 
                         20060208.01

            Individual Survival in a Police State

     The first maxim about learning to survive in a police
state is to understand that both the concept of the police
state and the experience of living in it, are relative.  The
libertarian hypothesis of a society devoid of societal
coercion is a fantasy not without its dangers.  It is
unavoidable that society should interfere with and attempt to
control individual existence.  The challenge to the
individual is to recognize, to understand, and to manage such
societal challenges to his integrity, and to the extent
possible, turn then to his own advantage.

     We cherish freedom. We glory in it and boast of it;
although most people would be hard put to define even
approximately what they mean by by freedom.  We have an
uncanny ability to delude ourselves into thinking that we are
free. Perhaps in some, perhaps in many respects we are. Yet
from other perspectives we are bound, tethered, imprisoned
without knowing it.  It will appear extravagant and
unecessarily provocative to trace the societal controls to
which we have been subject all our lives. The simple words
"from birth" are reminders of the utter dependence of the
infant on his parents or foster parents, and the albeit
diminished dependence of the child on his family.

     The social dependence takes new forms as the individual
is integrated into the educational system in its various
levels and branches. Here he is neither free to do or to say
what he fancies. To become educated is to be trained, like
any other domestic animal, to fulfill a social function.  It
is not by accident that "paideia", the Greek word for
education, is rendered by the translators of the King James
Version as "chastisement."  The student is cajoled,
disciplined, or coerced by threat of punishment to do and to
say and ultimately to think, what the society expects of him.
He is rewarded to the extent that he dedicates himself to the
unanimity and symphony of the social organism of which he is
a part. He is punished to the extent that he does not. In
school there is no occasion for freedom.  Neither is there in
the gainful employment, remuneration for which sustains him.
And similarly for the rest of his life, a man is bound by the
bonds of society.

     The chief social and psychological function of purported
political freedom is to sustain an illusion, to make other
inescapable constraints on a man's freedom more bearable. The
right to say what he wishes in the marketplace is some slight
compensation for the prohibitions against saying what he
believes at his place of work or in the religious
organization to which he is beholden.  Which leads to the
insight that the individual well integrated into his social
matrix has no (independent) beliefs at all but breathes
intellectually and physically as part of the social organism.

     The relationship between the individual and society is
dynamic.  The apparent fusion between them is never complete
and will vary from time to time and from place to place.
Tension and conflict between the individual and society are
inevitable.  The individual feels oppressed and seeks a wider
emotional and intellectual space in which to think and act.
The society in turn is threatened by his independence.
Arguably, not only is such tension unavoidable, but the
conflict to which it leads is essential to the well-being of
society.  Perhaps just as the individual body must be
exercised to retain its strength and agility, so the social
organism must be stressed and strained by the insubordination
of its members, if it is to remain viable.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
