between sexes leading to procreation, nor the love of a mother for a child. It is care, compassion, concern, the ability to share pain and suffering, and the attendant desire to help to relieve it. It is kindness and mercy. It is the natural feeling that binds human groups together, that lets people feel comfortable and at ease in the company of others. Love, then, is not sloppy sentimentality, and it is not the phony piety of most Christians. It is practical regard and assistance for our fellow humans. You would find it hard to believe these days, yet it is the simple expression of our natural moral instinct to help each other, which modern society is doing its best to extinguish in favor of a strategy of “every one for themself”. In the mistaken belief that Darwinism is inevitably about some sort of mortal combat, an idea that distinguishes itself by being called “social Darwinism”.

The moral instinct in humans nevertheless evolved, and it is the instinct to love others. We have been able to compete with species that rivalled us for food and resources and often were stronger than us physically by acting together in co-operation, and that is the purpose of natural morality, what it upholds that has ensured the survival of human morality genes. The Christian incarnated God specified that people should love others as if each one of them was God. Not to do so was not to be saved. “Treating others as you would like them to treat you” did not preclude enterprise but the point of anyone’s enterprise was understood to be for the benefit of everyone, not mainly to enrich the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur benefitted along with everyone else in the group, but otherwise such people were rewarded by the admiration and respect group members showed to any benefactor or successful leader. They were regarded as “big men” in society.

The social instinct, once established, was then refined by selection, through human groups being willing to expel those among their number who acted selfishly and greedily, like the much admired modern capitalist. Those trying to take more than their fair share in the primitive small groups we evolved in or not pulling their weight in the duties incumbent upon members were considered as free riders and were thrown out, and sometimes perhaps killed. Either way, those who remained were richer in the genes for co-operation, and lighter in the genes for greed and selfishness. Note that all genes are selfish in the R Dawkins sense of having evolved to survive using the means they have, but the means of surviving, the strategies available, can differ diametrically. It does not have to mean direct personal competition. The human strategy is sociality—living in groups—driven by our genes for our social instinct, the same genes and instinct that give us our basic moral sense.

Capitalism goes against a social instinct by encouraging humans to compete among themselves as if they were solitary beasts. If it were to develop to the plenum of its logic, society would collapse, humanity would end. Capitalists love all right, but they only love themselves. Narcissistic people, according to Freud, withdraw their love from others so that they can concentrate on admiring and loving themselves. The individuation of love is antisocial, and ultimately destructive. So, ultimately capitalism must fail.

As Marx observed, it has at its heart a contradiction. When one man has a scheme whereby he can extract wealth from the rest of the group, the enterprise must eventually leave everyone except himself broke, or surrendered in perpetual servitude. That is what is happening today in western society. A tiny number of rich families own most of the wealth, and what remains is split unevenly among the rest. When people can no longer afford to spend, our economies go into recession and governments force people to spend by cutting savings rates so there is no advantage in keeping what little money they have. When savings have all been spent, people are forced to borrow, debt mounts up, and we end in a depression. Manufacturing output has to fall because no one can buy the goods, so manufacturers lay workers off. Then some of those who could afford something until now, are unemployed and cannot afford to spend. More are laid off. It is a vicious spiral downwards.

The only way out of it is a New Deal—governments have to give away money to get people spending again, thereby turning the downward spiral into a virtuous upward spiral. The obvious source of money to create this virtuous circle is the rich. They have a lot of idle money that can be used to put the unemployed to work, but a government must have the will to tax the rich. Naturally, the rich resist this idea, even though they stand to benefit the most when the economy recovers, so governments have to do it indirectly by deflating the currency—printing money—called euphemistically “quantitative easing”. The trouble these days is that a lot of money is invested in derivatives or junk bonds that are bought and sold accumulating bonuses for bankers while being of no or negligible real value in themselves. So a section of the managerial class are able to syphon off wealth despite the poor economic situation of everyone else.

