Freedom Is Stupid

And a Curse for People Who Aren't You

If you make the mistake of talking to a miserable person about why they’re miserable, they’ll probably blame someone or something that isn't themselves. Then, if you ask for actions that could be taken to alleviate the grievance, they’ll rattle off a few that were popular in the internet rabbit hole they went down when they wanted to indulge their pathos. And if you build upon your previous errors by asking the miserable person what they believe they’ll get if those actions were to occur, then you are likely to receive an answer along the lines of “more freedom”. Thus, if they had more freedom, then, supposedly, they would be happier.

But we know the claim that more freedom will generate more happiness is a lie because these changes sometimes occur, and the people who were miserable before are frequently moreso afterward and find new excuses for their misery.

Yet the claim that freedom will lead to happiness is a commonly espoused delusion despite the obvious contradicting evidence, and both its acquisition and absence are used to provide moral justification for sociopathic behaviors.

In some cases, people claim they are not free because of another group and use that claim to justify treating the other malevolently - never mind the fact that they have the freedom to indulge their aggressive impulses. In other instances, people wallow in their pathos and pretend to be powerless to do anything worthwhile because they lack freedom - never mind that they somehow have the free time waste feeling sorry for themselves. The pivotal difference between the two is the energy of the supposed slave.

So it is good to war against the lie that freedom leads to happiness. It is used to justify evils which people inflict on others and on themselves. The malevolence it excuses is pervasive, unnecessary, and entirely avoidable. Moreover, the philosophy of the Magenta Pill requires its destruction so that Wonder might take its place. So I must take my intellectual hammer to this idol — it is both necessary and virtuous to do so.

Let us begin.

The Miscategorization of Freedom

Freedom is often viewed as something that one should want more of and treated as an end in itself. But people who think this way are mistaken. Their discussion of freedom indicates a failure to understand what it is. Thus, they commit a category error.

To help illustrate this point, consider the following:

Suppose that you go to an ice cream shop. And this shop has 100 flavors lined up. You have the freedom to choose from 100 different options. And you want to order Flavor X.

So you go up to the register and you order it. But there’s a problem — they’re all out of X. So you can choose from any of the remaining 99 flavors. You still have an abundance of freedom to choose what you get.

But there’s a problem—you don’t want those. You want Flavor X. That is why you came to the shop. And you’re feeling rather Karen-ish today, so you ask the cashier to look for Flavor X in the back.

The cashier wants to flip you off, but he knows you’ll complain to the manager if he does, and because this is America, he’s likely to lose his minimum wage job if he utters the obvious truth that the customer is always wrong. So he goes to the back to look for Flavor X while he secretly hopes that a stray drop of water will cause your witch ass to melt away while he’s there.

But he can’t find Flavor X. They were out. Like he said. Yet the cashier knows that if he returns to the front empty-handed, then the bipedal warthog holding up the queue is likely to throw a temper tantrum fit for a real trailer-park queen.

Fortunately, the ice cream gods have smiled upon him, and the store received an early shipment of their holiday flavors. So he grabbed a few, six in all, and brought them to the front — hoping he could quell the coming storm by giving Karen, you, a special deal.

But when you saw the six and noticed that Flavor X was not among them, you were distraught in a way that only a mentally-ill spoiled liberal white woman can be. You now had more freedom than before — your 99 options had been raised to 105 — yet you still didn’t have Flavor X. So you spoke the dreaded words, and the manager appeared. You made up a lie about how the cashier had been rude to you because you couldn’t restrain your sadistic glee, and you managed to get him fired on the spot.

You left the shop after chewing out the manager and walked away, telling yourself that you were victimized by the people therein so you could more easily live with the wretched misery of what you were. This proved that freedom and its expansion do not yield happiness when they fail to connect us with the things we really want. By recognizing this, we gained a better appreciation of what freedom is.

What Freedom Is

Freedom is a measurement of the number of choices available to us. It is not itself a choice. Nor is it an end itself. Desiring more freedom is like wishing for more wishes.

From this, we recognize that freedom only leads to happiness as it helps us select options that will make us happy. So an expansion of liberty does not produce an expansion in joy if the freedom expands in the wrong way. Further, a contraction of freedom may be beneficial if it excludes options that are undesirable and distract us from making better choices. Therefore, if we measure happiness in terms of freedom, we can say that the happiest conceivable man is also the one who is the least free - he is only ever able to make the best choice in any circumstance.

