Hister
Rookie
- Banned
- #21
I am striving for liberty because liberty is individualistic in nature.
I'm not sure how true that is, since individual liberty (as generally understood in these discussions) is virtually always reliant on social institutions. That is to say, those things your recognize as essential individual liberties--"natural rights"--are meaningless without social recognition. So in that sense, "liberty" exists at the societal, not the individual level: dismantle society and its institutions and enter some sort of Hobbesian state of nature in which the individual truly is supreme and you won't have anything resembling your conception of liberty.
So it sounds more like "liberty" here refers to carving out and retaining a certain role for the individual within society. Obviously defining that role is a never-ending process and one of the primary sources of political/social tension in our society. In that sense, your "idiot liberal acquaintance" was correct that the exact meaning or interpretation of "liberty"--the role societies preserve for the individual--is malleable. The definition you provided in the OP is very open-ended, in that one can imagine a broad range of possible societies satisfying it, all while disagreeing with each other about the exact relationship of the individual to the society.
well, shit. well said, although I disagree as i believe the society as it is today is overvalued and placed in a "national" view, where my definition of liberty would flourish in small communities rather than gigantic nations. Locke took a lot from Hobbes and shook it up a bit for his definition of liberty.
Lib is just selfish. That said, Lib's liberty is to satisfy himself with not total liberty, but just enough so that he can consider himself free. But he's still in the man's prison called liberty.