The big question is why was the crisis allowed to happen in the first place. Had the rich been progressively taxed from the outset, and the tax take redistributed to the poor, it would have been spent, and the economy would not have fallen into depression. There is no reason why this procedure should not be used to manage the economy effectively. It worked excellently, in fact, for forty years post war, with redistribution of the excess wealth of the rich via taxes to the poor who consequently are never destitute and can spend to maintain a manufacturing capacity. Equally, the rich are not left with excess money that is useless to them and which is put in an endless conveyor belt of investments and reinvestments in electronic transactions around the world making only bankers, and those with financial interests richer via commissions and bonuses.

We imagine the rich are intelligent, and so must realize that it is not in their own interest to destabilize the system by impoverishing the customers they depend on. Of course, many do not care as long as they can make money somewhere else in the world—globalization. Others are indeed intelligent enough to see that instability can lose them everything, and that it is better for them to yield a little in the cause of stability, and they are willing to do it.

Unfortunately, though, many of the rich are not intelligent! Their entrepreneurial fathers, grandfathers, and greatgrandfathers no doubt were, and they set up the family enterprise and made the family money, but the regression to the mean—the law of rendomization that makes children’s intelligence tend towards the average, irrespective of their parents’ intelligence—ensures that intelligent grandparents will have grandchildren of much more average abilities. The scions of the clever people who created ancestral wealth are not necessarily clever themselves.

Indeed the managerial class consists of clever people employed by the wealthy to run their businesses for them, and they have realized long ago that they can play off the various shareholder interests against each other and pay themselves grand sums in the confusion between. That is what the bankers have been doing too. Managers are happy to let the loose change of the megarich flop past their computer screens as often as possible, as long as they can take a percentage each time it does, so clever top managers are also content with the status quo. It is money for old rope, and much easier than having to work, even at managing!

So financial managers can slice off the margins of the tide of wealth sloshing backwards and forwards, getting rich in the process and having no incentive for reform, and the majority of the rich are too blind and grasping to realize what is happening. They have untold wealth they simply cannot spend, but haven’t the gumption to be willing to yield up a portion of it for the sake of shoring up the intrinsically unstable capitalist, system which they depend upon, at least while they are alive.

Greg Philo, a UK academic, proposed that the UK’s economic crisis could be solved if a sufficiently large but still small proportion of the country’s über rich gave up just a fifth of their wealth. They would remain preposterously rich with the 80 percent left to them. The 20 percent would pay off the treasury’s deficit, thereby keeping the economy in balance. Philo even polled a representative sample of those who would be paying the bill, and a surprising number, albeit a minority, expressed their readiness to do it. The rest were shocked and appalled at the thought. Needless to say, the appalled minority of a tiny proportion of the country’s population are the ones that “democratic” governments pander to. They would see unemployment at 30 or 40 percent, and the National Guard turned against the people.

Fear, Culture and Conditioning

The almost universal fear that negative freedom has induced is reflected in the entertainment themes of American cinema and TV drama. Someone ordinary is always facing up to the challenge of some extraordinary, mysterious and usually evil power. The little man is naturally a good guy. Typically, the ending is reassuring—evil, despite its supernatural power, is defeated and the small ordinary guy succeeds. TV and film viewers are plain ordinary folk who naturally identify with the heroes. Viewers know the feeling the hero has, because most people feel that they too are up against something they do not comprehend, and feel helpless. The enemy may be hard to identify, and they feel powerless even though they are living in a democracy. In movies like this, the government often does not help, getting in the way when it tries to, and Joe and Jane Doe often feel that they are up against the government too.

The reason is that they have freedom of a sort, but it is freedom that makes them uneasy, which enslaves them and fills them with fear. It is all “freedom from” which isolates them with no “freedom to” which truly liberates them. “Freedom from” really means “freedom from” the ties and duties of a society, which sounds fine until you begin to realize that you have also been freed from many former benefits of society too, and it is the benefits that we are subtly missing. Those who are clever and ruthless in their treatment of their fellows now rise to the top, but most of us are not ruthless and many of us are not clever enough to fool ourselves that this is the way we want to live. We miss the security and, yes, love, we once enjoyed and instinctively expect still.

