Source: Chaoyang Shaoxia
Freedom is a good thing, but only if it is "good freedom."
Chinese attitude toward freedom is mostly rational and pragmatic, attaching importance to and not worshiping, and using "freedom" to solve development problems, rather than talking about any kind of doctrine. Infinite exaltation, deification of freedom, becomes an unconstrained and unquestionable dogma, and freedom will go to its opposite, from paranoia to disaster. This is exactly what the United States has experienced.
Let's speak with facts and look at the four catastrophes of American freedom:
Recently, American elites have frequently expressed a sense of crisis in freedom, fearing that the pandemic is weakening the world's belief in American-style freedom. This year is also the 20th anniversary of the "9/11" incident in the United States, the 20th anniversary of the Us war in Afghanistan, and the 10th year of the "Arab Spring", coupled with the lessons of the epidemic response, 2021 should become a historical opportunity for the West to reflect on the tragedy of freedom and jointly build the value of freedom for all mankind.
In the 2018 battlefield in Afghanistan, an unexploded rocket accidentally exploded, killing 3 of hamisha Gul's 10 children and disabling all 7 others.
On the battlefields of Afghanistan, exhausted American soldiers snoozed during night operations.
The new US administration has repeatedly said from the time of the election campaign that "the United States needs to reflect." But what is surprising is that the so-called introspection in the United States is not correction and tolerance, but the fear of the collapse of the statue of freedom, which is further paranoid and radical.
The United States withdrew its troops from Afghanistan in near-haste, abandoned its promise to establish a paradise of freedom and democracy, and did not have a single explanation or apology to the Afghan people. The United States is also bombing civilians in Syria in the name of "freedom", without any introspection or guilt about the millions and millions of lives and displacements of the Arab Spring.
The United States is trumpeting vaccines as a triumph of the liberal system, and the blame for all the failures in the fight against the epidemic is on Trump, who is "anti-liberal democracy." What is even more frightening is that when the United States is hoarding too many vaccines and allies and partners have no seedlings to fight, young people in these countries are paying a terrible price in their lives for refusing to strictly prevent the epidemic and practicing an American-style free way of life.
"American freedom" is actually a "freedom" built on a sea of corpses and guns and gunpowder.
Most frighteningly, the United States is preparing with great enthusiasm and resources for the Global Democracy Summit. It is foreseeable that it will be a religious ceremony, and the United States has accepted the test of the epidemic of the "god of freedom" and once again stands in front of the door of God who "ends history".
The only thing that the United States needs to "reflect" on is that The Americans' belief in freedom is not absolute and thorough enough, that the world is not religious and fanatical enough for American freedom, and that more and more countries are beginning to question the "only God" of American freedom. amen! Freedom protects the United States, and america ends history!
Freedom is a major pillar of America's founding spirit. But today, American freedom has gradually faded, deformed, out of shape, and disillusioned.
Hayek once wrote a book, "Fatal Conceit", which emphasized the need to guard against the absolute rationality of extreme conceit, there is no universal institutional design in the world, and good institutions must naturally grow in the practice of all peoples.
Seeking truth from facts, practice is the only criterion for testing truth, and always maintaining humility in the face of practice is a kind of wisdom. At that time, Hayek criticized the rigidity of the Soviet system, while today's United States is following the old path of the late Soviet Union, unable to extricate itself from the self-cleverness of "universal values" and sinking deeper and deeper into the fatal conceit.
Since the dawn of civilization, human beings have been exploring freedom. In the traditional society of material poverty, freedom is sought from within rather than from the outside, and the essence lies in achieving the state of freedom of "not exceeding the rules of the heart" (Confucianism), "getaway" (Taoism), and "great freedom" (Buddhism) through the moral life of self-cultivation and self-denial.
The same is true in the West, where the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates said that self-control and goodness are freedom. In early modern Europe, the tradition was still continuing, Kant said that "freedom is self-discipline", and Hegel said that "discipline is the first condition of freedom".
Puritan immigrants, the source of the American spirit, were known for their "abstinence." At the end of the 19th century, the sociologist Weber systematically argued with a "Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism" that the ethical spirit of self-discipline and temperance played a decisive role in the prosperity of the West.
