Freedom is a quality of life that we hold dear, aspire to and often refer to, but do not fully understand in order clearly to define. It is akin to happiness, and we desire both that and freedom, but both are withheld from us in many ways and by many factors.
The desire for freedom is really the wish to do what we want to do; what instinct prompts us to do, perhaps, or what we are taught, conditioned, or fitted to do. Its antithesis might appear to be the power of authority and law, which can curtail freedom often to the extent of depriving the individual of liberty or restricting our liberty to do what is right and receive what is rightful, and sometimes inflicting painful punishments. On the other hand, without the protection of keepers of law and order the freedom of the majority to go about their chosen affairs might be interfered with by a minority intent on deceiving, cheating or robbing them, perhaps also doing them violence. But, then again, those in authority claim privileged freedoms above the norm, counterbalanced by underprivileged and relatively unfree individuals at the other end of the scale.
Matter, and its basic unit the atom, is strictly governed by physical laws to keep it from chaos, but allowed a free loophole to enable it to evolve. The particles within atoms, because their quantum mechanical behaviour is subject to tiny influences, occasionally proffer an alternative avenue which gives matter some freedom to reshape its form - if it can be called freedom since it is a question of reaction to those tiny influences. This avenue was first used by the influence of truth for the development of life. It was then also used by the influence of energy, to progress the evolution of life-forms by mutation including sophistication of their means of self-determination. Plants became able to influence growth by making choices at the point of biological bifurcation in order to determine, for example, the locations of all branches and twigs and the directions in which they should grow so as to take full advantage of the sun's rays.
This evolution of primitive life-forms may be seen as progressed by a certain freedom of choice, but the freedom is very slight for the choice is limited to a tiny bias one way or another. By the time the advanced instinctive animals had come into being the function of choice had been raised to a much higher level. Most normal activity was entrusted to habitual instinct, a matter of predictable subconscious decision. Some decisions were chosen with conscious freedom but strictly limited by instinct to two or three alternative possibilities. Very occasionally, and with considerable mental effort, conscious animals will freely take a new and unprecedented decision. This may bring about a change in habit that was not originated by any kind of chance mutation and natural selection but voluntarily. No new decision is made, however, nor habit adopted, that is contrary to the immediately evident interest of survival success. Such is the limited extent of animal freedom.
The fact is that there never can be a permanent state of actual complete freedom, for all organisms are necessarily restricted by the form and terms of their existence. But we always refer to the wild creatures of nature as free because they are not subject to the heavy restrictions that govern us. We sense and envy the freedom which they enjoy. Since they are also strictly governed, by instinct, it is clear that bodily freedom can be no more than a feeling - the emotional accompaniment of spontaneous fulfilment of a definite and necessary programme.
So nature appears free but is subject to drives and inhibitions - to the fixed code of instinct that yet operates for the good of a species. Yet nature is competitive and ruthless, in that the interest of one species may well be contrary to the interest of another, and the general good of the species is often gained at the sacrifice of individual interests. In good times all individuals may be fulfilled but in hard times those with the weakest temperament must suffer the miseries of being at the bottom of the pecking order. Nature achieves a balance between good and bad extremes, a fulfilment that is satisfactory overall but that includes fears, failures and necessary hardships.
When the human race appeared on Earth, it was the first species to be potentially capable of overriding and making free decisions. Realisation of our intellectual potential could make life good, for us and all other creatures, reducing fear and suffering to the minimum. We could make our own balance, and sustain it with supraconscious awareness. But we have failed to realise this potential. What we have done is to exploit the power of intellect by applying it to the drives, whilst rejecting certain inhibitions, of instinct. This has increased our freedom of action but necessitated all kinds of added restrictions to protect us from our conscious automated selves. We are partially subject to animal instinct. We are comprehensively subject to the impositions of instinctively-based automatic reality, to a variety of competitive means of securing our needs, and to a mass of laws and controls over those means. We are also subject to the awareness of intellect, which may reveal to us that these means and controls do not provide for our whole species and that they threaten our future. To be free in the sense that wildlife is free we, as a race, also require a fixed code that answers our common physical needs andour intellectual awareness and that we can responsibly obey with a will. Existing reality does not provide that code, nor can automatic principles ever be compatible with it.
The Machine isour present reality, and if we will not rise above it with the intention of changing it we have to find a place for ourselves as part of it. We then need a personal automatic code to follow for the sake of our sanity. Choosing this code is not a case of free will but of restricting both our instinct and intellect to a conditioning and mind construction that is presently realistically viable, and emotionally applying our will to acting it out. Neither is it a free choice of the whole individual, as is the instinctive creature's selection from instinct, but the conscious limitation of our unconscious potential to the dictates of reality. And our resultant behaviour is not given even the freedom of that degree of consent and co-operation of our species which instinct provides. Not only are we resisted and opposed, perhaps violently, by others of entirely different conditioning and circumstance, but also by humantrue awareness, within and without ourselves, which doubts, questions and criticises both the whole of this reality and our part in it.
