Allow me to mix topics: 1) Rules and situational ethics, 2) Civil disobedience, 3) Personal freedom, 4) Equity, and 5) Maybe some other stuff. If I were grading this as a college paper, I would comment that it tries to do too much without doing enough.
It’s the nature of government to impose rules. It’s the nature of rulers and their surrogates to refine rules by instituting more rules. In societies inundated by rules, no one is free except by defiance. Rule-breaking is, in part, an expression of personal freedom driven by selfishness and altruism. Contradictory, yes, but there. I said it. We break rules for ourselves; we break them for others.
Want a quick example of rules refined by more rules? The U. S. Constitution has 27 Amendments. You might ask, “Why didn’t the Founding Fathers think of those 27 rules when they wrote the Constitution?” And, to use an expression associated with the golden calf of Exodus 32:8, Holy Cow! Those Ten Commandments have been broken into “venal” and “mortal” sins, degrees of rule violations, so to speak. And Holy Cow Again, didn’t I just read that Pope Francis recently applied situation ethics to the Sixth Commandment when, referring to French cleric Michael Aupetit’s alleged dalliance, the Holy Father said, “It was a failing against the Sixth Commandment, but not a total one, one of the small caresses….” Yeah! Interpretations and re-interpretations of rules are the reasons for more refinement of rules. So, a selfish cleric defied a minor aspect of a major rule. He didn’t completely commit adultery. Reminds me of Bill Clinton’s, “I did not have sex with that woman.” We can use the Pope’s words to justify that oral sex and cigar sex aren’t sex and therefore violate no moral law.
Want an example of defiance that engendered a rule change? After struggling for years to get control of bootlegging and speak-easy black-market liquor sales, the government amended the Amendments, repealing the 18th Amendment in the end-of-prohibition 21st Amendment. Trying to force Americans to give up alcohol made drinking alcohol a matter of personal freedom. If you read the very first amendment, nay, when you look at the first ten amendments, you see the heart of the problem: Every one of those Amendments focuses in some way on freedom, making them, as we all know, The Bill of Rights.
American culture, born in an age of slavery, has been steeped ironically in the idea of freedom. From that famous Tea Party in Boston Harbor in the 18th century through the Civil War to the current defiance of mask and vaccine mandates in 2020 and 2021, Americans have balked at restrictions on their freedoms. But like steeping tea gradually and unnoticeably intensifying in a cup, rules become more intense with time, and freedom has become more diluted.
From where does the idea of freedom originate? It seems to have been on the minds of the Founding Fathers who banded together to break free from the English. Jefferson tied freedom to “unalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence. Among those rights: Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Or, for those who are growing up in an educational system that has abandoned writing script: the “pursuit of Happinefs”) Jefferson’s recognition of “happiness” has, over the course of 225 years, led to thinking among some that rules are in their very nature anti-happiness. Thus, over the course of the last 150 years anarchists have found a cause for turmoil in their anti-government demonstrations directed toward “those who ostensibly suppress personal freedoms.” Promising a better, happier world, Seattle’s anarchists replaced government rule with mob rule. But even anarchists discover the need for rule-making, as the recent debacle with its own armed militia in the city’s CHAZ demonstrated. And the product of CHAZ? Destruction of property, four woundings, and two homicides. Even loose rules are rules subject to defiance, and the promised happiness of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone crumbled in just 24 days.
The struggle between overlording government and freedom-seekers entered a new phase that Jefferson and his contemporaries did not foresee: The rise of Marxist and socialist ideologies that have been as repressive as any monarchy they knew. Nor could Jefferson and company have foreseen that the supposed motivation behind both Marxism and socialism, which promise enhanced happiness, lie ironically in interpreting equality as equity and in suppressing personal freedoms under rules, regulations, restrictions, and laws to guarantee that equity. For the Marxist and socialist, government’s imposed rules engender happiness and “freedom.”
Every new rule, regulation, restriction, or law comes with the pang born of hindsight: “Why didn’t we just do this, make a Bill of Rights, for example, in the first place? I had the feeling that this was going to happen, that is, that something unaccounted for or unexpected would show up.” Of course, there’s really no way to prove that one might have foreseen the need for refining or adding to such rules short of actually having made perfect (complete) rules at the outset.
