FREEDOM

"Freedom is not a philosophy, nor is it even an idea. It is a movement of consciousness that leads us, at certain moments, to utter one of two monosyllables: Yes or Nor. In their brevity, lasting but an instant, like a flash of lightning, the contradictory character of human nature stands revealed."

Octavio Paz

The Other Voice

 

"Freedom is not an idol, or an end, but a prerequisite condition of human worth. Man needs a margin to move about in and try himself out and show what he is worth and attract grace."

-Charles Peguy

 

"Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it."

-Pericles

 

"No man is free who cannot command himself."

-Pythagoras

 

"An education for freedom (and for the love and intelligence which are at once the conditions and result of freedom) must be, among other things, an education in the proper use of language."

-Aldous Huxley

Brave New World Revisited

 

"There is no freedom either in civil or ecclesiastical (affairs), but where the liberty of the press is maintained."

-Matthew Tindal

 

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."

-Noam Chomsky

 

"Without Freedom of Thought, there can no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as Publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech...."

-Ben Franklin   1772

 

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be nor more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power; would be justified in silencing mankind."

-John Stuart Mill

 

 

"It seems an odd way to structure a free society: most people have little or no authority over what they do five days a week for forty-five years. Doesn't sound much like "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Sounds like a nation of drones."

-Michael Ventura

 

"If freedom had been the happy, simple, relaxed state of ordinary humanity, man would have everywhere been free-whereas through most of time and space he has been in chains. Do not let us make any mistake about this. The natural government of man is servitude. tyranny is the normal pattern of government."

-Adlai E. Stevenson

 

"Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom."

W.H.. Auden

 

"To be freed from the belief that there is no freedom

is indeed to be free."

-Martin Buber

 

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."

Albert Einstein

 

"We gain our freedom when we attain our truest nature. The man who is an artist finds his artistic freedom when he finds his ideals of art. Then is he freed from laborious attempts at imitation, from the goading of popular approbation."

Rabindranath Tagore

 

"Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close

to freedom. "

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain

 

"….I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale; it is much stupidity….I need not say that, in real sound stupidity, the English are unrivaled….In fact, what we opprobriously call stupidity, though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature’s favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion."

Walter Bagehot

"Letters on the French Coup d’ Etat,III in Literary Studies

 

 

"The cost of a free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure those purposes which satisfy enlightened reason."

Alfred North Whitehead

 

"Man's freedom is never in being saved troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element of joy."

-Ranbindranath Tagore

 

"Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

William Pitt

 

"A Christian man is the most free lord of all and subject to none."

Martin Luther

 

   Luther took literally these words of Saint Paul's letter to the Romans: "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are established by God. Whosoever resists the power, resists the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

 

 

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

James Madison

 

"If you make a living, if you earn your own money, you’re free-however free one can be on this planet."

Theodore White

 

"What I care about most is the freedom of man, the liberation of the individual man from the network of moral and social convention in which he believes, or rather in which he thinks he believes, and smaller, sometimes even worse than he really is."

Fedrico Fellini

 

"Freedom of mind requires not only , or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."

Allan Bloom

 

"It is by the goodness of God that we have in our country three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either."

Mark Twain

 

"All eyes are opened or opening to  the rights of man….the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God."

Thomas Jefferson 1826

 

"The opinion’s of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction…."

Thomas Jefferson

 

"Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom."

Alexis De Tocqueville

 

"The beginning and end of all philosophy is Freedom."

Schilling 1745

 

"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."

-Milton Friedman

 

"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."

-Douglas MacArthur

 

"The monster fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted."

-Voltaire

 

"For we are free, if we are ready to pay the price of freedom, which will always be personal sacrifice. A free man is a courageous man, not a man who obtained (from whom?) three or four or a hundred and one freedoms. You hear "X is a free spirit." From whom has he his freedom? Not from the State, nor revolution, not from the Soviets, nor from democracy, and certainly not from experts. It springs from his vision alone, and from his struggle to realize his vision. Lenin under Czarism was more free than a member of the Communist Party under Stalin. And George Washington was freer than the American citizen who flicks the dial of his radio. They were fighting and we? We shall not be free, even in peace, unless we continue the fight."