Of course, our ability to predict the future is poor, and our knowledge of ourselves is imperfect. So we cannot constrain our freedom to such an extent that we can only ever make perfect choices. However, our knowledge of the two is not nothing either, and we can place numerous hard constraints on our freedom so it will retract from places where it ought not to extend. Moreover, our age is characterized by effeminate permissiveness. So most people would be happier if they lost more freedom, i.e., if they had fewer options.

Why Freedom Is an Idol

Yet despite the fact that people would benefit from reducing their freedoms, they insist on the delusion that happiness will accompany their expansion.

But why?

To answer the question of why people idolize freedom, I will decompose it into two parts: where the idea of its importance comes from and how it is sustained.

Where It Comes From

Freedom, its virtues, and its flaws have been discussed for as long as philosophy has existed. However, the modern obsession that transformed it into an idol has a more discrete and recent origin. I attribute it to the American founding.

The founders of the United States exalted a set of values that included liberty as one of their greatest. They understood liberty according to an older view, which was once different and nearly opposite to the classical view of freedom. However, when the word liberty entered the minds of Americans whose learning was inferior to those who wrote America’s founding documents, they wrongly equated liberty with freedom. Thus, the two became synonymous. Then, because freedom is an easier word to say, they spoke the word freedom when they meant liberty and the accidental synonym became the norm.

So, the word freedom displaced the word liberty. And Americans were propagandized to like freedom because liberty was one of their founding values.

How Freedom Became an Idol

After freedom had replaced liberty, it became influential. This was easy because the pretext the American founders used to justify their rebellion against England provided an incredible model for justifying Machiavellian power grabs. They were not the first to use this model, but their success snowballed in a way that it had never done before. The model requires users to employ the word freedom as its lynchpin, so the model and its practitioners have empowered it to the point of idolatry.

The model has four steps:

1. Identify a power greater than yourself.

2. Contrive an excuse to claim that it is oppressing you.

3. Use the excuse to justify all sociopathic activities taken against it.

4. Carry on until satisfied.

Freedom sockets well into the second step because a person who wants to use the model to justify their ambitions can claim another power is oppressing them and pretend that their efforts are done merely to expand their freedom - and not for the sake of their aggrandizement. So, freedom and its acquisition provide the moral justification for seeking power. And, because we live in a world where we have to exist with others, there will always be a way to pretend that one person is oppressing another. The other’s freedom to be a scumbag must be suppressed in order to exist alongside his fellow man. Thus, freedom is an excuse that always applies.

So freedom became powerful because it was so valuable for people who sought power.

How It Is Sustained

Freedom became an idol because it was a useful tool for power-hungry people. They use it to justify their trepidations against others, whom they must portray as oppressors. However, freedom remains an idol for slightly different reasons. I identify three forces that support its position yet did not place it there.

The Perfect Carrot

The same Machiavellian people who use freedom to justify their aggression also use it to retain the loyalty of their followers. They dangle the prospect of freedom before their followers and secure their loyalty by doing so.

In this way, the prospect of freedom gains a new function as glue for social movements. However, if the movement’s members acquired their freedom, then the leader could no longer ensure their support by dangling it in front of them like a carrot before a horse. The movement would dissolve. So it is important that the promise of freedom is made and never fulfilled.

Thus, freedom attains temporality.

Parrotry

The leader cements his position over the mass of followers by providing them with buzzwords and trite expressions, which they can use to absolve themselves of the twin burdens of thought and responsibility in a way that suits their leader. They learn to repeat the appeals to freedom that their masters assigned to them. In this way, they sustain and spread the word freedom and preserve its position as an idol. Thus, the lazy normy, playing the part of the parrot, preserves the false idol.

Why Apparent Dissidents Exalt Freedom

Of course, every population has its dissidents, and the normy mob is very much the rule. So, the disagreeable members of the herd form a new herd, which is defined by their contempt for the larger group. These are the conspiratards, the “wake up people” people, and the jerks who are always ready to call someone a stupid sheep because they’re too dimwitted to think of their own insults and too psychopathic to restrain their malicious impulses.

I hate them. You should hate them, too. If you’ve ever had to endure their presence, then you probably already do.

