Positive Health Online

Republished from pqliar.net

http://www.pqliar.net/in-life/health/58-independence-and-freedom

Whenever people feel constrained by their environment, a power to break free is generated, whether it is breaking free from a government, from an authority or even from parents and family. Teenagers are demanding their independence and their right to more freedom. Independence and freedom are concepts that are often linked together as if they meant the same thing. However, looking to define independence and freedom we encounter some difficulties when we relate it to the reality of life.

Independence can be defined as a condition of a person, nation, country or state in which its residents and population exercise self-government, and usually have sovereignty over a specific territory. This means that individuals within that territory will still have to obey rules and laws, but independence refers to the fact that they, as a group, are allowed to make their own rules and laws as opposed to a government people have become alienated from. It also shows that whenever a revolution ‘frees’ people from a governing power, these same people will, after the revolution, be subjected to a different government, a different power. Revolutions only redistribute power, whatever the reason for the discontent has been. It never delivers freedom.

Some define independence as the freedom from being governed or ruled by another country, another authority, which also indicates the change of authority. It appears that an individual can never be free from authority or government and therefore independence does not equal freedom. When you define independence as “the ability to live your life without being helped or influenced by other people” you are essentially describing a life disconnected from any kind of society, which is, for an extremely large part of the human population, an impossible, even an undesirable state. In short, independent you can never be as an individual and as a group it only appears you are independent for as long as you are part of the governing group and can identify with that governing group.

What about defining freedom then? Is it simply the condition or right of being allowed to do, say, think, etc. whatever you want, without being controlled or limited? That sounds good but is it a workable definition? Certainly freedom must mean the right to do as one pleases, to think, to believe, to speak, to worship (or not), to move about, to gather and to generally act as one chooses. Ah, wait a minute! Of course, but only in so far as those choices do not start to infringe on another person’s freedom. If you are allowed to do whatever you want to do then surely so is any other person, and if your actions restrict the other person’s freedom it becomes clear that not everybody is actually free. You are restricted by the effect you are having on another person. Now it should become obvious that there cannot be any freedom laid down in any law or ruling, as it may serve a certain part of the population well but when it does, it will always restrict others. In other words, there cannot be a country in which its citizens are free. There will always be laws to adhere to that are restrictive to some. There cannot be an authority that guarantees all its members freedom. Have a look at the definition of freedom as stated in the US National Library of Medicine, with regards to health matters.

The rights of individuals to act and make decisions without external constraints. 

Is it within this definition that certain actions from the Medical Authorities will have to be regarded? I am thinking of actions such as not allowing non-vaccinated children into schools, or making homeopathy an illegal therapeutic system? Where is the right of the individual to make decisions about his own health now? Oh yes, of course, I forgot! Those individual choices may endanger other people. By fearing it may, the authority can take away your freedom, so to speak to ‘protect’ others from potential harm coming their way because of your decision. Hence, they write laws in which they hand you freedoms, only for those to be taken away straightaway on their authority of having to protect the vulnerable and weak.

And where did that particular right come from? Well, once you grant every individual the right to do whatever they want to do, only chaos will ensue. Chaos in the sense that government can no longer know what is going to happen within the community. This is, for a society, of course unacceptable. First of all, nobody would know any longer what was acceptable and what wasn’t, but more importantly, there would be individuals who would not have the inner strength to express their wants and to make them happen. These people need to be given space and time to be themselves; for that all others will have to back down and give up their freedom of choice. So, summarized it looks a bit like this:

A strong individual has the freedom to express himself as long as he does not infringe upon another individual, but he has to give up his freedom to allow an authority to be seen to give space for the expression of a person who doesn’t have an independent opinion in life, doesn’t have anything to express.

I know this sounds harsh but it is only meant to illustrate how authorities use the vacuum that exists in the fact that not everybody has an opinion on everything. They fill that vacuum up with their definition of what is good for the people. In the process they manage to curtail the freedom of anybody who does make an independent choice on a particular subject, which nicely leads to a free community that is completely restricted in individual movement, dependent upon and ruled by the governing power.

