The Trap - What happened to our dreams of freedom

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TrevorLyman
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What is freedom..

To do as I chose without interference or cohercion.

I may chose to be a drunk on Friday night and all week-end long. Wonder where my rent is an food for the rest of the week. That is freedom. My choices may be condemning myself, but my freedom. Now if one wants to come along side and encourage. I still get to chose, but encoruaged to better myself.

Individual freedom is only the right to pursue, life, liberty, and happiness. It guarantees nothing.

Government requires one to do. They would even opt I be locked up for my own good. Taking money from another to pay for my stay. This is not freedom, but what is good for society or what society thinks is good for them as a group.

I often cringed when I see something like, 80% of Americans think that we should. That is majority rule and not a republic or an individual freedom. It is what is good for society as defined in the relativism of that society or individuals in control of that society. Weather it be media, dictatorship, or government cohersion.

charleydan Posted by charleydan on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 8:17pm
Finished this episode

Very interesting. Looking forward to the next 2 which I will be starting on immediately. So far I would recommend this.

______________
The FEDERAL RESERVE, Stealing the American Dream since 1913

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sharpsteve Posted by sharpsteve on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 3:30pm
I haven't watched all films

I haven't watched all films in full so the feedback is helpful and appreciated. Thank you!

TrevorLyman Posted by TrevorLyman on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 10:41am
Trevor,

I haven't watched all the films either. I am basing my opinion on the last few sentences in the conclusion of this video:

" In November 1989, the Berlin wall collapsed, and the Cold War was finally over. A new era of freedom had begun.

"But the shape that freedom is going to take would be defined by the victors, the West, and as this program has shown, the idea of freedom that had now become dominant in the West was deeply rooted in the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War.

"Next week's film shows how this idea spreads to take over politics itself, because it seemed to offer a new and better alternative to democracy. What it actually leads to is corruption, rigidity , and the dramatic rise of inequality.

"And we will come to believe that we actually are the strange, isolated beings that the Cold War scientists had invented to make their models work. This bleak vision, far from liberating us, would become our cage."

I did read a summary of the series on Wikipedia, that looks to me to be pretty objective, based on how the first episode was summarized. According to Wikipedia, the series ends with a critique of Isaiah Berlin's concept of "negative liberty", that is the idea that the function of government should be limited to preventing people from using force against one another. The documentary advocates "positive liberty" meaning (I gather) that democratically elected governments can legitimately re-distribute wealth and impose regulations on commerce.

Here is a quote from Wikipedia:

"In essence, the programme suggested that following the path of negative liberty to its logical conclusions, as governments have done in the West for the past 50 years, resulted in a society without meaning populated only by selfish automatons, and that there was some value in positive liberty in that it allowed people to strive to better themselves.

The closing minutes directly state that if western humans were ever to find their way out of the "trap" described in the series, they would have to realise that Isaiah Berlin was wrong and that not all attempts at creating positive liberty necessarily ended in coercion and tyranny."

Here is a link to the whole article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series)

I would contend that there is no such thing as "positive liberty", because the granting of false rights to certain people necessarily infringes on the true rights of others.

Proponents of "positive liberty" contend that everyone has the right to an education, to health care and housing, etc, and that the majority in a democracy may force society as a whole to provide these things to everyone. But this directly contradicts the idea that every individual has a natural right to life, liberty and property, which must not be taken away by any mob or any government.

Perhaps there is some value in the way this documentary explores the role of paranoia in convincing people to go to war, and the mistaken idea that freedom can be imposed on one country by another (i.e. the neo-con agenda), but I think this legitimate critique of the misuse of the concept of freedom and of fear tactics in a foreign policy context is by far outweighed by the anti-freedom socialist domestic policy message that dominates these films.

Claire Posted by Claire on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 1:50pm
No

This documentary is based on a deliberate misreading of the idea that people act in their own self interest, and blames this idea for our lack of freedom, and more alarmingly, class inequality and the like (in future episodes). What is the misreading? Acting in your self-interest is presented as a zero sum game, meaning that one person's gain is always another person's loss. Nowhere does this film explain the real effect of people looking out for their own interests, which is that one person's self interest very often coincides with that of another. Milton Friedman explains this very well. The baker bakes the bread and the customer gives him money for it. Both people have acted in their own self interest, and both are better off after the transaction than they were before. THIS is how free markets work.

But "The Trap" paints a very different picture. According to this film, the cold war gave rise to destructive theories of human interaction based on suspicion and conflict, which were then used by Margaret Thatcher and the like to promote free market capitalism. I suspect that the filmmakers' bias is that Socialism is actually better for people than capitalism, and that they are trying to convince people that the self interest theory on which capitalism is based is really nonsense, that people naturally want to labor for the good of the state, rather than for their own good and for the good of their families, and that if we can only return to this way of thinking we will have the nice, fair and equal socialist state that we really want.

So they paint this misleading picture of acting in your own self interest as a paranoid, hostile zero-sum game. I don't think you should broadcast this film.

Claire Posted by Claire on Thu, 12/04/2008 - 8:41pm
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