The negative dialogue of the security of the police, armies, and weapons is a trap that has not made us secure but slaughtered by the millions in wars and locked us up in order to free us, but the positive dialogue of a security based on freedom, human development, social bonding, education, and opportunity creates the field of freedom, which predicts not a false security but the real human security we crave as deeply as we yearn to be free.
We are taught that to be safe, we must sacrifice our freedom. This is based on the now debunked concept that human nature is evil, greedy, violent, etc and that in order to be secure, we must constrain human liberty. We know from thousands of archaeological digs and anthropological studies that for most of human existence, the community was egalitarian, shared resources, and non-violent.
War, class society, slavery, and police, rulers, and gods arose with the Agricultural Revolution, when the existence of surpluses (and times of drought and deprivation) resulted in the creation of a form of government based not on mutual aid but of classes, including slaves and rulers, and the intermediaries such as the accountants and police who served the rulers.
With this new order, the old principles of equality, sharing, and peaceful relations were replaced with institutionalized inequality, private property, and raids and war. And with this new introduction of violence, a new theory of human nature emerged, claiming that we are, by nature, evil, greedy, violent. Christianity embraced and promoted this diseased concept, and the founders of modern political philosophy, from Hobbes to Burke and Hitler promoted the concept of an evil human nature, which was used to justify oppressive religion, ideology, and the instruments of torture, police power, and war as not only outlets for a bellicose nature, but, contradictorily, as a remedy. The absurdity that only violence could cure violence led to world wars in which tens of millions of innocents were slaughtered in pursuit of "national security."
Is freedom the opposite of security or the foundation?
But we need not go back to prehistory to find the principles which support human freedom--equality, mutual aid, and peaceful relations--and the freedom of being with those you know and trust and who treat you with equality and peace. We an study modern nations with sophisticated tools to examine the correlation between freedom and human development (human rights, education, healthcare, etc) and security. Keep in mind the distinction between the false security of the police state and the great armies, which have led only to slavery and war, and the true security which is found only in conjunction with freedom and enjoyment of human rights.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