In this competitive society wide differences of attitude, interest, aim and opinion exist, and free exploitation and pursuit of these is permitted, with the result that there is conflict which restrictsfreedom. There is conflict between Machine and human institutions, and among them. There is consequent conflict between individuals depending on whether their minds lean more towards automatic calculation or humane reasoning, on which institutions they serve, support or just tolerate, on which they oppose, evade or try to escape, on whether they are generally privileged, ignored or deprived - winners or losers, made responsible or subjugated. This conflict puts us in the position, willingly or unwillingly, where we are not outwardly free to agree and co-operate whatever we inwardly think. For example, the policeman is not free to take the same attitude to law as the man in the street, nor he the same as the criminal. The attitude of the industrialist towards his production process may not freely correspond to that of the shop-floor worker or the consumer. The same attitude to war cannot be shared by protesters, politicians, weapon makers and field marshals.
Yet there ispotential freedom for us, beyond nature's blind obedience to instinct but in another, alternative, humantrue reality. That freedom is better served by, and depends upon, agreement and co-operation. Our awareness of this humantrue concept and its contrast with competitive reality is growing. It needs to grow into both a determination to take up the struggle between the Machine and its exploitation of us(in its interest - known paradoxically as free enterprise) and an inhibition of the Machine for the sake of true interest. This struggle has gained local concessions but has never come near to defeat of the world-wide Machine. Growth towards that ultimate goal has always been short-circuited into automatic conflict, basically between the privileged and the deprived, often ending in war, with the combatants losing sight of their human reason.
So the present human normal case, applying to various degrees all over the world, is that we continue as instinctive creatures, with intellect providing more opportunity but less overall care and protection. We have the same competitive and ruthless reality, having enhanced the pleasures and multiplied the fears and hardships with the added feature that we can be sharply aware (through the wide-ranging media) of the possibilities of both. To be largely deprived of liberty against our will is something we abhor but we are prepared to have our freedom restricted in a necessarily good cause. The question is when and to what extent is it necessarily good to curtail freedom in the individual or collective interest.
Our wish to experience the feeling of freedom may be converted into eagerness to pursue automatic drives to the maximum. Automated intellect gives boundless opportunity for exploitation of pecking-order dominance. The most automatically successful and least truly aware of humans can feel that this really is to be free because they are able to ignore the fact that their freedom represents the humantruly unacceptable opposite for others. Society as a whole, threatened with breakdown by the chaos resulting from a free-for-all, becomes desperate to control this reckless freedom. It does so by the institution of law, making certain practices unlawful and punishable. Whether we then feel free depends on whether we agree with the Machine and its laws and whether our own methods of competitive survival are free from its restrictions. The most humantruly aware of us, who want to escape the system and reform it, strongly feel ourselves to be morally unfree.
Broadly speaking there are two versions of automatic reality. The first is represented by the capitalist, free-enterprise, democratic order, for example in the USA. Countries allied to this version call themselves the 'free world'. Their concept of freedom is a myth. It feels comparatively free because everyone is at liberty to pursue autoprogression, and authoritative human interference is kept to a minimum, this being feasible because the money economy exercises its own controls. But automated individuals are tightly bound to other than their own true interests, free only to comply, by making automatic interests their own, or suffer. They are not free to survive by any other than automatic means, except with great difficulty, nor to observe human morality in all things.
Our freedom to think and act at all humantruly in capitalist society is affected by the role we undertake in it; by the fact that it makes demands on our minds and bodies which leave us little energy or opportunity for contrary thought or action. Our freedom is further affected by the competitive nature of our automatic roles; by our being in a state of habitual conflict, which means that the difficulty of behaving humantruly is added to by our Machine-imposed differences keeping us apart, rather than our common humanity drawing us towards agreement.
The competitive conflict that has put the USA at the top of the pecking order has put the 'third world' countries at the bottom. The Machine-induced freedom from conscience that enables humans to take part in competitive conflicts of the money economy despite humantrue reason also permits oppressed people to protest violently. The basic reason for the East/West cold war was that Russia sided with the protesters and stood for communist revolution whilst the USA sides with automatic reality and stands for the competitive money economy.
The East/West relations that obtained up to 1989 have been overtaken by subsequent events and the following comments, written in 1988, might now be considered irrelevant. I have let them stand with only slight alterations, however, for the following reasons. The Russian revolution was a left-wing reaction to an intolerable Right-wing regime. The violent oppression that subsequently occurred under Stalin was not a feature of communism but of totalitarianism. Russia and Eastern Europe in general is now determined upon 'democracy'. But the same fundamental factors underlay the situation, now as in 1917, and as long as the Machine remains dominant events are practically certain to go full circle, eventually returning to a similar situation, and to some kind of violent upheaval such as the Communist revolution.