We would expect the disagreeable faction that sprouted from the madding crowd to reject appeals to freedom because that was the idol of the people from whom they sought liberation. However, interactions with these people regularly prove this rejection has not occurred, and they appeal to freedom just as easily as those whom they left.

Their acceptance of the idol seems strange initially but makes more sense upon reflection. The dissenters rejected the people in the herd because they felt suffocated by the awful behavior of its people and leaders — not by the values that they espoused. Few people are so thoughtful that they would reject a movement on ideological grounds even if they liked the people within it. So, their dispute was not accompanied by a value transvaluation. But the dissenters must create a new value to replace freedom for their views to triumph. And the false idol must be displaced for the new value to reign.

So the question emerges: How?

How to Destroy the Idol of Freedom

Freedom is an idol that must be destroyed. Malevolent people use it to dupe the hordes of resentful morons into pursuing ends that are destructive to themselves, others, and the entire race. Its status as an idol prevents healthier values from emerging while enabling its abuse by sociopaths who correctly recognize that both social norms and common decency are restrictive and that freedom can be used as a pretext for dissolving both. Therefore, it behooves us to create a method for knocking freedom from its undeserved perch.

The method is a new political formula that ambitious people can use to justify their power grabs. The formula must replace freedom with a better alternative, be morally defensible, and inspire followers to support its wielder.

To determine such a formula, I will start by describing freedom’s replacement.

What Should Replace Freedom

Wonder should replace freedom. Wonder includes imagination and the activities undertaken to satisfy it. Characteristic acts associated with wonder include invention, exploration, and inquiry. Wonder is an enlivening value that instills purpose within people and encourages pursuits that generate real work products with measurable positive effects on those who receive and create them.

Wonder also permits freedom within boundaries conducive to the imagination, and it prescribes how manpower and resources should be allotted. Through wonder, knowledge expands, hope emerges, and the world becomes enchanted.

The Moral Defensibility

Wonder is morally superior to freedom because of how it presents conflicts.

Freedom is an inferior value because it compels people to model the world in terms of oppressors and the oppressed. It then gives the moral high ground to the oppressed people without regard for their character or competence because they ostensibly have less freedom than those above them. This causes the primary conflicts within a freedom-centric worldview to be between a man and his fellow man.

In turn, freedom encourages zero-sum thinking, as one man convinces himself that his freedom can only expand by suppressing that of another. So freedom not only justifies conflict but creates it. The conflict created drives waste when it compels expenditures that increase one group’s freedom at the expense of another’s without generating a net increase in value for society as a whole.

However, wonder fixes this problem by changing the kind of conflicts people regard as primary. Freedom drives people to model the world in terms of man vs. man and man vs. society, wherein one must triumph over another in order to acquire their freedom—only to later find themselves the oppressor in someone else’s story and place themselves within a Jewish cycle.

Jewish Cycle (n): A process whereby one attains power via means that would undermine their legitimacy if successful.

Wonder presents the primary conflicts as those of man vs. nature, man vs. technology, and man vs. himself. It does so because these are all conflicts between man and the unknown. In the first case, the unknown is nature and its chaos; in the second, the unknown is the physical world and the possibilities contained within its limitations; and in the third, the unknown is the ideal path a person should follow. And conflicts of these sorts are more pertinent for the conditions of modernity than are those presented by the obsession with freedom.

Man’s conflict with nature becomes more important as humans push further into space. Our conflict with technology is becoming more relevant because of tis pervasive influence. And the spiritual difficulties we encounter as our advanced technology expands our power are of far greater and more immediate importance for the ordinary person than those of the other types.

So, we can succinctly say that wonder is morally superior to freedom because it assists cooperation with other people and yields more useful models of the world.

Securing Followers’ Support

However, it is not enough that a new value would be morally defensible. It must also be valuable for the people who might adopt it. This means it must connect them with what they want. The interests of two groups must be satisfied by the new value: the Machiavellians and the normies. Machiavellians are status-seeking people who want to become leaders of the normies. Normies are either less ambitious or less competent, and their desires align more closely with those presented in Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.

Wonder works for Machiavellians because it allows them to present aesthetic visions, i.e., something which can be expressed in the form of a painting or a song, and use them to justify their pursuit of power. Moreover, the peculiarity of their vision protects the Machiavellians from competition because their aim is a product of their own imagination. A political formula can be used to leverage wonder as a justification for power, and I will present it in the next section. Through its use, the Machiavellian can, by treating the aesthetic vision as the end of power, assuage the degenerate condition that power usually takes in that it becomes an end in itself and leaves the society within which he operates in a healthier condition than it was when he discovered it.

