Our Lives—Thoughts on Freedom

It is the time of the  summer solstice, a daily reminder of the life-giving energy that comes to us from the sun at this time of year in the temperate latitudes when the sun is with us through most of our day.

Our sun, as Giordano Bruno was the first to say, is one of a perhaps infinite number of stars. Our sun’s energy supports life on earth  because it is so relatively close to us–just a little over eight minutes away at the speed of travel of the energy that comes to us from the sun as light and heat.

Andrew Galambos and Jay Snelson taught us one of the precepts of the wisdom of the ages–that in our lives we are all free as long as we hold on to the freedom of our primary property, our property in our thoughts, ideas, and actions.

Courageous men like Natan Sharansky have taught us through example and by their writing that even under the most adverse conditions we can and should hold on to our personal freedom in our thoughts, ideas and actions. Natan Sharansky, born in 1948 in the Ukraine, then part of the former Soviet Union, spent eight years in prison (1977-1985) for the “crime” of speaking out openly and fearlessly demanding that the tyrannical masters of that society allow its inhabitants to leave the country if and when they wanted to. ¹

We live now in a paradoxical condition of society. Never before in the history of mankind have humans had the capacity to enjoy so much material abundance, a capacity and opportunity opened up to us by advances in science and technology. Simultaneously we look around and see chaotic social conditions in even the United States of America, the country that has benefited most from the freeing of the human spirit from the tyranny of man over man.

If we look outside our daily lives we hear news of economic depression, widespread unemployment, and increasing social instability in other developed countries; we hear of  political repression in parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia even as the liberation of the human spirit spreads around the world.

It is true that often we are our own worst enemies. As Andrew Galambos and Jay Snelson taught us, as did a few of their ideological predecessors and antecedents, through politics humans bring out and institutionalize the worst manifestation of human life, coercion of the many by the few who through force and fraud use politics to rule others.

Just as a person in prison need not allow his mind, spirit and soul to be ruled by the externally imposed coercion of prison life, those of us in the larger prison created by political action need not allow the pathology of political society to corrupt our essential human freedom of thoughts, ideas, and actions.

The future and the present belong to those who embrace freedom. The teachings of Andrew Galambos and his colleague Jay Snelson are about our lives, how we can maximize our happiness through the freedom to make the most of our lives without interfering with the lives of others. Galambos taught that true and complete human freedom, the kind which harms no other person, will be produced by human action; that freedom is a product, to be built step by step by humanity following the intellectual and ideological leadership of those who offer governmental services on a proprietary, non-coercive basis, in free competition with others who offer and supply governmental services.

Government of this kind is not the government of a political state. The concept of the political state is a perversion of the true concept of government–which is to steer and to guide, not to rule and enslave. Political manipulators of mankind claim they aim only to serve and protect, whereas in reality politics has always been the means by which some people rule and steal from others.

The book to which this blog is related is dedicated to human freedom and self-rule achieved through knowledge, science, technology, and above all else, constant observance of the morality expressed in the biblical golden rule–do not unto others that which is hateful to yourself.