The American Dream turns out to be the American Nightmare. Psychopaths and sociopaths do not need love, but they have become our natural rulers! We are ruled by people who think differently from us. They might as well be scaly skinned reptoids—metaphorically they are. The movies offer the same empty reassurance as do the Christian priests and pastors—salvation is assured! Yet it remains curiously unreassuring.

There were prophets who saw it coming—Kafka, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, H G Wells. Alien invasions and catastrophic movies dramatize the psychological struggle we nearly all feel within. Governments and media are torn between the advantages of having a fearful population, and the need not to alert them to the real underlying problem. They compromise by maintaining a constant threat from outside—communism, then Islamic terrorists. The expenditure on the external wars that these threats require to seem authentic is considered as necessary, and the people are easily persuaded it is. All they are doing is converting tax dollars into war bucks for the fat cat military industrialists. Then stealing some poor countries’ oil resources to benefit the same rich plutocratic minority. Fat cats and fat cats’ sons are not dying in the wars. They get fatter and more disgusting. Jane and Joe’s sons die. They are as much value to their leaders as the “Gooks” and “Ragheads” they are being sent to kill.

All of this is hard to see for some because it is never presented the way it is. Faced with overwhelming force and fear, it seems sensible to trust a strong leader, then—too late—they realize the strong leader is not helping, but is exacerbating the problem—Bush did not help, nor Blair. Obama is not helping. A few decades back, Tricky Dicky did not, Hitler did not, Stalin might have helped to defeat Hitler, but could have done it better, and otherwise seemed a paranoid disaster. Totalitarianism is what emerges from the existential angst of modern people when the power of propaganda and public opinion cuts off necessary cures for it. The exposure of the psyche brought on by the insecurity of negative freedom leaves us open to fascism—the simple solution of a regulated society with people generally knowing their place in it.

It is not something that only happens abroad. The USA is already more than half fascist despite its democratic forms. Time was, not long ago, when civilized countries never started wars. Wars were started by countries intent on expansion for imperialist gain. The Nazis invaded other countries. So did the British in the Age of Empire Building. Most European countries did, mainly abroad in undeveloped regions like Asia and Africa. The USA today invades other countries in a big way. Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq did not invade the USA. It is acting like the fascists did in the last century. Previously it has done so too, in Vietnam and Korea, and under the Monroe Doctrine it has kept the Americas as its exclusive “sphere of influence”—only it could invade American countries, which it did often. And the ever anxious American supports their own governments that do it, backing their country right or wrong, even though they are suspicious of their governments, and rightly.

It is a popular and dangerous fallacy that democracy guarantees freedom, and that freedom must be a happy state. Negative freedom is what people understand by the single word “freedom”, yet it leads to anguish and the feeling of helplessness in many because nothing positive has replaced the assurance and security of a “strong” state and a “strong” leader. Positive liberty requires each of us to help in ruling ourselves—to feel that we are empowered and contributing to the common weal. Otherwise we are tempted into automatism—uncritical acceptance of the popular view, and that often leads to an uncritical acceptance of authoritarianism, the popular view having been manipulated and conditioned by our de facto rulers, the caste of megarich plutocrats via their control of the media of communciation.

One aspect of the degree of angst people suffer is the strength of the salvation industry in the USA, where there is no real political choice even to give an illusion of personal control over the nature of the government ruling us. The USA has gone farthest in wiping out political alternatives to blatantly unregulated capitalism. No one dare advocate socialism or even liberalism. The only options allowed by the dictatorship of popular opinion—choreographed of course by the media—is one of the political varieties of capitalism, all being neoliberal mixed with different intensities of fanaticism. Democracy gives Americans one choice of politico-economic outlook—neoliberal capitalism.