People in the USA value their freedom of choice, and this would be a good thing were it a matter of seeking to choose the opportunity given to all life to adopt mutations, and make changes, in the spirit of evolution towards realisation of truth. But it is a bad thing, for it merely means freedom to choose from false substitutes provided by the Machine - being able to select from the latest of its exciting technological offerings, a new car for example. This represents submission to a reality that does not stand for true worldwide human freedom and happiness.
The second of the two main versions of automatic reality is Marxist socialism, taken up by Russia and generally thought to be represented by Russian communism. The fact is that the communism of Karl Marx was to put the automatic power of capital and production into the hands of the working people, the majority, and to put their interests first. Its adoption in Russia was really a reaction to the extremely oppressive money economy and tyrannical domination on the part of the privileged ruling minority up to 1917. It could never work because power is a false concept. To whomsoever power may be given, in the beginning, it shall eventually devolve upon an elite, whilst successful socialism depends on free and equal co-operation. For Marxism temporarily to work would require a great and voluntary effort of self-discipline on the part of all people. No people have ever been prepared for such effort, and there is never time or open opportunity for them to prepare themselves before a revolution.
Perhaps it was that Lenin sensed this, in Russia in 1917, so that he established his own version of communism. This was to have the people support the State: the State to interpret and supply the peoples' needs, and to devise and impose what it deemed to be necessary discipline, by controlling activity and restricting all freedom of expression and choice. This is regarded by non-communist people as tyranny because their interpretation of freedom is the relative absence of such direct and oppressive controls. Whether Russians feltfree would depend on whether or not they agreed with official restrictions, and that might depend on how their personal way of life compared with their expectations, or with the way their parents or grandparents lived before the revolution. Third-world people were generally attracted to Russia rather than repelled, for communism seemed to offer them much more than they presently had precisely becauseof its controls and restrictions.
Marxist/Leninist communism was bound eventually to fail because rather than giving responsibility to a responsible people it invested it in the State, a powerful independent organ separated from the people. Russian society was therefore repressive rather than expressive of either instinctive orintellectual freedom. As a result, individuals were devoid of the will or compelling reason to work hard and use initiative. In consequence they not only lacked the consumer rewards of the West but also failed to evolve such voluntary humantrue freedoms as would develop better alternative intellectual interests and physical activities which, being disinterested and altruistic, could not easily be opposed by the State but might eventually erode it.
Nevertheless, for all its faults, the Russian State did uphold an important moral right by continuing to guarantee a fundamental freedom to the great working majority - relative freedom from exploitation and destitution. In order to protect and maintain this freedom of the workers, the State imprisoned a dissident minority - individuals whose interests were not those of the majority and who also opposed the State. This was condemned by the West as cruelly oppressive. Yet, in a country where the morality of the majority as represented by the State is supposed to be supreme, it was quite logical that the undermining of both should be unlawful. The cruel punishment of dissenters is unacceptable, but it is also unacceptable that selfish minority aims should undermine true majority interests. The West can allow relative freedom to its moral dissenters because things are so arranged, politically, that dissent can be met with indifference and ignored, for our governmental authority is borneout of competitive conflict of interest, not morality. The root reason why the West supported Russian dissenters was simply that we shared their opposition to communism because itis opposed to capitalism.
Of course, the Russian State did not truly represent the moral freedom of the majority. Growing ever more separated, it did not evolve in service of the people as intended. Whilst it kept the fundamental moral objective it interpreted it in a narrow and dictatorial way. In a sense it was obliged to do so, for the people as a whole had never outgrown their pre-revolutionary competitive instincts. There was a degree of corruption in many sectors of Soviet society that might be taken as reflecting the inescapable frailty of human nature but in fact revealed the failure of humanity, here and everywhere else in the world, to discover and fulfil its truenature. Those in authority became a privileged elite, gathering around them a 'nomenclatura' - a list of top people, and of top jobs open to them alone. The workers saw no reason to work conscientiously hard without the incentive of gain. So the State, seeing these results of stagnant idealism and the dead hand of control, and knowing that Russia was falling ever further behind in the economic competition of nations, finally succumbed to, and began opening the floodgates on, the hitherto forbidden influence of automatic conditioning. The State started by encouraging 'glasnost' and 'perestroika'. It was the people who finally demanded an end to authoritarianism and the reintroduction of incentive rewards and free enterprise. The same is happening in China, as briefly mentioned in Chapter 34, though not in the same way.