Today, however, American freedom has completely turned its back on self-discipline. In the name of false freedom, all disciplines and norms are deconstructed to a degree of irrationality and even absurdity.
After the outbreak last year, young people in the West ignored lockdown orders, did not wear masks, did not maintain social distancing, held parties and carnivals, and activists even took guns to demonstrate outside city halls to protest the lockdown measures, claiming that the blockade had taken away their freedom. Some brainless youth have also launched an incredible "challenge" on the Internet, going to the toilet to lick the toilet lid, actively "embracing" the virus, and showing their ignorant and fearless image of a free person.
On March 11, 2020, about 70 Texas-Austin University students insisted on using spring break to vacation and gather at the beach in Florida despite the surge in covid-19 cases in the United States, and 44 of the students were diagnosed after returning.
In March 2020, Ava Louise, a 22-year-old American Internet celebrity, posted a video on social media licking the toilet lid on a plane, calling on everyone to follow their own initiative to launch the "new crown virus challenge", and some imitators posted similar videos and tested positive for the new crown virus just two days later.
The anti-ethics of American freedom has been a cause for widespread concern as early as the 1970s and 1980s. President Carter warned Americans that America had been captured by a vast emptiness and had become a "slave to self-indulgence and consumerism."
But the victory of the Cold War changed the perception of americans, the United States was worried that the Soviet Union used the sexual liberation movement and AIDS, VEDs to attack the American liberal system, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, worry became pride, challenging traditional marriage, family, social ethics instead produced a sense of progress and high-level towards the end of history.
Today, sexual freedom has reached the point of freedom of sex trade and freedom of sexual work, and many states in the United States have legalized prostitution. The proliferation of pornography has led to a proliferation of out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families in the United States. Epstein, a wealthy American businessman, has mysteriously died, but the scandal of the sexual assault club in which he was involved is still further fermenting.
Last December, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to legalize marijuana at the federal level. Many Chinese in the United States have had this experience, and when they teach their children to stay away from marijuana pills and early sexual behavior, they are often under the pressure of being discriminated against, and are regarded as a conservative and backward Asian authoritarian.
"Etiquette, righteousness, and shame, the fourth dimension of the kingdom." If the four dimensions are not open, the kingdom will perish." Ethics and progress are not in conflict, self-discipline and freedom are not opposites, when American freedom reaches the point of disregarding shame, there is no progress, only degeneration!
If American freedom has done some good things, it is the market economy that once promoted free competition. More than a hundred years ago, in order to ensure market competition, the United States introduced a series of anti-monopoly laws to combat oligarchs, and promoted the establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization after World War II, promoting the principles of free competition and free trade to the world. Regrettably, today's America is moving toward the opposite of free competition, running wild on the path of protectionism and oligopoly.
Thomas Filippoon, a professor of finance at New York University in the United States, said in "The Great Reversal: How america gave up the free market" that the United States has abandoned the principle of free market and become a manipulated market. Lobby groups are the face of vested interests, extracting market value to the maximum and setting legal thresholds for those who catch up later.
When the United States frantically introduces various technology bans, unilateral sanctions, barriers of entry, and decoupling plans against China, no matter how grandiose the rhetoric, its ultimate purpose is nothing more than to monopolize the interests of oligopolies, stifle scientific and technological competition, destroy the free market, and damage not only the interests of American consumers, but also the final reputation of the United States as a market economy country. When the United States is afraid to lose in competition, it must be the beginning of its irreparable decay.
Monopolists' huge profits and unfair competition also occur within the United States. The "American Dream" of competing to get rich under the Statue of Liberty has been torn to shreds by the "wolf of Wall Street" raised by the financial oligarchs.
In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement erupted, with demonstrators pointing to financial systemic speculation, government self-theft, and a widening divide between rich and poor. Today, the richest 0.1 percent of households in the United States already own almost as much wealth as 90 percent. In 1970, 90 percent of young americans around the age of 30 lived better than their parents did when they were 30, but now that number has dropped below 50 percent.
In September 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement broke out in the United States, and thousands of demonstrators chanted slogans such as "99% of the people are no longer silent" gathered on Wall Street in New York and other places to oppose the power and money trade in American politics, bipartisan strife, and social injustice. The campaign was eventually violently cleared by the police in October.