As every generation discovers, it was born into a complex rule under which changing times apply pressures to revise. As every generation discovers, past laws just don’t account for realities of current circumstances. Commerce went from bartering to wholesale and retail in-person sales, to today’s online market cyber stores. Certainly, the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen a nation of fifty states and 330 million citizens that stretched across a continent and into the middle of the Pacific, all interconnected by electronic media. Certainly, they could not have anticipated a nation with territories as close as Puerto Rico and as far as Guam and Samoa and the globalization of the American economy. Certainly, they could not have anticipated any of the modern technologies, all of which are subject to some degree to laws that are built on previous laws, the Constitution, and those Amendments.
Two fictional stories before we proceed in this matter of rules vs freedom in an Age of Promised Equity:
First, “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. In the tale, an incredibly physically superior teenager with equal natural superiority of mind, must be handicapped by law. The revised Constitution imposes equity. In the tale, it’s the year 2081, and the U.S. has added amendments, 211 through 213 (CCxi-CCxiii) that prohibit any personal superiority. No spoiler here; just read the story.
Second, Lord of the Flies by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a novel with the premise that humans are “savages” whose savagery is restrained only by the dictates of civilization. If you recall the story, you’ll remember that during a time of war boys arrive on an island sans adults, try to organize, break into cliques, and revert to savagery that includes murder. They are “rescued” by neatly dressed sailors, semblances of civilization’s orderliness, whose business it is to break, injure, and kill. Seems humans are at heart heartless—at least in the eyes of Golding. The heartlessness manifests itself in the absence of cultural controls and in the presence of them. Think of “civilized and uniformed German soldiers” who oversaw the concentration camps.
A recounting of any war seems to support the notion that civilization is itself only a temporary restriction imposed on savagery. The restriction hasn’t worked very well, has it? I suppose that like the neatly dressed sailors in the novel, the neatly dressed and civilized Nazis simply masked their savagery. The bombing of London serves as evidence. And the civilized world’s solution to stop the Nazi bombing campaign was equally as savage: The bombing of German cities, including the fire-bomb destruction of Dresden, and the corollary bombing by Americans of Japanese cities, including the total nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stand as evidence that all civilized people can be “inhumane.” Savagery can wear suits and uniforms. Savagery can emanate from offices.
In an attempt to quash the innate savagery and selfishness that arises with unbridled freedom, our species has organized itself under rules imposed by governments large and small. On the surface, the organization is “for the greater good,” at least in the eyes of those in control, but rules multiply like rabbits in Australia and Kudzu vines in the American South. Rule-makers themselves can become unrestricted, and they often impose ever more refined restrictions under the influence of one faction or another. Laws pile on laws; restrictions pile on restrictions as government agencies acquire more control. The tea darkens. The sundry federal agencies beget state and local versions; the United States Environmental Protection Agency finds reflections of itself in state departments of environmental protection, county-level agencies, and even city departments.
The imposition of many rules and regulations that bury personal choice, usually engenders some form of rebellion as personal freedoms work their way back to the surface of humanity. Humans just can’t keep their hands off the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We’re all Adams and Eves unless we restrain ourselves or someone else restrains us. If there’s fruit to be had, someone will find a way to pick it. That innate defiance has manifested itself in contesting the many restrictions governments have imposed in response to the pandemic, restrictions imposed ostensibly for “the greater good.”
I found a story in the New Zealand Herald via the New York Post that I believe exemplifies why restrictions of any kind often succumb to the desire of individuals to do whatever they want on the basis of whatever they need at the moment. * Savagery will out. Clerics will do non-clerical things. Individuals will defy. At the very outset of the pandemic, the island nation of New Zealand imposed strict travel and other restrictions on its citizens. From the perspective of those in control, the government took actions “for the greater good.” Now, more than a year later, we can read a report about a New Zealander who received ten vaccination shots in a single day on behalf of people who did not want to be vaccinated. He took the shots for money; the people he represented got their fraudulent proof of vaccination. Small matter right? Isolated incidence of gaming the system?
No, not a small matter. It is, rather, an indication that restrictions, rules, and laws once imposed become dark waters rising to inundate an island of freedom. They shrink the living space. New Zealand is smaller because of those restrictions. Those on the land see a rising ocean of controls that limits their physical and mental spaces. And that inundation is one of the reasons that socialism with its many restrictions doesn’t work as its advocates intend. People, as we have seen from two giant migrations of Cubans in the last century, will build boats and leave to find freedom. Poor New Zealanders. They might have boats, but in sailing away, they might in a COVID world gone rule-happy, find no welcoming port unless they are vaccinated, masked, and willing to comply with freedom-crushing restrictions on movement, business, and even entertainment.
