George Lakoff's Whose Freedom?

Summary:
Lakaoff, ever the interested scholar of language—having previously tackled the metaphorical nature of thought in Metaphors We Live By—herein submits that a loaded word like freedom, cannot pass by without being analyzed. Both conservative and leftist politicians use the word freedom, but the word takes opposite meanings.

Definitions and Questions for Freedom

Basically there is a "freedom to" and a "freedom from." (78)

For example, FDR gave a speech, famously called the Four Freedoms Speech and he defined freedom as being freedom from necessity, want, hunger and fear. (7) FDR also said that freedom does not exist in the absence of opportunity (76).

The USA is committed to spreading freedom. But what kind of freedom? For who? (17)

Linguistic threats to Lakoff's type of leftist freedom

These fall into general categories that I would best describe as

•overuse - the word freedom simply gets used too much and loses all meaning, like how revolution, once a technical meaning, is now used by Verizon and many other companies to describe weekend sales "A price revolution...this weekend at select stores"

Vagueness - words tend to mean different things to different people. Certain words are loaded. Even specific words like "over" are subject to many different meanings.

Overuse

Repetition is a great way to evacuate dangerous words of any type of subversive or intelligible meaning.

Case in point. Consider the name Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. (6)
MT: The name Operation Enduring Freedom recursively gets Lakoff's point across about how freedom means different things to different political persuasions. With a name like that it is easy to ask, "Is freedom something that will endure," or "Is freedom something that must be endured?"

Vagueness

Words mean things and that is the problem. They tend to mean too much. A simple word like "over" has over 100 distinct meanings. (22). MT/MQ: So imagine how many meanings freedom has. This reminds me of Toni Morrison who said that nobody knows what anybody means when they talk about love because to some it means lust, to others it means something that looks awfully like abuse.

Take a word like art. Everybody knows what art is right? Lakoff suggests that to even begin, first you have to categorize art in some way. So you could use traditional categories like Dada, realism etc. For example if you show a realist painter canned shit like Piero Manzoni did. The artist shit into little cans, tinned them and sold them to investors as "Freshly canned shit of the artist." People gobbled them up. Of course the artist had really smart reasons and directed social criticism toward buyers, but many were not capable of understanding. Likewise if you tell a realist that Manzoni's work is art, a more traditional artist would disagree and not be able to recognize it as art. Likewise, if you tell a conservative what you mean by freedom, they don't even really understand.

A right wing view of freedom focuses on individual freedom (25). In other words, interference with individual liberty— usually by the government— is a crimp in the great hose of freedom. It actually would make sense that if you can afford to do whatever you want, that lax tax laws would benefit you.

Additional

Roussau and the Social Contract

Social contract is a metaphor where absolute freedom is traded for security. For example airplane searches are like a part of the social contract. You give up a little personal space in order to bring about greater safety. So there is a give and take. Rousseau thought that humans exchanged absolute freedom for freedom within the social order. (49)

Taxation pays to build and maintain the commonwealth (81).

Civil Disobedience

Like the social contract, civil disobedience is invoked frequently by progressives. The main idea is that, within social systems, following long periods after revolutions or chaotic events, the guardians of states tend to become corrupt (50). It then becomes necessary to disobey. Disobedience takes a number of forms, but can be divided into two main forms: Violent/Nonviolent. MLK was an advocate of the latter, whereas somebody like Angela Davis advocates the former. Davis thought that periodic, loud bursts of violents were necessary to expiate and to cleanse the guardians.

Why freedom, whatever it means to you, is important

Unhappy and unfulfilled people tend to not want others to be happy, so they bring people who are moving along nicely down, or try to bring them down to their level (75). To be empathetic it requires that people are able to feel fulfilled at some level (75). It's interesting that in America, basically the economic engine is greased through greed and coveting. God said, don't covet your neighbors wife, so people kept doing that and started coveting things like jet skis and homes that can safely house a small airplane inside of them. So to be happy, this might be another case of, it's important to have freedom from something. In this case freedom from the desire to always "upgrade." It is easier to get rid of this desire by removing from sight the images and sensory harmonics that cause desire.

Lakoff sees empathy as the basis of the progressive worldview (85). He describes Buddhism and Taoism as being major religions of empathy (86). Lakoff thinks that the companion of empathy is responsibility (86). Under a feudal society, lords had a paternal relationship to their workers. As states started to form, Kings still had a vestige of paternal care, but one who is father to all, is father to none. States at some point grow too big for empathy to check excess. States with a lot of ethnic and cultural homogeneity like Sweden and Norway seem to have effective state systems. Other states that have opened the doors to migration and neoliberal trade policies have always found it hard to pass genuinely empathetic legislation. As transnational companies have been able to set up shop in other countries, should we really be suprised that they pollute those environments and extract resources at the cheapest possible cost? Being commited to a certain land and people is absolutely a precursor for empathetic action.

Taxation

Hurrican Katrina was interesting because the social contract part of the state, FEMA, was defunded by tax breaks for the wealthy and also diverted to pay for war. So it raised the question, "what are we paying taxes for? (83).

Low income workers uphold the lifestyles of nearly 3/4 of the American population.