Denis de Rougemont

The Last Trump

 

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men (and women) of zeal-well meaning but without understanding."

Justice Louis Brandies

 

"Far from being in any way scientific, psychological-conditioning programs are often fundamentally anti-intellectual. They enshrine "feelings," not analysis; the opinions of inexperienced peers, not facts: they induce psychological acceptance of fashionable attitudes rather than teach logical procedures for analyzing assertions, or cannons of evidence for scrutinizing claims. In addition to displacing intellectual courses from the curriculum, brainwashing, programs actively promote anti-intellectual ways of dealing with the realities of life."

Thomas Sowell

Inside American Education

 

Freedom of Speech

Freedom of religion

Freedom from want

Freedom from fear

(announced by Franklin D. Roosevelt 1942 State of the Union Speech)

"….There are not four freedoms. There is only freedom, or none. I shall prove it by a parable.

I know of some men who in fact do enjoy the above-mentioned four freedoms. They can say anything they want to their neighbors. 2. They freely enjoy the comforts of their chosen religion. 3. They don’t have to worry about their subsistence. 4. They are effectively protected against any dangers from the outside. They are the American Prison inmates."

Denis de Rougemont

The Last Trump

 

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst."

Albert Camus

 

"Freedom is a great word. Under the banner of industrial freedom the most predatory wars have been waged, and under the banner of freedom to work, the workers have been plundered."

V.I. Lenin

 

"Freedom of thought is the greatest triumph over tyranny that brave men have ever won....we owe to their (Quaker) heroic devotion the most priceless of our treasures, our perfect liberty of thought and speech, and all who lover our country's freedom may well reverence the memory of those martyred Quakers by whose death and agony the battle of New England has been won."

Brook Adams

 

"The denizen of the technological state of the future will have everything his heart ever desired, except, of course, his freedom."

John Wilkinson

 

"At the end of a murderous century, let’s curse the enemies of the individual. If, in order to do so, we must fall back on the vocabulary of abuse, so be it.

This is what I learned from twentieth-century history: only dumb ideas get recycled. Every social reformer longs to be the brains of an enlightened, soul-reforming penitentiary. Everyone who is vain, dull, peevish, and sexually frustrated dreams of legislating his impotence. The image of a billion people dressed in Mao’s uniforms and shouting from his little red book continues to be the secret hope of new visionaries."

Charles Simic

Orphan Factory

 

"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."

Salamon Rushdie

 

"The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us-is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority….

The majority has might –unfortunately-but right it is not. Right-are I and a few others. The minority is always right…..

I have a mind to make a revolution against the lie that the majority is in the possession of truth. What kind of truths are those around which the majority usually gathers? They are truths that have become so old that they are on the way toward becoming shakey. But once a truth has become that old, it is also on the way toward becoming a lie…..A normally constituted truth lives, let us say, as a rule seventeen or eighteen years; at most twenty, Nevertheless it is only at that stage that the majority makes their acquaintance….All these majority truths….are rather like rancid, spoiled…hams. And that is the source of the moral scurvy that rages all around us….."

Ibsen

An Enemy of the People

 

"Freedom! To fill people’s mailboxes, eyes, ears and brains with commercial rubbish against their will, television programs that are impossible to watch with a sense of coherence. Freedom! To force information of people, taking no account of their right not to accept it or their right to peace of mind. Freedom! To spit in the eyes and souls of passerby with advertisements. Freedom! For publishers and film producers to poison the younger generation with corrupting filth. Freedom! For adolescents of fourteen to eighteen to immerse themselves in idleness and pleasure instead of intensive study and spiritual growth…..Freedom! To divulge the secrets of one’s country for personal political gain."

Solzhenitsyn

 

 

"Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are entrenched on, die on the first inch of your territory."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

"The free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought."

Leon Blum

 

"Ordinary people! Merely think how they shall spend their time; a man of talent tries to use it."