This is a backward move, for communism, with all its imperfections, was an approach towards humantruth - the nearest approach that any governing authority has yet made - in that it rejected the principle drives of the money economy. By adopting perestroika the Supreme Soviet embraced the very policy it was formed to fight against; by taking this easy option it has copped out of the much more difficult job of perfecting socialism by enlightenment. This is failure to perceive that the only way forward is by supraconscious awareness.
The Russian State has failed to see that Marxist/Leninism was a stepping stone along the humantrue way, and that its job was to seek and encourage enlightenment in order to make progress along that way instead of stagnating in a fixed and intolerable position. As glasnost and perestroika overcame that unacceptable inertia, by releasing the people from State control, it simultaneously harnessed them, and the State authority, to equally unacceptable control by the Machine and its money economy. By their failure to intellate, this 280-million population has simply exchanged one set of problems for another, eventually much more burdensome set of problems. It is as though the Russian revolution, once a beacon of hope to the world's downtrodden, had never happened, or as though that door on the possibility of a better world had never, just for a little while, stood ajar.
We cannot be materially free, for the apparent freedom of consumerism is really enslavement by automation. But neither can a potentially intellectual race naturally tolerate artificial control of any kind. We have certain needs - of clean air and water, suitable food and shelter - which the Machine does not equally and adequately provide. Reason tells us that we should adjust our needs to the resources lastingly available to us, which the Machine fails to do. Intellect must take over from instinctive automation the role of providing for and guiding humanity but intellect must first be fulfilled, then freed. The need for responsible effort as well as restraint shall be perceived by intellect and voluntarily self-applied by each individual's own understanding.
Our human mutation will have reached maturity when we are fully and freely intellectual - that is to say, supraconscious. The process will be perfected throughout the world when we all acknowledge the same body of humantruth, and when we have replaced instinct with a freely upheld humantrue constitution. For some time to follow we would feel the impulsions of instinct but humantruly necessary inhibitions would be built into every individual's understanding, strongly, and to equal degree.
We humans, the first intellects on Earth, are able not only to know but also to do that which is for our well-being. But we are presently at an in-between stage, our intellect so consciously developed that we have invented and freely manufacture atom bombs, for instance, but not so supraconsciously aware as to be freely responsible enough to render the making of such things unthinkable. If the Machine decides to make them, both leaders and the workers involved in their manufacture are practically and economically bound by that decision. But individuals are mostly free to protest and make their protest heard. That the numbers of nuclear weapons once deployed in the USA/Russia confrontation have been and are still being reduced illustrates an important point. The Machine, at last obliged to make a choice between automatic convention and humantruth - whether to keep nuclear weapons or get rid of them - in full public view and under great anti-nuclear pressure from human moral awareness, must choose humantruly. Thus could our humanity prevail on any matter of reform, once we came to understand it truly and wish for it strongly. But the fact of USA/Russian disarmament does not herald the imminent collapse of the Machine, only the long overdue recognition of its most blatant insanity. The Machine is yet much too persuasive and strong to collapse, and human morality is yet too weak to cause that collapse. But the fact that the nuclear threat has thus far retreated is encouraging.
The basic freedom available to us is now revealed as a state of ideal restriction of the individual, having regard to the well-being of all individuals, that is freely accepted because it is voluntarily and willingly self-imposed. It is also vitally essential that we should satisfy awareness to the extent of feelingfree. This means that our characters will have to be so enlightened and our circumstances so humantruly arranged that when we act spontaneously, without stress and fully according to our whole potential, we shall also act responsibly, but shall not feel artificially restricted.
Therefore the state of basic freedom, for us as an intellectual species, is to be free to undertake humantrue responsibility. Individual freedom presently produces many undesirable results, so that we restrict it, because we are not generally enlightened or united. It is made acceptable only to the extent that it can be subjected to some degree of reasonable government, but that is not freedom. Individuals may act with basic freedom only when all are represented by the same personal code, and uphold a world framework of life, both of which are entirely humantrue.
Once we have established the responsible, basic element of freedom, related to a practical framework of life that is simple and settled and so need occupy only a part of our minds, we shall find ourselves with a great deal of spare intellectual capacity. At that level, exercise of the mind is outwardly subject only to mathematical and graphical limitations, and this is the optimum free fulfilment, our optimum feelingof freedom. Up to the present we have applied our minds mostly to coping with the chaos of our world and hardly at all to such truly free fulfilment. The secret of our future happy success shall be that we voluntarily reject freedom to deviate from the humantrue constitution at the practical level but, always inwardly subject to supraconscious awareness of our responsibilities, that we freely experience intellectual development at the abstract level.
We will then be expressing truth in practice but also absolutely in the mind, for uninhibited intellect can not but express truth. As a result the whole human race will exert a great collective influence on micro-choice on Earth, like Gaia, and in the universe. The result, immediately for us, will be humantrue society, and eventually, for the universe, true equilibrium.
Pt.VII REALISATION
The PRINCIPLES
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