The thought that socialism and government-run-wild do not work because they impose restrictions in the name of “the greater good” and equity, however, is not mine alone. One of the best refutations of socialists’ arguments lies in words by Karl Popper, a reformed Marxist turned reformed socialist, who eventually recognized affront to individualism imposed by restrictions. The late philosopher of science writes in his autobiography:
“I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.” **
Back to our over-vaccinated New Zealander: Vaccinologist Helen Petrousis-Harris called his behavior and the behavior of those who paid him “unbelievably selfish.” He needed money; the people who paid him took advantage of his need to fulfill their desire to remain unvaccinated. The scam was a defiance of policies and rules imposed for “the greater good” of New Zealanders.
In efforts to force humans into egalitarianism, socialists, Marxists, and Fascists promise much from the rules they impose. But the cost to individuals eventually makes them like the boys in Lord of the Flies, more savage and selfish as restrictions, rules, and laws shrink their world. The examples of gaming the system and defiance of the laws abound, with rum runners during Prohibition to drug cartels during the War on Drugs to people trying to escape such governments throughout the world and throughout the twentieth century and even the current century.
But socialists, Fascists, and Marxists will never learn that their burgeoning restrictions, regardless of their purpose to serve the “greater good,” will eventually run headlong into personal needs and desires. As Popper also writes, “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.” They also produce a world in which the common good itself can be threatened. Think armies, police, and first responders. The U.S. military would rather weaken itself by releasing soldiers who defied the order to be vaccinated than to maintain its current strength in experienced soldiers. Cities would rather reduce their police forces by the number of unvaccinated and reduce their fire departments by those unvaccinated rather than maintain the level of protection found in pre-COVID years.
Find yourself on a shrinking island of personal freedoms today? Do you also find that innate savagery starting to emerge, if not in you, then in others?
Or, instead, do you find yourself to be compliant with whatever rules the government imposes on your life? Remember my question about the origin of freedom? Think ancient Greece for a moment. Isn’t that the place you associate with the rise of democracy? True, it was limited just as American freedom was limited before the Emancipation Proclamation. Greeks also owned slaves. Personal freedom was not an absolute and universal principle in ancient Greece, but in December, 2021Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis made what he called a “tortured” decision to impose a mid-January, 2022, law requiring everyone over 60 to get a shot or face a monthly fine of 100 euros ($112). Yet, at the time of this writing in late 2020, fewer that two-thirds of the general population is vaccinated.
Freedom in Greece? The average monthly pension for elderly Greeks is 720 euros ($823). Ask yourself whether you would be willing to relinquish an eighth of your income because you don’t wish to be vaccinated, maybe, for example, because you have already had and recovered from the disease, maybe because you believe you have a good chance of surviving the disease but that even if your chance is slim, you prefer to make a decision freely. Strange that in a world where some governments accept euthanasia, capital punishment, and abortion, there is a push “to save everybody.”
Contrast the two kinds of defiance here. One guy in New Zealand gets ten shots in a day to make money and help others defy the vaccine mandate; some 520,000 elderly Greeks are forced by law to get a shot or face fines. Ah! Egalitarianism. Ah! Socialism, Fascism, and Marxism. What could possibly go wrong when all of us are treated equally in the name of equity? What could possibly go wrong when rules are imposed for “the common good”?
You want my answers? Defiance born of both selfishness and altruism: there will be elderly Greeks who will defy the law individually and in groups by finding some way to avoid the vaccine just as ten New Zealanders found a way. That underlying savagery of Golding’s novel surfaces and manifests itself in individual freedom whenever civilization becomes a self-perpetuating system of proliferating rules, regulations, restrictions, and laws. That sense of personal freedom also emerges when those subjected to such rules see that the rulers and their surrogates exempt themselves from the rules, as the US President, the Speaker of the House, a number of their supporting celebrities, the now notorious British Christmas party-goers at 10 Downing Street during the lockdown, the maskless and social proximity of the California governor dining with friends during a period of social restrictions, and, to use that expression that refers to the golden calf in Exodus, Holy Cow! a number of other “officials” who defied their own rules.
Note:
*New York Post. 11 Dec. 2021 (New Zealand Herald. news.com.au). Online at https://nypost.com/2021/12/11/man-takes-10-covid-vaccine-shots-in-single-day/. Accessed December 12, 2021.
**Popper, Karl R. 1985. Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. Chicago. Open Court. Originally published as “The Autobiography off Karl Popper” in the Philosophy of Karl Popper by Schilpp, Paul Arthur. Ed. The Library of Living Philosophers.