Arthur Schopenhauer

 

"It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move in one’s inward journey into new realms, that to stand defiantly for outer freedom."

Rollo May

 

"Freedom lies in being bold."

Robert Frost

 

"Freedom, especially a woman’s freedom, is a conquest to be made, not a gift to be received. It isn’t granted. It must be taken."

Federico Fellini

 

"When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other."

Eric Hoffer

 

 

"What does liberation mean? If I free someone in the desert and he cannot go anywhere, what is his freedom worth?"

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

"Compulsion is being trapped in a known psychic reality, a dead-end space. Freedom is in the unknown. If you believe there is an unknown everywhere, in your own body, in your relationships with other people, in political institutions, in the universe, then you have maximum freedom. If you can examine old beliefs and realize they are limits to be overcome and can also realize you don’t have to have a belief about something you don’t yet know anything about, your are free."

John C. Lilly

 

 

"…..The State

Loathes freedom like the very plague,

But loves equality all too well.

 

Henrik Ibsen

 

"The buzzard must be a buzzard and the bee must be a bee-this is

fate, but man is free to choose which he will imitate.

W.J. Bryant

 

"When true freedom covers the earth, we shall see the end of tyranny-politically, religiously and economically. I am not here referring to modern democracy as a condition which meets the needs, for democracy is at present a philosophy of wishful thinking, and an unachieved ideal I refer to that period which will surely come, in which an enlightened people will rule; these people will not tolerate authoritarianism in any political system; they will not accept or permit the rule of any body of men who undertake to tell them what they must believe in order to be saved, or what government they must accept. When the people are told the truth, and when they can freely judge and decide for themselves, we shall then see a much better world."

Alice Bailey

Ponder This

 

"And what about all these much-vaunted advocates of freedom? Is the work of liberation only to be allowed in the field of politics? ….Is it not above all the spirit that needs liberation? Serfs’ souls like ours cannot even enjoy the freedoms we already have.

Henrik Ibsen

 

 

"I'm beginning to see that I am only going to be free when I'm fully involved in the world. A strange insight for me."

Ram Das/Richard Alpert

 

 

"In our time, as in times before, creep on the insidious forces that, producing inequality, destroy Liberty. On the horizon the clouds begin to lower. Liberty calls to us again. We must follow her further; we must trust her fully. Either we must wholly accept her or she will not stay. It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life; they must stand on equal terms with reference to the bounty of nature. Either this, or Liberty withdraws her light! Either this, or darkness comes on, and the very forces that progress has evolved turn to powers that work destruction. This is the universal law. This is the lesson of the centuries. Unless its foundations be laid in justice the social structure cannot stand.

Henry George

 

 

"True freedom is then inseparable from the inner strength which can assume the common burden of evil which weighs both on one- self and one's adversary. False freedom is only a manifestation of the weakness that cannot bear even one's own evil until it is projected onto the other and seen as exclusively his. The highest form of spiritual freedom is, as Gandhi believed, to be sought in the strength of heart which is capable of liberating the oppressed and the oppressor together. "

Thomas Merton

 

 

"We have all-rulers and ruled-been living so long in a stifling, un-natural atmosphere that we might well feel in the beginning that we have lost the lungs for breathing the invigorating ozone of freedom. "

Gandhi

 

"No government on earth can make men who have realized freedom in their hearts salute against their will. :

Gandhi

 

 

"If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then I'll gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up. "

E.B. White

 

 

"I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long-standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose. "

E.B. White (July 1940)

 

 

"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. "

II Corinthians 2:17

 

 

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. "

G.B. Shaw

 

 

"There can be no real freedom or democracy until the men who do the work in a business also control its management."

Bertrand Russell

 

 

"Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail

the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder

That the clanging of the church bells blew far into the breeze

Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder

Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind'

Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind

An' the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time

An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing."

 

Bob Dylan

Chimes of Freedom

c M. Witmark & Sons 1964

 

 

"Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject  to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity."