The illusion of choice is preserved by having two capitalist parties, Republicans and Democrats, and even they overlap in large measure—both favor freedom of the negative variety but denying freedom, in fact, to anyone who does not think freedom to exploit someone else economically weaker than yourself is a freedom worth having. So, faced with an alleged democracy that is false, but the weight of a highly conditioned public opinion, Americans are confused and frustrated. They often follow the outlandish lines of the radio talk jocks, and TV talk show demagogues. Very many Americans are simply too uneducated and uncritical to be able to see the distortions put across by these odious liars. They take their outrageous positions to be some sort of antiestablishment protest when they are four square behind the plutocratic caste. They enjoy their lively mendacious banter, but feel just as anxious having done so.

Round about here the salvation industry becomes important, these talk jocks being fond of Christian guests, rarely other than right wing authoritarian ones. “Jesus saves.” All Americans see it everywhere and many believe it. If they are anxious about their lives, then Christianity will save them when they are dead, and you are, of course, dead for far longer. All they have to do is conform to the American norm of support for the God given economic system, patriotism for God’s Chosen Country, and acceptance of God’s own religion, Christianity. It saves! Automaton conformity saves! Walking blindfold into fascism and slavery saves! The regular American is actively walking away from freedom while believing they are standing up for it… and God.

No one seems bold enough to wonder whether an eternity of death can really be some sort of everlasting life, or whether anything after death can replace a lost life, especially when it has been wasted conforming to false idols, and promises accepted without evidence. But even being slightly unconventional in such ideas in the USA is to be a serious oddball. To take a critical view is worse, to be unpatriotic is to be a commie or a Moslem, even an atheist—whatever suits the moment. Whether you like them or not, all of these are perfectly arguable positions for anyone to hold. They should not be dismissed as demonic. They should be argued and understood, not just ignored or villified out of ignorance and prejudice. That is what freedom and democracy are for, and how they work. The average Joe has been conditioned to be antidemocratic. Mention Islam or communism, or even the Democrats to some people and they react like Pavlov’s dogs, frothing at the mouth, but out of rage. They spout freedom while chopping it away root and branch with their intoleration.

Of course, the salvation industry claims to be “The Truth”, and people indoctrinated thus from childhood find it hard to challenge, even intelligent ones. Yet who has ever demonstrated this salvation Truth sufficiently well for anyone to accept without credulity? Individual people can have strange experiences that have been interpreted in more ignorant times than ours as manifestations of God. Not a few of those people we can recognize as having clear symptoms of insanity, and many of the rest were displaying various neurotic or psychotic symptoms that might have stopped short of insanity, but suggest they were not the full dime. Those who have had experiences of such “divine” manifestations while being reasonably sane, albeit a minority, are a fair proportion, but they do not uniformly agree on the explanations of their experience.

Those brought up as believers will gladly assign them to God, but others do not find the experiences supernatural at all, but psychological, or even physical. Scientists and many drug users have similar experiences when testing out drugs, whether officially or unofficially. Consuming chemicals can cause phenomena much like the experiences of mystics and divines in the past. A good number of them were probably taking substances, and others were certainly inducing odd psychological phenomena by excessive fasting, hyperventilation, and so on. Even fluctuating electromagnetic fields can induce “divine” mental phenomena. Nothing now can allow anyone to justly claim that any mental phenomenon is divine. It could easily be a migraine.

Yet believers still make the claim, and believe it of others. They are simply accepting someone else’s subjective experience as being as they imagine it to be, and that is merely a religious habit. The same people believe at all for no better reason that their parents of pastor persuaded them they should at some stage, often in their childhood. People accept tales like these merely because some respected figure assured them so. In every case, they were more than likely to have been lying innocently or subject to lies themselves.

