What Does Freedom Taste Like? (Part I)

My title is a rhetorical question.

We should not taste freedom... we should bathe in it. We should swim in it with much aplomb. We should be swathed in it from cradle to grave.

I have touched on this very topic, albeit with a different twist as I recall.  I'm not going to go back through my own rants to recount the selfsame.  You may, of course, at your own leisure.

Man (and I use that intending gender neutrality to imply humanity) in his natural state is 100% free to do as he pleases.  But a man does not live as a solitary animal, much as a wolf does not roam alone.

I am not an anthropologist, but we are social animals.  Man forms bonds with other men. We want to be with others, we form families or tribes in our natural state.  Then by extension, we form towns, cities, kingdoms, nations and so on.

Tribes once fought each other, they banded together, then cities, then kingdoms, then nation-states, then nations...

Somewhere along the way, the individual man gets lost.  He becomes a statistic, a pawn.  He fights for king and country.  He is but another salmon swimming against the stream.  Yet he still exists.

Thus the battle between the individual and the State.

I am concerned that too many have lost site of the natural order, and look to the nebulous term of "the government" to take care of them.  Whether in the form of a benevolent dictator, king, or committee... when one gives away the right of being an individual, one is less of a person.

The government does not exist.  If every human being died tonight, tomorrow, there would be not be a government.  We are all cogs in the wheels of that machine which we created, and in many instances, that machine has swallowed us.

"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"

Gawd... I love that line... It's from The Declaration of Independence.

The next line is one which should give pause:  "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

BAM.

In the interest of brevity, I will now leave you with Part II.