Gandhi

 

 

"To the Greeks freedom was then understood to consist of status, personal inviolability, freedom of economic activity, right of unrestricted movement," and slavery consequently was the lack of these four attributes."

Hannah Arendt

 

 

A man obsessed is no longer free." No man who is divided can be free, and a man who cannot make the free act of choosing the object of his love is condemned to this division. "

Berdyaev

 

 

"Personal liberty-that is to say, the liberty to move about- is everywhere conceded, while of political and legal inequality there are in the United States no vestiges, and in the most backward civilized countries but few. But the great cause of inequality remains, and is manifesting itself in the unequal distribution of wealth. The essence of slavery is that it takes from the laborer all he produces save enough to support an animal existence, and to this minimum the wages of free labor, under existing conditions, unmistakably tend. Whatever be the increase of productive power, rent steadily tends to swallow up the gain, and more than the gain. Thus the condition of the masses in every civilized country is, or is tending to become, that of virtual slavery under the forms of freedom. And it is probably that of all kinds of slavery this is the most cruel and relentless. For the laborer is robbed of the produce of his labor and compelled to toil for a mere subsistence; but his taskmasters, instead of human beings, assume the form of imperious necessities. Those to whom his labor is rendered and from whom his wages are received are often driven in their own turn-contact between the laborers and the ultimate beneficiaries of their labor is sundered, and individuality is lost. The direct responsibility of master to slave, a responsibility which exercises a softening influence upon the great majority of men, does not arise; it is not one human being who seems to drive another to unremitting and ill-requited toil, but the "the inevitable laws of supply and demand," for which no one is in particular is responsible The maxims of Cato the Censor-maxims which were regarded with abhorrence even in an age of cruelty and universal slaveholding- that after as much work as possible is obtained from a slave he should be turned out to die, become the common rule; and even the selfish interest which prompts the master to look after the comfort and well-being of the slave is lost. Labor has become a commodity, and the laborers a machine. There are no masters and slaves, no owners and owned, but only buyers and sellers. The haggling of the market takes the place of every other sentiment. "

Henry George

Progress & Poverty 1888

 

"The libertarian creed....offers the fulfillment of the best of the American past along with the promise of a far better future. Even more than conservatives, who are often attached to the monarchical tradition of a happily obsolete European past, libertarians are squarely in the great classical liberal tradition that built the United States and bestowed on us the American heritage of individual liberty, a peaceful foreign policy, minimal government, a free-market economy. Libertarians are the only genuine current heirs of Jefferson, Paine, Jackson and the abolitionists.

   Strands and remnants of libertarian doctrines are, indeed , all around us, in large parts of our glorious past and in values and ideas in the confused present. But only libertarianism takes these strands and remnants and integrates them into a mighty, logical, and consistent system. The enormous success of Karl Marx and Marxism has been due not to the validity of his ideas-all of which, indeed, are fallacious-but to the fact that he dared to weave socialist theory into a mighty system. Liberty cannot succeed without an equivalent and contrasting systematic theory; and until the last few years, despite our great heritage of economic and political thought and practice, we have not had a fully integrated and consistent theory of liberty. We now have that systematic theory; we come, fully armed with our knowledge, prepared to bring our message and to capture the imagination of all groups and strands in the population. All other theories and systems have clearly failed: socialism is in retreat everywhere, and notably in Eastern Europe; liberalism has bogged us down in a host of insoluble problems; conservatism has nothing to offer but sterile defense of the status quo. Liberty has never been fully tried in the modern world; libertarians now propose to fulfill the American dream and the world dream of liberty and prosperity for all mankind."

Murray N. Rothbard

For a New Liberty

 

"Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so long as we recognize private property in land. Until that is abolished, Declarations of Independence and Acts of Emancipation are in vain."

Henry George 1879

 

 

"A person dependent on somebody else for everything from potatoes to opinions may declare that he is a free man, and his government may issue a certificate granting him his freedom, but he will not be free. He is that variety of specialist known as a consumer, which means that he is the abject dependent of producers. How can he be free who can do nothing for himself? What is the First Amendment to him whose mouth is stuck to the tit of the "affluent society"? Men are free precisely to the extent that they are equal to their own needs. The most able are the most free."

