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Freedom from want and freedom from fear, as FDR put it, are not freedom but security expressed as freedom.
Reminds me of the quite commonly expressed notion over the last decade all the way to today, that censorship of wrongthink is required for free speech, because for women/POCs/LGBTQ+/etc. to have free speech, they must be free from other people expressing opinions that "make them feel unsafe" or "deny their humanity/basic rights/existence/etc." Another case of people smashing a square peg through a round hole because the roundness is what's been declared as sacred.
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It shouldn’t be any surprise to you I don’t agree with his ideology. An insecure population isn’t one that lives freely either. What the hell kind of freedom is it if I can’t walk outside my door without getting accosted by a criminal? Reminds me of the reaction ordinary Russians had of communism when they saw the plenty and relative abundance Americans lived in when compared with their own. The communists said, “But that’s exploitation…,” and the people shouted back “If that’s exploitation we want to be exploited!”
Who cares what FDR thought? (Damn… that’s deep dawg.)
Freedom isn't something handed to you. It's something you're able to hold onto on your own. When you try to give it to everyone whether they can hold it or not, you don't actually spread freedom around. You change what the word means until it fits people who can't carry the real thing, and what you're left with is safety, or dependence, with the word "freedom" stuck on top.
If somebody can grant you your freedom, then somebody can take it back. That isn't freedom. It's permission, and permission always comes from a person standing over you. A freedom you have to be given is just a nicer word for being managed.
What you're describing isn't freedom for everyone. It's a guy who can't count on anyone to protect him and isn't allowed to protect himself, being told that's what free feels like.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that living with the mentality that I have to be prepared to “take” my freedom for myself at any moment is true freedom in any way I should find desirable. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but I don’t fetishize the concept the way people do in the west. In Scandinavia you have a right to roam that doesn’t exist in the US. In China you have the freedom to be publicly intoxicated without running afoul of the law. In France you have a protected and enforced “right to disconnect” from your employer, ignoring any communications from them after hours. These are freedoms that don’t exist in the US.
There comes a point where I really don’t care whatever someone wants to call it. Call it whatever you want. I’m a results driven guy. If someone wants to come along and drop some “profound” deepity a famous American president once said, with his arms crossed and a grin on his face he can do that; does that change the reality of the situation?
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