Sociality, Objectivity and Obfuscation

In short, while mystical experiences happen not infrequently, the assignation of them to God are merely assumptions. Now even in the land of the free, it is not a valid assumption to take someone else’s mental experience as one that is personally meaningful. A subjective experience belongs only to the subject, who might be mad, intoxicated by drugs or simply having a dream at the edge of consciousness and mistaking it for reality. Communal living allows several people who are together to compare experiences while they are indulging in a common activity. Perhaps they are dropping acid, being hypnotized by a flashing light or carrying out a scientific experiment. As they are experiencing the same thing, they can compare notes, agree on what they experienced in common, and therefore accept what they could expect to happen when they do the same thing again, or, if they were to introduce someone new to the habit, what they would expect the novice to experience. The experience is no longer subjective. It is objectively true. As a group, we know what to expect having recorded what we actually experienced in common.

No solitary animal can know what this means, for objectivity is a social matter. It follows that the process of individuation, the extension of “freedom from”, which leads to increasing isolation of each individual, interferes with the ability of people to be objective. That, of course, suits the pedalling of subjective phenomena like supernaturalism and hinders the comprehension of science which requires objectivity. It is just what has happened in the USA, where ordinary Americans find it more and more difficult to understand science, so most prefer “The Truth” of subjective religion—mainly a crude distortion of Christianity. Actual Christianity, the free American has to reject because it promotes sociality through love of others and mutual help, the antitheses of misguided individuality, distrust if not dislike of others, and exploitation of the poor by the rich, and of the weak by the strong—the core values of capitalism.

Yet how can something be said to be true that is not evidently and objectively true, even if the evidence has to be sought out? We have seen that one person’s subjective impression ought not to convince anyone. That person could be mad at one extreme or just mistaken at the other. They could even be right, but the odds are against it, unless the experience can be reproduced, in which case there is a basis for investigation and a chance of establishing objective truth. Science makes this procedure into a formal method of investigation. The believer, on the other hand, has just to believe on no evidence, merely someone’s authority, usually parents or a clergyman. Religion can suit a society when it is not challenged by any alternative truth—an authoritarian society—but when there are, such as alternative religions, turmoil is inevitable because no method exists to establish which is true. All are arbitrary. Only science has a method for testing truth. Religion simply cannot stand up in a free society in which people are mutually supportive, and so able objectively to understand what truth is, and seek to verify it.

Once we get into extended societies like our modern ones rather than the original small groups, truth becomes a weapon. Some people in a society benefit from knowing it, but others benefit from concealing it. Plato knew this. Generally the ruling class know the truth, and the mob—the rest of society—are not meant to know it. It remains so. The neoconservatives, reading Plato through the eyes of Leo Strauss, made no bones about the fact that ordinary Americans—ordinary people anywhere—were to be fed lies through the media. Following Plato still, these lies they preferred to call myths. These myths, though, are not stories about Zeus and the Olympian gods. Myths about Yehouah, Yeshua and the characters of the Jewish scriptures served well enough, but the media myths were uniformly propaganda about how awful almost everyone in the world were compared with democratic Americans, so that foreigners could be mass murdered, whenever it suited rulers of the US, cheered on by the American public.

The mass media could create suitable myths and repeat them until public opinion had been sufficiently conditioned. The involvement of Iraq in the 9/11 atrocity is one such myth—believed by the majority of Americans and almost no one else in the world—which served the half witted Republican puppet, G W Bush, as the excuse for picking on Iraq, rather than Saudi Arabia where most of the criminal gang that committed the atrocity hailed from. Both Arab countries had what the US ruling elite wanted—oil—but the Saudi royal family and its oil barons were allies of the USA whereas Saddam of Iraq was a US backed dictator, disposable because he had outlived his usefulness.

The absurdity of the myths matter not. It was absurd that Saddam was believed an ally of Osama Bin Laden. The latest myth is that the US is supporting NATO in bombing Libya to save Libyan civilians! The US leadership have decided now that Libyans would rather be dead and free than alive and in bondage. People might decide for themselves that they would rather be dead than free, but it hardly makes sense that Christian Americans can make that decision for them. It does not matter. It serves as a myth. US public opinion will accept it. Twice Gaddafi has been willing to accept a cease fire accompanied by talks. That would immediately stop all killing of Libyan civilians whether by the dictator himself or by the allies saving them from him. The US led military alliance, NATO, has twice refused the cease fire offer. So it is the US that is perpetuating the killing and not the dictator. The automaton conformity of the US public does not permit simple truths to register, and, bar a few intelligent and critical enough to know, Americans are conditioned automatons. Hume is right—nothing is so easy as a ruler’s control of public opinion, and, conversely, nothing is so important to the public as being able critically to discern the truth.