Wendell Berry

 

 

"What impels man to a moral action is his experience of the world of spirit through the revelation of that world within his soul. This experience takes place within the personal individuality of man. To experience oneself in reciprocal intercourse with the spiritual world through a moral action is to experience FREEDOM  For the spiritual content does not act within the soul of necessity, but in such a way that man himself must develop the activity which impels him to receive the spiritual."

Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography

 

 

"The world is full of wickedness and misery precisely because it is based on freedom-yet that freedom constitutes the whole dignity of man and of his world . " .

Berdyaev

Dostoevsky

 

 

"Dostoevsky wanted to take men along the ways of wildest self- will and revolt in order to show them that they lead to the extinction of liberty and to self-annihilation. This road of liberty can only end either in the deification of man or in the discovery of God. "

Berdyaev

 

 

"The thing which Dostoevsky and Nietzche knew is that man is terribly free, that liberty is a tragic and a grievous burden to him."

Berdyaev

 

"Scope for free choice, personal caprice, however extravagant, the maddest of fancies-those are what man is after, quintessential objects that you can't classify and in exchange for which all systems and theories can go to hell."

Berdyaev "

 

 

"When you define liberty you limit it, and when you limit it

you destroy it."

Brad Whitlock

 

"Strange to say, under the influence of laboratory science many people today seem to use their freedom only for the purpose of denying its existence. Men and women of great gifts find their purest delight in magnifying every "mechanism", every "inevitability", everything where human freedom does not enter or does not appear to enter. A great shout of triumph goes up whenever anybody has found some further evidence-in physiology or psychology or sociology or economics or politics of unfreedom, some further indication that people cannot help being what they are and doing what they are doing, no matter how inhuman their actions might be. The denial of freedom, of course, is a denial of responsibility: there are no acts, but only events; everything simply happens; no one is responsible. "

E.F. Schumacher

 

 

"Man has received freedom from God, not from himself, and this freedom is exclusively under the power of God, totally determined by Him-that is, it is ultimately a fiction. God invites the creature to love God and begin a divine life, but God expects an answer only from Himself, for its He who gives freedom and knows the consequences of freedom. The problem of Ivan Karamazov is worked out more fully and transposed into eternity."

Nicolas Berdyaev

 

 

"What is Liberty? You say of a locomotive that it runs free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that Friction is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat skimming the water with a light foot, "How free she runs," when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is "in Irons," in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy. Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies. "

Woodrow Wilson

 

 

"We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism....which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote....Free trade and freedom of opportunity are ideals which still may rouse the imagination of large numbers, but a mere "reasonable freedom of trade" or a mere" relaxation of controls" is neither intellectually respectable nor likely to inspire any enthusiasm. The main lesson which the true liberal must learn from the success of the socialists is that it was their courage to be Utopian which gained them the support of the intellectuals and thereby an influence on public opinion....Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost."

Friedrich Hayek

 

  "Just as the first responsibility of freedom is to ensure the amplest possible forum for communication and dialogue, the first impulse of tyranny is to diminish that forum to a narrow, monodirectional channel of dogma. Until the 1990s in eastern Europe, this strangling of ideas was achieved through arbitrary regulation of the media, interdiction of messages from abroad, severe limitations on publishing, restrictions of personal travel and stringent control of educational methods and materials. Because even repression so comprehensive as this could not fully stop the flow of ideas, governments took the further step of creating secret police who used informants to monitor the speech of their fellow citizens and who also made sure that nationals could not speak freely abroad. Only when these regimes had bottled up all outlets of human expressions could they be confident of their power.

