I saw someone today who wore a t-shirt on which was quoted "Won't you help me sing these songs of freedom" attributed to Bob Marley. It's a lyric from Marley's "The Redemption Song".
We were standing on line together to get coffee so I asked him if he just liked the song and the shirt, or if he was making a point.
He said "yeah I wear this to show that I'm against war. I'm for peace and freedom."
I said: "Oh. Small regular coffee please?"
His response got me thinking especially within the context of this song which begins:
Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit.
But my hand was made strong
By the 'and of the Almighty.
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly.
Won't you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
'Cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.
Now it's pretty clear that this song is about the longing for freedom. Freedom from whom? Freedom from oppressors. Even when Marley expands his theme into the philosophical, he is talking about fighting for freedom:
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear for atomic energy,
'Cause none of them can stop the time
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look
Oh! Some say it's just a part of it:
We've got to fulfill de book.
Won't you help me sing
these songs of freedom
These are sentiments I agree with: freedom takes work, effort, and vigilence.
Points that were lost on my young t-shirt wearing friend.
You see, his "world-view" assumes that freedom and peace are the natural state of things. This is incorrect: peace and freedom is not the natural order of things, it is very much the exception to the natural order of things.
The natural order of things is domination of the weak by the strong. And while it is quite true that the result of domination can be "peace", it often comes at the price of freedom.
There was peace within Yugoslavia under Tito; but there was no freedom.
There was peace within the Soviet Union; but there was no freedom.
There is peace within China; but there is no freedom.
There is peace within North Korea, but there is no freedom.
And while peace and freedom are not mutually exclusive, they certainly do not mix easily. I like to think of them as oil and water; to get them to combine you need an emulsifier.
In our case, the emulsifier is a constitutional democracy.
But this is a very sophisticated political instrument. This is not something that just arises naturally. Things tend towards disorder, science teaches us; towards maximum entropy. To combat entropy - chaos - one must expend energy to enforce order. Your living space, if unattended, will just get messier until such time as you expend energy to clean it and restore order.
Oil and water don't mix because at the point where they meet, entropy is at a maximum:
The reason oil and water don’t mix is that the entropy of the system is a maximum (the disorder is as great as it can be).
For freedom and peace to co-exist, one must expend energy to combat entropy.
We must work hard to allow peace and freedom to exist.
Freedom without peace is easy: Somalia is a good example. It's what the anarchists want.
Peace without freedom is not much more difficult; it only takes random examples of absolute power to keep people in line. There are numerous historical examples of this from Stalin to Saddam.
To achieve peace and freedom on a global scale also requires effort and vigilence.
You can not achieve this by simply espousing a philosophy of peace under all circumstances because if left unattended, you will lose either peace or freedom as the system tends towards maximum entropy (chaos).
And maximum entropy always results in peace: the peace of the dead. The ultimate crystalization of society where no creativity or deviation from norms is permitted.
Those who espouse the politics of peace embrace, unknowingly, the politics of chaos.
The politics of Death