Smoke and mirrors are popular methods used by the owners of the media to sow confusion among the populace. Issues are obfuscated by unnecessary complication of them when essentially they are simple. But the average person is not meant to grasp the simple reality, so smokescreens disguise it, perhaps op-ed pieces written by sycophantic academics glad to pander to the establishment view for a fee or the chance of a govvy job, but most in-house journalists are paid to do it on a regular basis. It is easier than working, with plenty of opportunity to get drunk. The aim of the obfuscation goes beyond just confusing people on some particular issue, it is meant to weight them down until they are resigned to their failure to understand, and then they will comply with the popular view publicized by the press. The more impatient ones will simply dismiss the media as uniformly useless and just give up attempting to inform themselves. They are still open to public opinion, but it will be indirect, and they will therefore have complied, or at least abandoned their original dissenting view.

Mirrors amount to the publication of a large number of competing and countervailing views to the true one. Christianity is a prime example. Getting hold of any book critical of Christianity is difficult unless you know where to look. Equally, knowing what Christianity is has become hard to discover, there are so many variants of it, very many of which essentially just have the form of Christianity with little of the moral content essential to it. The Protestant Reformation was a huge breakthrough from the old authoritarian Catholicism that refused to let anyone untrained as a priest read the bible. Mainly they couldn’t anyway. It was in Latin and only clergymen were taught Latin. The Protestants translated the bible into vernacular languages, and people could read them for themselves. Now, in the USA, most Christians have not read their bible at all, and a lot claim they do not need to! Their pastors have explained enough of it.

Maybe so, but they can hardly claim to be Christians when what God said and did does not concern them, though they are supposed to believe he appeared on earth as a man, Jesus. They can hold this belief because they believe what the confidence trickster called Paul said instead. Paul is not God, and even the Pauline Christians do not claim he is, but they prefer to believe what a liar and a boaster says, rather than the one whom their religion is named after. The ordinary believer is also overwhelmed by a vast corpus of religious work published every year. If they had cause to doubt some of it, they would not know where to go to find out. If they were to get close, they would still be faced by a fog because Christians have had a very long time to devise myths to dispose of criticisms of their primary myths. Most pastors, many of invented sects often invented by themselves, will not give honest answers. They will give their own personally advantageous take on whatever the question is.

Ultimately everyone needs a structured view of the world, a weltanschauung, and smoke and mirrors is intended to make it hard to find for anyone who wants to reject the ready made ones acceptable to public opinion. Many are, of course, discredited in advance by the media and the politicos, so will not be considered out of prejudice. Trivialization is another method of confusion. Since the serious news is too hard for Joe and Jane to understand, they are fed trivia about celebrities, “reality” shows, scandal and fads to distract them from the issues that should be far more important to them.

People are easily manipulated but think they are not. They think they are free but have become automatons tied to the desires of about one percent of the population—the vastly rich. The illusion fools them into thinking they decide their own fate democratically, yet many feel isolated among a population of millions, and anxious that things are not what they seem or should be. However they vote, nothing much changes, insecurity worsens, wars keep coming, and mothers’ sons keep dying in them, the American Dream continues to recede. Yet few people have the courage to question the basic assumptions of capitalist society.

The conservatives always want a bonfire of regulations when it always has the opposite of its expected effect—hidden capitalist enterprise is not unleashed, but clever operators channel other people’s dollars into their own bank accounts. It just happened again, with the near collapse of the system, but the siren call continues… “deregulate… deregulate…”. As long as the system does not collapse, and the treasury bails out the smart operators, they have grabbed a load more of the national pot! $Trillions more! The richest people in society take the money, and the poorest pay their tax dollars to refill the empty exchequer and lose their jobs to save on outgoings. Why would Joe and Jane want to support deregulation? It always costs them, and the plutocratic class always finish up richer. But conforming automatons conform!