It’s the nature of government to impose rules. It’s the nature of rulers and their surrogates to refine rules by instituting more rules. In societies inundated by rules, no one is free except by defiance. Rule-breaking is, in part, an expression of personal freedom driven by selfishness and altruism. Contradictory, yes, but there. I said it. We break rules for ourselves; we break them for others.
Want a quick example of rules refined by more rules? The U. S. Constitution has 27 Amendments. You might ask, “Why didn’t the Founding Fathers think of those 27 rules when they wrote the Constitution?” And, to use an expression associated with the golden calf of Exodus 32:8, Holy Cow! Those Ten Commandments have been broken into “venal” and “mortal” sins, degrees of rule violations, so to speak. And Holy Cow Again, didn’t I just read that Pope Francis recently applied situation ethics to the Sixth Commandment when, referring to French cleric Michael Aupetit’s alleged dalliance, the Holy Father said, “It was a failing against the Sixth Commandment, but not a total one, one of the small caresses….” Yeah! Interpretations and re-interpretations of rules are the reasons for more refinement of rules. So, a selfish cleric defied a minor aspect of a major rule. He didn’t completely commit adultery. Reminds me of Bill Clinton’s, “I did not have sex with that woman.” We can use the Pope’s words to justify that oral sex and cigar sex aren’t sex and therefore violate no moral law.
Want an example of defiance that engendered a rule change? After struggling for years to get control of bootlegging and speak-easy black-market liquor sales, the government amended the Amendments, repealing the 18th Amendment in the end-of-prohibition 21st Amendment. Trying to force Americans to give up alcohol made drinking alcohol a matter of personal freedom. If you read the very first amendment, nay, when you look at the first ten amendments, you see the heart of the problem: Every one of those Amendments focuses in some way on freedom, making them, as we all know, The Bill of Rights.
American culture, born in an age of slavery, has been steeped ironically in the idea of freedom. From that famous Tea Party in Boston Harbor in the 18th century through the Civil War to the current defiance of mask and vaccine mandates in 2020 and 2021, Americans have balked at restrictions on their freedoms. But like steeping tea gradually and unnoticeably intensifying in a cup, rules become more intense with time, and freedom has become more diluted.
From where does the idea of freedom originate? It seems to have been on the minds of the Founding Fathers who banded together to break free from the English. Jefferson tied freedom to “unalienable rights” in the Declaration of Independence. Among those rights: Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. (Or, for those who are growing up in an educational system that has abandoned writing script: the “pursuit of Happinefs”) Jefferson’s recognition of “happiness” has, over the course of 225 years, led to thinking among some that rules are in their very nature anti-happiness. Thus, over the course of the last 150 years anarchists have found a cause for turmoil in their anti-government demonstrations directed toward “those who ostensibly suppress personal freedoms.” Promising a better, happier world, Seattle’s anarchists replaced government rule with mob rule. But even anarchists discover the need for rule-making, as the recent debacle with its own armed militia in the city’s CHAZ demonstrated. And the product of CHAZ? Destruction of property, four woundings, and two homicides. Even loose rules are rules subject to defiance, and the promised happiness of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone crumbled in just 24 days.
The struggle between overlording government and freedom-seekers entered a new phase that Jefferson and his contemporaries did not foresee: The rise of Marxist and socialist ideologies that have been as repressive as any monarchy they knew. Nor could Jefferson and company have foreseen that the supposed motivation behind both Marxism and socialism, which promise enhanced happiness, lie ironically in interpreting equality as equity and in suppressing personal freedoms under rules, regulations, restrictions, and laws to guarantee that equity. For the Marxist and socialist, government’s imposed rules engender happiness and “freedom.”
Every new rule, regulation, restriction, or law comes with the pang born of hindsight: “Why didn’t we just do this, make a Bill of Rights, for example, in the first place? I had the feeling that this was going to happen, that is, that something unaccounted for or unexpected would show up.” Of course, there’s really no way to prove that one might have foreseen the need for refining or adding to such rules short of actually having made perfect (complete) rules at the outset.
As every generation discovers, it was born into a complex rule under which changing times apply pressures to revise. As every generation discovers, past laws just don’t account for realities of current circumstances. Commerce went from bartering to wholesale and retail in-person sales, to today’s online market cyber stores. Certainly, the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen a nation of fifty states and 330 million citizens that stretched across a continent and into the middle of the Pacific, all interconnected by electronic media. Certainly, they could not have anticipated a nation with territories as close as Puerto Rico and as far as Guam and Samoa and the globalization of the American economy. Certainly, they could not have anticipated any of the modern technologies, all of which are subject to some degree to laws that are built on previous laws, the Constitution, and those Amendments.