The United States has a superpower to confuse right and wrong, demonizing the majority's pursuit of free and fair competition, and describing protectionism as "maintaining fair competition" and 99 percent opposing 1 percent of justice claims as undermining the rule of law.
Whether it is the vast number of developing countries represented by China or all the people in the world who have encountered injustice and injustice, everyone upholds the right to free competition, honest labor, fair rules, and fair distribution, and those who rely on monopoly, sanctions, speculation, and perverting the law to obtain huge profits are the public enemies of freedom.
Mr. Xu Qianyun, an American historian, once lamented, "Looking back at the united states, I once admired the loftiness of this country's founding ideal. After living here for sixty years, I often lamented that such a good river and mountain, such a diverse people, how could the situation be so deteriorating day by day? ”
Many people who still have illusions about the United States tend to say that American-style liberalism is helping the weak and achieving equal rights through "affirmative action" actions. But the "affirmative action" is nothing more than a fantasy that is difficult to achieve, and the reality brings about the pain of social polarization and tearing.
When American progressives want to realize the creed that "all men are created equal," they encounter another day of "the sanctity and inviolability of private property rights." Touching property rights means moving toward socialism, so the United States has found a shortcut to the spiritual victory law, that is, "identity politics", constantly amplifying the identity awareness and rights demands of various vulnerable groups, creating the myth of "I have a dream" in the media, elections, and podiums, and creating Alice's sleepwalking illusion of "equal rights" pleasure.
Ethnicities, genders, people with disabilities, the elderly, vegetarians, drug addicts, sexual minorities, radical animal protection groups and other groups of people all hold the banner of rights to demand their own interests.
As the wave of identity politics rushes forward like a wild horse, American society seems to have returned to the old "tribal" era. People with specific identities huddled together to keep warm, drawing a clear line with opposing groups and confronting each other, and the melting pot was also added with an "isolation belt" and a table of "nine palace grid" hot pots was placed.
"Black Life", "Me Too", "Freedom of Speech", "America First"... Identity politics has divided American society into self-talking factions with no consensus.
Dreams are rich, reality is harsh. Identity politics has beaten the ideal of fairness and justice into fragments, indistinguishable from authenticity, absurdity, and more and more distant from power and closer to fantasy, and as a result, it has become a stepping stone for the atmosphere group of election campaigns and politicians to ascend to power.
The Obama administration was elected to the spectacle of blacks and minorities, but eight years later it was a chicken feather, with black people's incomes, education standards, and crime rates deteriorating. At the same time, another serious consequence was that more and more middle-class and lower-class whites felt humiliated in the hustle and bustle, reduced themselves to a vulnerable group, and retaliated by electing their own agent Trump.
When the new US government shouts similar "affirmative action" slogans to the front again, the polarization and rifting of American society is deepening, and the impeachment of Trump and the trial of white police officers are nothing more than the political carnival of the people at the bottom again, and the dust before the strong return of populism. The bell of American liberalism has been sounded, and the mantras have been chanted over and over again about consensus, unity, reconciliation, and progress, but they cannot hide the deepening of the rift and the dismal reality.
When the sun rises in the east, the western lighthouse, which is already in tatters, is even dimmer. (Illustration |.) Yutao）
As early as 1902, Liang Qichao proposed in "On Freedom": "The free person, the axiom of the world, the key to life." There is true freedom, there is pseudo-freedom, there is total freedom, there is partial freedom, there is civilizational freedom, there is barbaric freedom."
Chinese are not strangers to freedom, and what we seek is true freedom, full freedom, and the freedom of civilization. Marx said, "The free development of every human being is the condition for the free development of all human beings. Mao Zedong said, "Freedom is the understanding of necessity and the transformation of the objective world."
Freedom with Chinese characteristics draws on the reasonable nutrients of ancient and modern China and foreign countries, and at the same time includes individuality and commonality, science and practice, rights and responsibilities, respects the laws of nature and history, combines collective freedom and individual freedom, adheres to the spirit of science, upholds practical character, carries forward innovative ideas, welcomes free competition, and pursues the all-round development of all people.
"Count the popular characters, and look at the present dynasty." Who is really free and who is free to pretend, history has its own public opinion.