Freedom and the Four Freedoms

Boe Meyerson gave a talk on freedom today at Ethical Culture, and made some interesting distinctions– external coercion or no coercion from internation freedom which may be best
had through knowledge and disciplined ( an idea from the Western tradition) or through self-rule (an idea of Gandhi).


I realized as she was talking that when people wave the flag about Freedom, they want each of us to have our own emotional image of freedom, and mine is an image of myself at six bursting out of my repressive old school on a sunny June day. The sun is in my face, and wind, and I am free free free! It’s an ecstatic feeling, but of course what is happening is not that I am going wild, but rather that I am using my legs naturally, at will, to walk or skip or run, to read a book or play with my parakeet or tease my sister: a whole world of activities that I’ve been trammelled and unable to do. Sometimes, of course, we think we are free– we do exactly as we please– and we are actually doing things we are being forced to do internatlly– addictions to, say, alcohol or love. Or things we’ve been trained to do like shop.

I drifted a little, thought of the line from the song, “Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose...” And then there were Roosevelt’s rather wonderful political four four freedoms, and how long since George Bush ever imagined anything as graceful as these?

From Roosevelt’s speech Jan 1941:

“The first is freedom of speech and expression --everywhere in the world.

“The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-- everywhere in the world.

“The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants --everywhere in the world.

“The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor --anywhere in the wold. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called "new order" of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

Freedom from fear? They delight in fear as a way of controlling us.