Positive Freedom and the Moral Teaching of Christ

Now, the man whom Christians call God came out, taught and acted in their founding myth for a period of around three years on earth before being tortured to death. Under the influence of a man who was merely a man, the deeds and words of the Christian God were sidelined, and his cruel death magnified from an ethical historical event into a mystical, salvific one. Most Christians will say now that by dying on the cross, Christ saved everyone willing to believe the myth. Being saved means not dying, whereas not being saved meant, for most believers, the unbeliever would permanently be being burnt short of death in a hot fire. To be saved, the Christian need not do anything other than believe. Being a perfect human being but not believing was not enough for salvation, whereas believing but living the life of an utter blackguard would see anyone saved. Few Christians find it in the least difficult to accept this, even though Christ—God as a man—told them God loved every one. Few think it at all contradictory that God loved us all, but could condemn most of us to being tortured forever. Moreover they can effortlessly believe that God wanted nothing more from them than to profess their belief that Christ had died to absolve them from the consequences of their sins.

It would be perverse of a Christian today to wonder what the point of Christ’s three years of good deeds and moral teaching were for when none of it is needed for salvation. We saw that modern US Christians cannot see the point of Christ’s life, and show no interest in wanting to know it like their real god, Paul. This Paul, the self styled apostle to the gentiles, knew nothing much about the life of Christ, and was not interested beyond the crucifixion and resurrection. It is his invention that belief is all that is necessary and sufficient for salvation. He devised the automaton conformist’s lazy route to heaven. The modern pastor might add a couple of requirements of his own, like appearing regularly at church to hear the propaganda and to leave a few bucks in the collection. Morally you could now be as wicked as you liked because you had already done all that was required—you had said you were a Christian, paid your subs, fulfilled the requirements. In particular, you could be a capitalist, exploit the poor and get rich, and you would be no less saved for having done so.

Christ, however, whose words are recorded with inerrant accuracy in the bible, according to many Christians, and who was God, they believe, had far stricter criteria of who would be saved and who would not. If belief was to be enough, it was not merely belief that “Jesus Saves”. The belief had to be in Jesus himself, as God, and therefore in all that he said and did as God incarnated on earth. Unless that is the case, the life and teaching of God incarnate is indeed meaningless, and that is absurd. Belief in God cannot include the belief that He is an idiot. God appears on earth for over thirty years man and boy, of which in the last three He is actively teaching and demonstrating what He means to be a Christian, yet it was all purposeless. Christians have to believe that God is an idiot to believe this. None of them can see that Paul has hijacked Christ’s teaching and made it into an eastern mystery religion. Christ was teaching a strict morality. He was not a lucky charm. To be a Christian, to believe in Christ’s teaching, you have to believe what Christ taught and did, and practice it!

The crux of Christ’s teaching was when he explained to assembled disciples that if any one mistreated him or refused to help him when he was in distress, then they would be discarded at Judgement Day, as weeds were from the corn. In short, they would not be saved! They were all relieved that no one among them had ever mistreated him or refused to help him, and protested this to him. Their relief was short lived, for Jesus said, if they had mistreated anyone, or refused to help anyone, then they had refused to help him! And he, Christians believe, was God!

God had appeared as a man, so God could appear as any man. If they mistreated or withheld help from anyone, they could not know it was not God they were treating badly. The whole point of Christ’s teaching is that everyone on earth has to be treated as if they were God. Christians are to love God, and their neighbor as themselves. To fail to do so meant rejection from God’s kingdom. That is why, as Christ said himself, the way to heaven is narrow, but the way to hell is broad. There is nothing easy about being a Christian, so all modern Christians following the false teaching of Paul, can be sure they are not saved at all. They have been misled. In seeking an easy path, they have missed their footing all together and been saved by the Devil.

