The Dirty Trick

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsley believe they are free"
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have spent my whole life believing that this nation is a free society; that it is the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Much to my dismay, I have recently come to a far different conclusion.  Looking at the facts objectivley and using simple deductive reasoning it became quite obvious that we are infact the opposite of free.  We are slaves to a cunning and deceitful master. 

We are undoubtedly more free than many nations, but we are not truly free.  Being more free than most, coupled with the empty phrases we constantly hear about our country being free, gives us the illusion that we are infact free.  So, what is freedom?  How can one be "more free"?  Is it even possible to have varying levels of freedom?  These are the questions that have been coursing through my mind, rearanging my previous conception of American indepenence.  They are the questions that any liberty minded individual must ask to maintain the maximum amount of "freedom" possible. 


The Question: What is freedom?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines freedom as: The absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice of action/ liberation from slavery or restraint from the power of another. 

The Logic

Premise one: Freedom is the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint.

Premise two: The U.S. government constrains it's citizens by way of coercion, making it
necessary to live under it's mandates or risk the consequences of it's punishment.

Conclusion: Therefore, U.S. citizens are not free.

Unless we are to change the definition of freedom, there is no way that we can say we live in a free society.  Simply changing the definiton of the word to escape the scary idea that we are not free would be quite silly wouldn't it?  Yet I'm sure that is what most Americans would do when confronted with this sad truth.  They will justify, they will rationalize, they will decieve themselves, and they will go on perpetuating the lie. 

As I stated previously, we are more "free" than many other nations, and for this I am thankful.  Yet the question arises; how can one be "more free"?  It seems to me that freedom is one of those things that is either there or it is not.  There is no way we can stay true to the definition of the word and maintain that we are free.  Freedom is the absence of necessity, coercion, and constraint; therefore if any of these apply, even just a little bit, it stands to reason that the word freedom does not apply. 

Properly and precisley propegated propaganda promotes permutation in previously presumed postulation.  In other words, good lies can change one's mind on self evident truths, such as the definition of a word.  The words freedom and liberty have successfully maintained their positive connotations while discarding their true definitions.  Americans get a warm fuzzy feeling when they talk about living in a free country because freedom is a universally good word.  The word has kept it's emotion, but it has lost it's definition.  To say that one is free with a concious knowledge of the word's definition while admitting that one is subject to the control of a coercive government is what Orwell would call doublethink.  To purpossfully alter the word's definiton to describe our condition, or to rationalize the lack of freedom in any way would be cognitive dissonance.

What we really need is cognitive dissidents.  We need an intellectual revolution.  We need more people willing to educate themselves, provide for themselves, and stand up for their rights.  That is why it's so important to hold the words we use to their proper definitions and realize that describing the U.S.A. as a free country is a lie.  If we go on perpetuating the propaganda then we are working for the enemies of liberty.  It's time to arm yourself with a dictionary and logic and defend what is yours.