Two fictional stories before we proceed in this matter of rules vs freedom in an Age of Promised Equity:
First, “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. In the tale, an incredibly physically superior teenager with equal natural superiority of mind, must be handicapped by law. The revised Constitution imposes equity. In the tale, it’s the year 2081, and the U.S. has added amendments, 211 through 213 (CCxi-CCxiii) that prohibit any personal superiority. No spoiler here; just read the story.
Second, Lord of the Flies by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a novel with the premise that humans are “savages” whose savagery is restrained only by the dictates of civilization. If you recall the story, you’ll remember that during a time of war boys arrive on an island sans adults, try to organize, break into cliques, and revert to savagery that includes murder. They are “rescued” by neatly dressed sailors, semblances of civilization’s orderliness, whose business it is to break, injure, and kill. Seems humans are at heart heartless—at least in the eyes of Golding. The heartlessness manifests itself in the absence of cultural controls and in the presence of them. Think of “civilized and uniformed German soldiers” who oversaw the concentration camps.
A recounting of any war seems to support the notion that civilization is itself only a temporary restriction imposed on savagery. The restriction hasn’t worked very well, has it? I suppose that like the neatly dressed sailors in the novel, the neatly dressed and civilized Nazis simply masked their savagery. The bombing of London serves as evidence. And the civilized world’s solution to stop the Nazi bombing campaign was equally as savage: The bombing of German cities, including the fire-bomb destruction of Dresden, and the corollary bombing by Americans of Japanese cities, including the total nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stand as evidence that all civilized people can be “inhumane.” Savagery can wear suits and uniforms. Savagery can emanate from offices.
In an attempt to quash the innate savagery and selfishness that arises with unbridled freedom, our species has organized itself under rules imposed by governments large and small. On the surface, the organization is “for the greater good,” at least in the eyes of those in control, but rules multiply like rabbits in Australia and Kudzu vines in the American South. Rule-makers themselves can become unrestricted, and they often impose ever more refined restrictions under the influence of one faction or another. Laws pile on laws; restrictions pile on restrictions as government agencies acquire more control. The tea darkens. The sundry federal agencies beget state and local versions; the United States Environmental Protection Agency finds reflections of itself in state departments of environmental protection, county-level agencies, and even city departments.
The imposition of many rules and regulations that bury personal choice, usually engenders some form of rebellion as personal freedoms work their way back to the surface of humanity. Humans just can’t keep their hands off the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We’re all Adams and Eves unless we restrain ourselves or someone else restrains us. If there’s fruit to be had, someone will find a way to pick it. That innate defiance has manifested itself in contesting the many restrictions governments have imposed in response to the pandemic, restrictions imposed ostensibly for “the greater good.”
I found a story in the New Zealand Herald via the New York Post that I believe exemplifies why restrictions of any kind often succumb to the desire of individuals to do whatever they want on the basis of whatever they need at the moment. * Savagery will out. Clerics will do non-clerical things. Individuals will defy. At the very outset of the pandemic, the island nation of New Zealand imposed strict travel and other restrictions on its citizens. From the perspective of those in control, the government took actions “for the greater good.” Now, more than a year later, we can read a report about a New Zealander who received ten vaccination shots in a single day on behalf of people who did not want to be vaccinated. He took the shots for money; the people he represented got their fraudulent proof of vaccination. Small matter right? Isolated incidence of gaming the system?
No, not a small matter. It is, rather, an indication that restrictions, rules, and laws once imposed become dark waters rising to inundate an island of freedom. They shrink the living space. New Zealand is smaller because of those restrictions. Those on the land see a rising ocean of controls that limits their physical and mental spaces. And that inundation is one of the reasons that socialism with its many restrictions doesn’t work as its advocates intend. People, as we have seen from two giant migrations of Cubans in the last century, will build boats and leave to find freedom. Poor New Zealanders. They might have boats, but in sailing away, they might in a COVID world gone rule-happy, find no welcoming port unless they are vaccinated, masked, and willing to comply with freedom-crushing restrictions on movement, business, and even entertainment.
