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There doesn't seem to be any scheme of human improvement that hasn't disappointed the hopes that once rode on it. Take free-trade, or free-love, or representative democracy, or compulsory education, or national self-determination, or dietary reform, or co-operation, or the separation of powers, or pacifism, or rational dress, or planning, or civil rights, or sky-scrapers, or birth-control, or socialism, or nuclear power, or naturism, or trade unionism, or suburbia, or feminism, or the rule of law: in its time every one of them has been celebrated as the herald of universal happiness, before getting tarnished by too much reality. All of them have failed to live up to our requirements. Is there still any hope for hope, I wonder; or is hopefulness another lost cause?
We seem to be stuck in a cycle of optimism and gloom. We carry on reaching for self-evident maxims and formulas to guide us in our righteousness and help us make the world a better place. But then we carry on being disappointed, feeling cheated by the world, and astonished over and over by the treachery of people in power. Things just go from bad to worse, and whatever is, is wrong. In fact we can feel quite disappointed when things do not turn out as badly as we hoped. But if the world is failing to live up to our expectations, is it the world that's always to blame?
And what about freethinking? It promises us truth, freedom, tolerance and democracy, so who could possibly be against it? Or is it just another of those hopes that will all end in tears?
It's not freethinking that is the problem, everyone has always done that as best they could.
It's free speech that is unpopular with those in power, as they fear that action may follow.
A key right is that we own the means by which we make our living, which, in many cases, will be land. Most of us aren't free because we need salaried work to survive and either rent our homes or incur debt in buying them.
Let us consider the distinct possibility that we live a more intense conditioned life. Bound by what, conditioned by whom?
Conditioned by a more an increasing overarching and dominating social need for individuals to be consumers with a narrow sense of individuality and humanity. Relooking at this again perhaps Marx was unervingly right. We are alienated from the purposes of our human self and identity. Buying is at the heart of towns, death and mental health hidden away. Buying what and for whom? Conditioned desires provoked from multiteired marketing. Can we now buy an article of clothing without a logo advertising something that we do not have a relationship with?
Politics - the same power in a different disguise - implementing establishment perspectives and values resold in different packages. Changed frequently so that we are given the false sense of having the power to change things.
Dissappointment arrises when we have the uncomfortable meeting with a chaotic future without the niceties of our conditioning as truths reveal themselves to us through the successive decades of our short alienated lives.
IMO freethinking is disappointing only when it fails to be tempered with adequate consideration of the ends for which the 'thought' began. All too often the means are mistaken for ends, that is rather than deciding on an end and finding the appropriate means society is prone to having a means and ignoring or improvising the ends.
By beginning from means hope becomes the last and worst evil to come out of pandoras box. And freethinking a placebo used to cure the dissatisfaction with the reality of the end acheivement.
Perhaps in this vein it is better to begin freethinking from assertaining just what our requirements / ends are and what means exist to acheive them. Striving for universal happiness is only ever not a false hope when the questions of, happiness with what and for whom are adressed?
In this vein before claims can be made about what freethinking promises the question needs to asked, what is the ends/purpose/goal etc of freethinking? In doing this perhaps the reality of freethinking can be faced before hope leaves the box...
Just found you - via 成人论坛 Collective. I now have a destination to inspire a long overdue auld think.
Could you unravel this question for me on Nationalism, which as an Irish person, I have mixed feelings about. Taking into account it's self serving nature, to what extent can nationalism be a force for progressive and enlightened political motivation?
If freethinking is done for an end, to achieve some goal, to make the world a better place, then, like all else done for that or other purposes, it will disappoint. I think history shows that we, humankind, will not make this world a better place, though we keep tweaking and keep hoping...
Freethinking however, is good in itself. As are truth, beauty, etc. Better to live and die truthfully, an insignificant dot in the great unknown everchanging possibly futureless universe, than believe a lie, live a lie...
In fact I personally believe in God.
'To enhance humanness, individually and collectively, without deliberate harm to anyone' seems a reasonable intention to live by. A new way of life may need a new means to carry it out, and there is another resource in language that has an enabling effect on perceptual transcendence.