Everyone has to do something to be saved by God. Mere belief means nothing unless it is demonstrated in deeds. That is the point of Christ’s life described in the gospels. Christians have to love one another. The life of Christ showed what was meant. He helped people, he ministered to their needs. He told the parable of the Good Samaritan—again the same message—the good man is the one who helps! These are the things Christians have to do to be saved. Faith has to be faith in what Christ—God—said, not faith in what Paul said. They are quite different things.

The relationship of this with freedom is that the man Christians call God—and it does not matter who he was or even whether he lived or is a myth, for it is the moral system described that matters—was explaining what positive freedom was many centuries before Erich Fromm invented the term. Christ was explaining what we now know to be a moral instinct essential to us if we are to remain human—we have to be love each other, to be kind and compassionate and helpful to our fellow human beings, even our enemies. We have evolved to live in the company of others, and for the company of others to be tolerable, we have to be able to trust them to have our interests at heart, just as we have theirs. We can only be free in a caring society—a society where we can rely on others because we love them and they love us.

Love? Yes, but not romantic love, sloppy sentimental love, necessary as it is, but lovingkindness, what Christ will have called hesed, the willingness to help others and not to harm them that Christ identified with loving God—and each one of us is God to be loved. Christ was God in human form, and what God did once he can do many times, perhaps every time—for God everything is possible! Christians are fond of saying God is immanent in everything, and so he is in all us humans. Every human who dies might be God, like Christ on the cross, and the point of the crucifixion then is that God is directly monitoring what happens to us all, and making notes in everyone’s “Book of Life”, according to Revelation. Everyone is a son of God, and everyone responsible for a human death is recorded, even when the responsibility is indirect like Caiaphas and the Jewish Priests who considered it expedient that a man should die, and betrayed Christ to torture in the Christian myth.

Few Christians batted an eyelid when Osama Bin Laden was murdered, and many rejoiced. Osama might have been God. “Nonsense, God could not have appeared as such a wicked man,” Christians may retort. Well, they always know God’s mind, it seems, but they still do not do what He instructed them to do in the gospels. And wasn’t Christ executed instead of Barabbas, a robber? Is any Christian sure that the man who was killed as Osama actually was Osama? Maybe this Osama was like Christ, someone killed instead of who was meant to be. The message of the crucifixion is that torturing and killing human beings is wrong. It is as bad as killing God. No believer can be sure that the man whose death they’ve approved is not a Christ—an innocent man, killed in error.

Conclusion

Erich Fromm praised the modern democracy of developed nations, for securing a fair degree of negative freedom, but emphasized that positive freedom was still absent, and was needed. Negative freedom can only be of any value when we can do something positive with it. Positive freedom equates with our evolutionary morality and with the Christian morality as taught by the Christian God, Christ, Himself, if the Christian gospels are true historically or morally. Without positive freedom, the negative type reverts inevitably to an authoritarian rule by a plutocratic elite—fascism—the opposite of democracy.

US democracy is often praised as a model, not least by Americans, but perhaps the first independent analysis of the remarkable work of the Founding Fathers had this prescient warning:

It is vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power. This rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840)

Today, thinking and behavior in the USA are dominated by ideas propagated by the media, mainly owned by very wealthy people who use them to benefit themselves, and thereby the whole of the wealthy class, a small plutocratic group whose interests are uniform. Advertising, again owned by the rich, is another way of conditioning people. To become free as individuals is not to be conditioned in our behaviour, but to think our own thoughts, to express what we truly feel, and act according to our moral instincts by doing what instinctively we feel will makes a happy community. Given that freedom from the propaganda we are fed on, we shall have freedom to respond naturally to our fellow human beings—to be truly in touch with the needs of those with whom we share the world—in Christian terms, our neighbors, even our enemies. This real social democracy cannot be achieved until we escape the propaganda of those who aim to control us.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History