Musings of the Sundarman

Am I really Free in America?

I'd like to share something I read recently, that seems to apply to our individual and collective lives, in this time of a deep and insidious threat to the security of our society. The malignancy that is Wahabbist Islam cannot be ignored; its ability to metastasize and wreak havoc on societies all over the world is well documented.

What should governments do, when confronted by a massive security threat that doesn't wear a uniform, doesn't use military assets and tactics in the ways of the past and refuses to surrender, cow down or be bribed away from its work?

Unfortunately, one of the ways to tackle such a looming challenge is to curtail the rights of the many, granting special powers to one's police and military, providing them with additional tools to arrest, interrogate, infiltrate and tear apart extremist networks. I say unfortulately, because the very freedoms that a state seeks to protect are stripped away from its citizens, one by one, until the extremist has achieved his goal, in some cases, without firing a single shot.

The great British thinker, John Stuart Mill, was regarded a revolutionary for his essay, 'On Liberty', written in 1869. Mill was deeply concerned about the limits of the authority of society over te individual. He asked, " What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?..."

"The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar, particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England..", Mill says, pointing out that the earliest patriots in any society make it their duty to curb the limits of the ruler or ruling class over the hoi polloi, the plebeians, the common people.

This involves, firstly, the codification of certain immunities, called political rights, or liberties, that the ruler cannot infringe on...Secondly, there is the creation of constitutional checks and balances on the ruling authority, imposed by a set of duly elected representatives of the people, whose term is temporary.

However, democracy is a far from perfect political system. "Self-Government" merely implies that one set of people end up making a whole bunch of decisions on behalf of a much larger group, and may end up creating a tyranny of sorts.

Mill posits, "Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

There is a limit to the ligitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence...and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism..."

hmmm...something to think about...by the way, the full text of Mill's essay is available at http://www.bartleby.com/130/