Meanwhile, wonder works for normies because it provides them with entertainment, community, and purpose.

The entertainment value of wonder is most apparent in the spectacles that our technological marvels enable, such as new forms of music and visual media. Exploration into novelty also yields new inventions of manifold types that improve the conditions of life in numerous ways, as we currently enjoy.

More importantly, the existence of wonder implies a wonderland - a world born of the imagination and not of history or geography. The creation of this vision is the chief task of the wonderer. It provides a pretext for the many disaffected and lonesome people modernity has produced to cooperate in pursuit of the aesthetic vision presented to them. This union around a shared artistic vision can create new communities whose members resonate with the mission more strongly than with any form of social organization that currently exists. Such groups have already begun emerging online, although their ability to achieve any exalted aim is hampered by the lack of sincere and competent leaders who might direct them toward noble ends.

And from the community, many flowers bloom. Among them is a sense of purpose. People who participate in the community have an overarching reason for being as they work to bring about their wonderland. Additional reasons emerge within the community as people discover roles they can fill to sustain and drive the collective toward its ends. So the, the wonderland gives the community a reason for being, and the community gives members a reason in turn. In so doing, the vision answers the existential questions presented by modernity in a manner conducive to human life.

The Alternative Formula

Thus, reasoning from the moral defense and likely benefits, I propose the following political formula, which ambitious people may use to pursue their ends and supplant the idol of freedom with a superior alternative.

1. The leader invents a unique, aesthetically pleasing vision of the world that is expressible in a painting.

2. The leader communicates with an audience of dissatisfied people and tells them: “We are not born when, where, or how we ought to have been born. We were meant for a better world. I know the better world where we should live. But our current rulers are petty, boring, and ugly. They hate greatness because it reminds them of how wretched they are. So they deny us the better world. Follow me and we will go there.”

3. From this vision, policies can be selected and justified according to their utility in pursuing the artistic vision.

With this formula, an ambitious person can acquire a community of followers, direct their energies toward useful ends, justify their seizure of money and power from others, and invest both in either a community or works that realize the vision while protecting them from competitors.

Wonder and the Guild Pill

Now, I will tie this formula to the guild pill.

In order for the leader to advance his vision and build his people, he must be able to present his vision, find those who resonate with it, and organize them into a community that can leverage their talents in a way that is conducive to the attainment of their dream. The guild is an organization designed for this purpose.

The guild is a combination of a trade union and an artist collective. It is a trade union in that the vision implies certain professions, and members create firms and seek employment in those fields necessary for the vision. Meanwhile, the vision, being aesthetic, requires creative and intellectual types to define and romanticize it. Their work products assume the form of a media franchise responsible for inspiring guild members, establishing a shared culture, and marketing its mission to the broader populace. Through their efforts, the guild gains prestige and loyalty.

Thus, the guild unifies people who can elucidate the vision with people who can bring it to fruition.

What You Can Do Now

Having said that, I will summarize my position and provide a course of action to the reader and viewer.

Freedom is an idol. Its adoration is used by malevolent people to manipulate the human herd, it is used to advance malevolent aims, and it infects people with an unhealthy obsession with power and rights that causes them to interpret the world as a series of zero-sum conflicts against their fellow man.

So freedom is evil and should be replaced.

The replacement is wonder.

Wonder is better because it provides people with aspirational goals and shrinks the importance of group struggles in favor of struggles against nature, physical limitations, and one’s own demons. The guild system will advance wonder as the replacement for freedom, and it is under construction.

The reader should desire this replacement for reasons I have addressed, and they can aid the effort by making a few slight adjustments to their vocabulary. One is to reduce the frequency with which you say the words freedom and rights. The second is to use the words wonder, grand, and majesty more often. These changes are useful because ideologies require keywords, and their respective values live and die by their utterance.

What I Will Do Next

Of course, it would be unseemly if I told others what they should do without reflecting on what I should be doing as well.

Next, I need to do three things: find supporters with whom to share the vision of the guild system, deduce an organizational structure, and describe the methods through which the guild delivers value to its members.

My next immediate step is to seek publications on Substack where I can broaden my audience base.

This has been Gene of the Space Guild.

End Transmission.