The conclusion must be that freedom is not achievable. We can endeavour to become free from something specific, but freedom itself, even the freedom of choice our governments are keen to stress we have, can never be ours. We will never be allowed to do, say or think whatever we want. So, is this realization then the perfect time to start a general depression?

Well, let’s see what else we can learn from these observations. There are two aspects we can examine. One is the fact that we will always be constrained, and the other is how an individual can still obtain whatever he or she needs.

There will always be an authority that restricts our movements, that hampers the expression of our wishes. So, we are not free, because we are not independent. We depend on others. More so, it isn’t even a human restriction, not even a human fault. Restriction always indicates a power greater than our own. If it isn’t, it would not have the power to stop us, it would not restrict us. In other words, we would still be free to do whatever we want, but we only need to work a bit harder for it. Indeed, there are several powers, institutions and others, within human society that we can identify as restrictive to an individual’s life. For instance, the judicial powers are restrictive to the criminals. Which power has decided that I can no longer buy a soft drink that does not contain an artificial sweetener? And human history shows us that, at times, enough people have rebelled against certain powers and have overthrown them, only for those to be replaced by other powers, who then in the fullness of time, also become a thorn in the eye of the people. No matter how hard people have tried, they have never achieved freedom. They have always come up against a power that is far greater than themselves.

Now then, imagine people with great independence. People that live isolated lives, away from any kind of society, any kind of human ruling, have the freedom to do whatever they want to. You like to think so, wouldn’t you? There may be people living in the Alaskan forests, being free from human interference, but can they do whatever they want to? I wouldn’t advise them to want to walk around in shorts and a T-shirt in January! Life will still be ruled by forces greater than their own, whether it involves animals or the weather to name just two. Even devoid of human interference, an individual still has to bow down to forces greater than himself. And those forces will restrict his freedom. And just as you and I, this individual has a choice. You can either acknowledge the power and take note of the reality of life or you can keep on fighting it screaming loudly “it isn’t fair”.

So, if no human being can ever be free what are all these human movements for freedom for then? They are struggles to become free from something, not struggles for total freedom, because total freedom leads to utter chaos and anarchy. Remember that!

But what can an individual do then to gain the freedom that is required for the individual to attain his necessities in life? Well, to begin with, I think it might help if we realize that we are not looking for freedom per se. We are looking to satisfy essential requirements in life.

Governments, as well as medical authorities, pretend to deliver everything a person needs for their health and well-being. They gather us all together in the corral and then give us what we need. Not what every individual as an individual right at that moment needs, but what they have decided the group needs. Don’t forget that whatever it is you may need, you are only allowed it when it does not infringe on anyone else. And how difficult can it be to find someone somewhere who is not benefitting from or even hindered by what you want! A good enough reason to deny you your freedom. Hence, the only possible authority with an overall view, taking into account ALL wants and needs must be the government, must be the experts, must be the specialists. So, they decide what it is all of us in the corral are getting, not what is good for the individual, but what is acceptable to the authority.

What about the essential needs for an individual then? Well, the more restrictive the gift from the authority becomes, the more individuals will be left in the cold, unable to fill in their essential requirements. Because they are essential, not having them will mean the demise of the individual. Some of these individuals will go down fighting but going down they will. How can an person under these circumstances survive, or, even better, thrive?

Don’t forget, we have stated that there will always, everywhere, be powers that rule over your individual life. Also bear in mind that those power differ from organization to organization, from country to country, from culture to culture. There are always powers above your head, but they are not the same ones, guarding the same rules, everywhere.

In spite of authorities providing us with everything they have decided we need, we will still be in trouble. Our health will be in danger, unless we manage to get the things we really need. The individual who has gathered this knowledge knows he has two options, two possible roads he can follow.

