Great post, Mq., really one of your best.
Freedom is viral, give it a chance and it will flower anywhere, infect anything. People want to be free. I don't know if it has been ever subjected to any rigorous analysis in terms of its place in the hierarchy of needs, but I would say it is up there, right close to food and drink.
It drives migrations, efforts, innovation, and everything that has allowed us to leave the savannahs of Africa in search of a better place. I would even venture to say it drove our chimpoid efforts to stand on two legs--we need to look to the horizon, see what's "over there."
We cannot do these things without freedom.
It's the reason Islamofascism will eventually fail. The Islamofascisti take too literally the meaning of their great religion. They literally demand "submission," something we are not programmed to accept. The more enlightened ones, of course, take the wise view that submission relates only to the relation between a man and his god.
Superstitious garbage, anyway, but harmful and self-defeating when applied in the way the I-fascists demand.
I'm not worried because at the end of the day, perhaps a century from now, when we are all quite irrelevant, the virality of freedom as an evolutionary-genetic imperative will assert itself. |
