Freedom is not confusing

[Alan Forrester]

Bruce Caithness on Facebook:

> Boundary rules are liberating for children, there are few things more confusing than being left as a free agent.

Bullshit. If you're free then you can just act on the ideas you
understand and decline to act in other situations. So then you're not
confused about what to do. You either do stuff or learn more about
what to do before acting.

What is confusing is being dumped in a situation where you are
expected to act despite your lack of understanding. This is inevitable
in coercive education because the people "educating" you don't allow
you to refuse to do stuff. So you will end up acting in situations
where you are confused.

An illustration:

> I had some slight experience with this when I worked for some eight years with autistic children and adults. We found behaviour modification techniques were appropriate for helping them gain a grip on their dangerous and confusing umwelts. Freedom has a dark side.

The autistic people are people who just behave in some way some
psychiatrist hates and he wants to force them to learn to behave
differently. These "autistic" people may feel confused, but that's
because somebody is forcing them to do stuff they don't want to do.

Alan

[Michael Smithson]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 4:27 PM, Alan Forrester
<alanmichae...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Bruce Caithness on Facebook:
>
>> Boundary rules are liberating for children, there are few things more confusing than being left as a free agent.
>

A few thoughts:
1. "Boundary rules" is a silly euphemism. You might reasonably have
boundary rules for a game, delineating what is and what is not out of
bounds in order to better facilitate the game. What's under discussion
here, though, are not rules on a limited game, to which the
participants are all consenting parties and which rules are designed
to enhance fun and enjoyment, but "boundary rules" on LIFE, and in
particular, the life of a small, helpless child who is to suffer these
rules, who cannot object or dissent or resist lest he be punished. In
other words, naked force in order to coerce the helpless according to
the whim of a petty tyrant. "Compulsion is liberating" is the meaning
of the statement "boundary rules are liberating for children."

2. There's nothing in the logic of such a statement as "Boundary rules
are liberating" which limits its application to children. Such a
limitation is artificial and unprincipled. If boundary rules are
liberating for children, why not for adults too? Do not many adults in
fact experience suffering from the confusion of being left as a free
agent?

3. In so far as we can describe the statement as "compulsion is
liberating", which I think is fair, it reminds me of the following bit
from the Fountainhead:

>“THE BASIC TROUBLE WITH THE MODERN WORLD,” SAID ELLSWORTH Toohey, ”is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.