In the first place, he can observe and learn how the authority he lives under operates. What are their rules and how are those rules supported? Not all generally known rules are supported by law, for instance. Although in the UK the general rule from the medical authority is to administer several vaccinations to new born babies there is not one vaccination that is a legal requirement. So people can refuse. This may spark a vicious reaction from the authority but instead of getting drawn into a pseudo-scientific argument one can simply use the right of freedom of belief that the government claims UK citizens have. The trick is not to get into justifying your choice or defending your independence, but instead to claim the right that authorities have already (mostly in words, not in reality) given you. Medical authorities claim you have to make “informed” choices. So, if your choice is based on different information they will say it is false information you have used to make your choice. You have been manipulated! However, the point here is not what kind of information, the point is that the choice should be made based on information. So you listen to their information and you hold on to other information you consider important and then you make an informed choice, proven to be informed because the information is on the table and has been digested. Then you claim the right of free choice. If they deny you that, you have a legal challenge to any authority that denies you an internationally agreed upon right.

For most every day instances it never gets that far. It mostly comes down to the individual understanding how the authority works, what the law is and then finding the edges of what is allowed. Don’t go and ask permission. Do what is right (try not to harm others!) and let the authority prove you have done something wrong. Know that it is impossible to prove innocence, so don’t ever let an authority push you into that situation. Make sure they will need to prove whatever they are accusing you of. It is a natural urge to get your system whatever it needs in order to survive. And when you do this you will learn that nobody will be short of anything when you take what is essential to you. You can serve your own system very well without stealing anything that is deemed to be essential to someone else.

Hence, when two people decide to exchange something or one is giving the other something then it should be up to the people involved to decide what and how. Between them they should have a free choice about all the aspects of that interaction. If it is okay for them then nobody else should have any right to interfere or worse to condemn the interaction. This would focus life on individual interactions rather than on group decisions and it would deny the right of any authority to intervene. Only then can an individual become successful in filling in the necessary requirements of life.

Within any society, within any group, within any human structure, an individual can only achieve stability and peace in his life when he or she finds a way to fulfil the basic needs without deliberately hurting or damaging another and without attracting attention from the authority. Focus on your own individual life with the knowledge of how your environment operates. The fight for freedom will be an individual one and will be different for every single one of us. We are, however, bound together by the will to be allowed to behave like a free human being and at the same time, to allow others to behave like free human beings too.

When people have a similar picture of what is acceptable and what isn’t, then in a free world these people will find each other and build a society on those terms. And other people are allowed to do the same based on other ground rules and since there will not be a competition between the different groups, people are allowed to move from one to other freely.

Apart from adapting a style of operating under the government radar and adapting your life focussed on your own personal essential requirements, there is another way of responding to an authority that denies you those essentials. When it has become impossible for you to adjust to your environment you can always look for a different environment. Other parts of the world, other cultures, will provide you with other living conditions and other restrictions. Such an environment may be a better match for you, a better and richer soil for you to grow in. In that case it is time to move.

Ultimately, both scenarios end up with like-minded people finding each other and deciding to live together based on their acceptance of life in that specific way. It is, of course, crucial that each community allows other people to form different types of communities and that they do not interfere in each other’s businesses and lives. Finding each other to form these groups can happen in two different ways. First of all, an individual can look around to found an existing group in which he or she can satisfy the essential needs of life. The individual moves to live in a different community. Secondly, it may be that an individual stays where he or she is but finds other people in the neighbourhood who follow the same lines. These people may support each other in their efforts to supply their lives with the essentials. So, in this case, a group will be distilled from and within an existing community, setting themselves apart from that community.

Whichever form it will take for you, it will always be about individuals claiming their right of free choice. A right goes hand in hand with a duty. It is the duty of such an individual to give that same right to every other person, even if someone else has a different view on life. Maybe this difference makes it impossible for these two individuals to life together but that must never be a reason to deny anyone the right to a free choice.

We need to interfere a lot less in other people’s lives, telling them what is right and what isn’t.

We need to be more tolerant towards others but at the same time we need to act swiftly and with great determination when our own essential needs are being threatened.

We need to learn to live alongside people with different opinions and to learn to allow people to have different opinions. We should not demand they adapt ours and they cannot demand we adapt theirs.

We should not forget that we are all human beings and we all have the same basic natural instincts and needs. Based on that fact, there won’t be real chaos or anarchy at the end of the rainbow of freedom.

Acknowledgement Citation

Republished from pqliar.net

http://www.pqliar.net/in-life/health/58-independence-and-freedom