Individual Freedom vs. Collective Liberalism

 

It is a commonly held view in United States that Liberalism curbs personal and individual freedoms. Specially under intensive propaganda against liberalism by extremely wealthy conservative lobbies, many think that liberalism means our lives being controlled by government. To have a comprehensive and in depth analysis of this issue, we have to look into some very important social and economic factors, with a historical perspective. Through out the course of history, as far as we can go back and as far back as we can look through historical accounts, we see a continuous struggle between, and by, money and power. Unfortunately, the human lives, the lives of common people like you and me, have always been controlled by people who owned money or power or both. Usually both, because they have always been interrelated. Money brings power and power brings money. If we do, a even deeper analysis, we find that money have always been an stronger factor, when compared to power, because, rich people usually held the power, compared to powerful people holding wealth and money. The other way around, that is powerful people holding wealth and money has not been uncommon, either, though. That is why the major reform movements in history, like religions, and political and economic ideologies, have always tried very hard to keep them separate. But, practically it has been virtually impossible, in most of the cases. The money and power, both are usually owned by same group of people or in common terminology, by same class, or elites.  Religion tried to avoid this problem by giving authority and power to people of God, that is clergy, thinking that people of God were less likely to abuse their powers,  fall into greed for money and to use their power and authority to accumulate money. Unfortunately, this idea never worked and so called people of God, that is clergy, did the worst abuse of power and accumulated unprecedented amounts of money by abuse of their power and authority. This happened in almost every religious society, including Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist. In most cases, people finally revolted against theocracy, millions of lives were lost in the process and ultimately they got rid of these theocracies. Although, they  theocracies never ended their struggle to get back the power and authority, which is extremely evident in world wide terrorism by Muslim extremist groups, opponents of separation of church and government in west and far right movements in Israel, India and Sri Lanka.  Secular ideologies tried to achieve this goal by separating church and the government and by separating political process from money game or even by abolishing religion. These strategies have worked in short run, but, unfortunately in long run, they have failed too. This is because, money and power has so much affinity for each other that they ultimately formed an alliance, and the rich and powerful people joined their hands together, to strengthen, widen and prolong their hold on masses. This happened in socialist societies, where the communist and socialist party leaders ultimately gathered all the power and wealth in their hands., and, it is happening in Capitalist societies, including, United States, where banks and other multi-national financial institutions, media and politicians are forming a new alliance (compare this with traditional triangle of power between theocracy, bureaucracy and aristocracy) to enslave the people. Can you believe that multinational financial institutions ditched the global economy, with their greed and fraudulent practices and in return, instead of getting punished for it, they got rewarded by trillions of dollars of the money owned by same people, they were ripping off, at the first place, the tax payer. This was because their pimps in media and politics, by round the clock bombardment of fake and fraudulent reports, made us believe that if we, the poor and hard working people, do not provide this assistance to these multi-trillion dollar, global and corrupt industry, then sky is falling on our heads. We fell victim into this false propaganda, once again, and trapped ourselves and our future generations into trillions of dollars of debt, just to bailout the crooks who messed up every thing because they were trying to rip us, the hard working people and actual generators of wealth and money. What happens when your generator fails? No power. Ripping off the actual generators of wealth and money bankrupt the global economy and these multi-trillion dollar industry lost it’s actual source of revenue. They still do not realize and accept that their wealth is actually generated by hard working people and if these hard working wealth generators fail, the corporations, that depend on their labor and consumer ship, fail, too.  Democracy was another attempt to break this alliance in the favor of common people. By providing the power to elected representatives of people, it was meant to separate power from money and bring it to the hands of individuals. It worked, to some extent, that way, in the beginning, but, unfortunately the democratic political process and democratic governments, also, got hijacked by wealthy lobbies and special interest. For example, it does not matter. if the approval rating for Iraq war was below 30% or Afghanistan war is getting more and more unpopular, every day. These wars did go on, and will keep going on until these rich and powerful corporate lobbies want them to go on.  Freedom of media was another attempt to strengthen the democracy and the power of people. It was believed that free media will empower people with information that is necessary to make well informed decisions. But media became a puppet in the hands of rich, powerful and influential, corporate advertisers. It is not telling us, what we need to know, but, it is telling us what is in the interest of their  influential advertisers and what these advertisers want us to know and the way they want us to know.  This was the idea behind public education system. But, this education system has failed, too. When it comes down to their voting rights, most of our high school graduates are not capable of making an informed decision. Many of them don’t even know, what are the branches of government and what are their roles in our government and authority they exercise in running our government and day to day lives.  If this is the history and this is the state of affairs, right now, then, what do you choose? Government, political system and our daily lives controlled by an alliance between money and power, money alone or honest and independent representatives, though rare, elected by us. We elect them not because their campaigns were financed by rich lobbies, but, because, they truly represent us and our interests?

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