  What is life like under such circumstances? The bitterest diatribes of Western anti-Communists are probably inadequate to describe it. Westerners can condemn oppression and sympathize with its victims, but they must struggle to imagine the complex of shame, depression, frustration, bitterness, boredom and dread that result from what might be called the political realization of a paranoid fantasy. To enter the mind of an intellectual in eastern Europe, they must conjure up a haunting sense of unfulfilled promise, a consciousness of being unspecifiably diminished, an anguished feeling that their instinctive desire to learn, to know and to express is somehow wrong and can be indulged only at the risk of guilt and punishment. Yet those who feel this pain may be called the lucky minority; for the majority, the political repression of free thought breeds simply dullness, a spiritual anesthesia coherent with the deadened society at large. Deprived of both individuality and community, people lose aspiration. Their world shrinks to the material effects around them. Tyranny's deepest offense is the reduction of its citizens from people of potential dignity to creatures of barbaric despair."

Robert Grudin

On Dialogue

 

NOTEBOOK: Regime Change by Lewis H. Lapham Harper's Mag Feb 2003

"Unrelenting in its search for Osama bin Laden and the roots of all the world's evil, the Defense Department some months ago established an Information Awareness Office that took for its letterhead emblem the all-seeing eye of God. Although still in the early stages of development and for the moment funded with an annual budget of only $200 million, the new medium of mass investigation seeks to "detect and classify" every prospective terrorist (foreign, hybrid, mutant, or native born) setting foot on American soil. No door or envelope unopened, no secret unexposed, no suspicious suitcase or Guatemalan allowed to descend unnoticed from a cruise ship or a bicycle.

   To give weight and form to a paranoid dream of reason not unlike the one that sustained the sixteenth-century Spanish Inquisition, the government apparently means to recruit a synod of high-speed computers capable of sifting through "ultra-large" data warehouses stocked with every electronic proof of human movement in the wilderness of cyberspace-bank, medical, and divorce records, credit-card transactions, emails9interoffice and extraterritorial), college transcripts, surveillance photographs (from cameras in hospitals and shopping malls as well as from those in airports and hotel bars), driver's licenses and passport applications, bookstore purchases, website visits, and traffic violations. Connect all the names and places to all the dates and times, and once the systems become full operational, in four years or maybe ten, the protectors of the public health and safety hope to reach beyond "truth maintenance" and "biologically inspired algorithms for agent control" to the construction of "FutureMap"-i.e., a set of indices programmed into the fiber optic equivalent of a crystal ball that modifies "market-based techniques for avoiding surprise" in such a way that next week's nuclear explosion can be seen as clearly as last week's pornographic movie. In the meantime, while waiting for the technical up-grades with which to perform "entity extraction from natural language text," the clerks seated at the computer screens can look for inspiration to the mandala on their office stationary-an obverse of the Great Seal of the United States similar to the ornament on the back of the $1 bill, an Egyptian pyramid and mystic, Rosicrucian light buttressed by the rendering in Latin of the motto "Knowledge is power."

See article in Harper's Feb 2003

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Book: "Snitch Culture…How citizens are turned into the eyes and ears of the state." By Jim Redden

Book: "The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech" by Tammy Bruce

Book: "The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge" by Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

Book: "On Dialogue: an essay in free thought" by Robert Grudin

Book: "Casualty Of War: The Bush Administration's Assault on a Free Press" by David Dadge

Book: "The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age" by Jeffrey Rosen

Book: "The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror" by Christian Parenti

Book: "Lost Liberties: Ashcroft and the Assault on Personal Freedom" ed by Cynthia Brown

Book: "The War on the Bill of Rights: And the Gathering Resistance" by Nat Hentoff

Book: "Liberty and Freedom" by David Hackett Fischer

Book: "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism" by David Cole

Book: "The War on Our Freedoms: Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism" Ed by Richard C. Leone

Book: "Terrorism, Freedom, and Security: Winning Without War" by Phillip B. Heymann

Book: "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad" by Fareed Zakaria

Book: "Liberty & Freedom" by David Hackett Fischer

Book: "Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen" by James Bovard

Book: "Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press" by Kristina Borjesson

Book: "FREEDOM: A History of US" by Joy Hakim

 

www.Freedomhouse.org

 

 

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