The thought that socialism and government-run-wild do not work because they impose restrictions in the name of “the greater good” and equity, however, is not mine alone. One of the best refutations of socialists’ arguments lies in words by Karl Popper, a reformed Marxist turned reformed socialist, who eventually recognized affront to individualism imposed by restrictions. The late philosopher of science writes in his autobiography:
“I remained a socialist for several years, even after my rejection of Marxism; and if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple, and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.” **
Back to our over-vaccinated New Zealander: Vaccinologist Helen Petrousis-Harris called his behavior and the behavior of those who paid him “unbelievably selfish.” He needed money; the people who paid him took advantage of his need to fulfill their desire to remain unvaccinated. The scam was a defiance of policies and rules imposed for “the greater good” of New Zealanders.
In efforts to force humans into egalitarianism, socialists, Marxists, and Fascists promise much from the rules they impose. But the cost to individuals eventually makes them like the boys in Lord of the Flies, more savage and selfish as restrictions, rules, and laws shrink their world. The examples of gaming the system and defiance of the laws abound, with rum runners during Prohibition to drug cartels during the War on Drugs to people trying to escape such governments throughout the world and throughout the twentieth century and even the current century.
But socialists, Fascists, and Marxists will never learn that their burgeoning restrictions, regardless of their purpose to serve the “greater good,” will eventually run headlong into personal needs and desires. As Popper also writes, “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.” They also produce a world in which the common good itself can be threatened. Think armies, police, and first responders. The U.S. military would rather weaken itself by releasing soldiers who defied the order to be vaccinated than to maintain its current strength in experienced soldiers. Cities would rather reduce their police forces by the number of unvaccinated and reduce their fire departments by those unvaccinated rather than maintain the level of protection found in pre-COVID years.
Find yourself on a shrinking island of personal freedoms today? Do you also find that innate savagery starting to emerge, if not in you, then in others?
Or, instead, do you find yourself to be compliant with whatever rules the government imposes on your life? Remember my question about the origin of freedom? Think ancient Greece for a moment. Isn’t that the place you associate with the rise of democracy? True, it was limited just as American freedom was limited before the Emancipation Proclamation. Greeks also owned slaves. Personal freedom was not an absolute and universal principle in ancient Greece, but in December, 2021Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis made what he called a “tortured” decision to impose a mid-January, 2022, law requiring everyone over 60 to get a shot or face a monthly fine of 100 euros ($112). Yet, at the time of this writing in late 2020, fewer that two-thirds of the general population is vaccinated.
Freedom in Greece? The average monthly pension for elderly Greeks is 720 euros ($823). Ask yourself whether you would be willing to relinquish an eighth of your income because you don’t wish to be vaccinated, maybe, for example, because you have already had and recovered from the disease, maybe because you believe you have a good chance of surviving the disease but that even if your chance is slim, you prefer to make a decision freely. Strange that in a world where some governments accept euthanasia, capital punishment, and abortion, there is a push “to save everybody.”
Contrast the two kinds of defiance here. One guy in New Zealand gets ten shots in a day to make money and help others defy the vaccine mandate; some 520,000 elderly Greeks are forced by law to get a shot or face fines. Ah! Egalitarianism. Ah! Socialism, Fascism, and Marxism. What could possibly go wrong when all of us are treated equally in the name of equity? What could possibly go wrong when rules are imposed for “the common good”?
You want my answers? Defiance born of both selfishness and altruism: there will be elderly Greeks who will defy the law individually and in groups by finding some way to avoid the vaccine just as ten New Zealanders found a way. That underlying savagery of Golding’s novel surfaces and manifests itself in individual freedom whenever civilization becomes a self-perpetuating system of proliferating rules, regulations, restrictions, and laws. That sense of personal freedom also emerges when those subjected to such rules see that the rulers and their surrogates exempt themselves from the rules, as the US President, the Speaker of the House, a number of their supporting celebrities, the now notorious British Christmas party-goers at 10 Downing Street during the lockdown, the maskless and social proximity of the California governor dining with friends during a period of social restrictions, and, to use that expression that refers to the golden calf in Exodus, Holy Cow! a number of other “officials” who defied their own rules.
Note:
*New York Post. 11 Dec. 2021 (New Zealand Herald. news.com.au). Online at https://nypost.com/2021/12/11/man-takes-10-covid-vaccine-shots-in-single-day/. Accessed December 12, 2021.
**Popper, Karl R. 1985. Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. Chicago. Open Court. Originally published as “The Autobiography off Karl Popper” in the Philosophy of Karl Popper by Schilpp, Paul Arthur. Ed. The Library of Living Philosophers.
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