The Big Lie: Freedom!

Free at last? No duped again.

You will hear the word freedom a lot in modern politics.

It is interesting, because in most Western Democracies the population believed they were free, until they were told they weren’t. And ironically it is those that are shouting loudest about freedom that are putting us in chains.

The idea of freedom has challenged philosophers for centuries. It changes from one era to the next, one situation to another. That all people are, or even should be, free is relatively new. From serfdom, which was still the system in Russia until the mid 1800s to slavery, that was the economic base of the cotton industry in the US until he Civil War, freedom was quite straight forward. Did someone own you or your labour, without compensating you.

The next stages of freedom came with the rise of left wing politics. Marx talked about the workers of the world throwing off their chains, and that caught the wind. Men and women working fourteen hour days, six days a week were not free. Trade unions were more effective than revolutions. Workers started demanding elements of freedom.

And to through the 20th Century we have seen people captured and freed by and from various political systems. The USSR seemed to misunderstand Marx, as did Mao. The Fascists were not great interpreters of freedom either. Hard left and right were the antithesis of freedom, and so it ws left to democracies to take ownership of freedom as a concept.

And for the most part that was the case. We could travel, talk, work, protest, buy, sell, dance, and listen to the blues, a lot of which was banned in other countries.

But fast forward to the 21st Century and we are being told that our freedom is not good enough, that we are being shackled by a combination of government and taxation. The Libertarian right have adopted these positions to promote their own ideology, which, surprise surprise, is all about getting richer. But what they are doing is trapping people into supporting ideas that are actually self harming if you are not wealthy. In the US the voters supporting Trump would without question be better off voting Democrat. They enable tax cuts for the wealthiest 5%, and reduction in the public services that they need. North Carolina has seen their standing in the US education and health services per state collapse because they elected a Governor who introduced tax cuts for his pals, the billionaires.

In the US and the UK we are seeing social advances being pulled back. We are seeing gerrymandering reduce the power of the vote. We are seeing the rise of the power of money being used to get people to lock themselves up through constant messaging, based on propaganda and advertising techniques.

But most of all we are seeing the 21st Century version of shackles. The power of the media.

It is very easy to believe that we are smart enough to keep our own counsel, to make your own decisions, to think things through and be free to make our own choices.

Think again.

The Libertarians are taking away our freedom to think. How? By the domination of the media and politics by their use of their wealth.

You may think that this is an extreme view, but think about this for a moment. When I was younger it was acceptable to be a socialist. Or to be left wing. They were an acceptable part of the political discourse. Now they are used as accusations of some sort of extreme dangerous cult. Our government and opposition are terrified of the right wing media, because they know that they are able to bring down our elected leaders. Yet we live in a world where the circulation of newspapers has fallen hugely, so how are they still powerful? Because in a 24 hour news world, their headlines have become part of the newsfeed, given repeated prominence in the news agenda. To fill the airwaves we see columnists and reporters from the Telegraph, the Mail, the Sun and the Times.

Then we throw in the Think Tanks. The mysterious organisations that are quoted as if they have some real insights that the rest of us don’t. Until you dig and find out who funds them, and discover that they are set up to push a particular political agenda, mainly on the right.

The think tanks are underpinned by research, often carried out in Universities. Surely they are neutral, and base the reports on facts? Yet again you are too nice a person if you believe that. Whole swathes if University funding comes from right wing billionaires. The investigations into the crash of ’08 was caused by false research that suggested that lending Iceland several billion with no collateral was smart. It wasn’t. A documentary into the US Banks role in the crash interviews many academics, they all shut down when asked about the amount they were paid by the financial institutions.

Koch. Google them. Read Kochland. There is too much corruption and evil in there for me to summarise.

We have now reached the stage that the power of these people is taking away our freedom. The power and dominance of the media is more important than the message, because they can change that on a whim, and sell it in a week. The shift from freedom from government to tax reduction, to stopping women having choice to gay marriage. They are a few extremely wealthy people who can change the actual politicians standing for election by using their money in local politics. The freedom to choose a non Libertarian is being removed as they cry freedom.

We are not free from the control by the media of the messages we hear. The headlines chosen by the BBC based on the stories in newspapers owned by billionaire tax exiles are not the ones that we need to or want to hear, they re decided for us. We do have freedom to respond on social media, but that can also be distorted by the power of money, buying ads, paying people to respond, creating false campaigns targeting people and accusing them of being OMG, left wing!

The biggest loss of freedom is that of being an individual. With 24 hour news and ongoing opinion being placed in front of us on television, radio, social media and online, we are being brought into the fold of our main political views. The methodologies for this are the same as used by cult leaders. Create fear, offer protection. Create a sense of belonging by having extreme views that are challenged, which creates fear. Present whole issues as having clear solutions if you follow the agreed path. Blame people in other groups, socialists, left wingers, right wingers (the hard left and hard right use the same tactics, but the left is not being funded by billionaires to buy media space.) Our individuality is crushed by the media, but also by knowing that our friends and colleagues are also becoming part of a group, that they will argue using the language and positions they have heard on the media, and they will resent being challenged.

We can see this all the time when issues arise. Before the people speak we know what they are going to say, depending on their political position. Politicians lie to support their positions, set in stone, rather than face the facts. Commentators start with the goal of protecting their ideologies, not to look at the issues. They present as intellectual when all they are doing is repeating the lines of the people who pay them. Nothing original ever sees the light of day on either wing.

So when you next hear a politician or polemicist talk about freedom, you can be pretty sure they are thinking about their own political ideology, supporting freedom from taxes, freedom from regulations put in place to protect us, and freedom to become wealthier.