A free society needs a foundation. Part 8

I first published this series of articles in the German-speaking area under #freie-gesellschaft. I started the attempt to translate this article series also for the English-speaking countries. I have only a limited command of English and have therefore used a translation program. However, many terms are very difficult to translate because there is no clear translation for some words. I hope, however, that at least the meaning of the content will be understandable.
for the English readers I will open the section #free-society

For the other parts of the series #free-society I have to add a foreword, which serves as "Key questions for analysis work" (guiding questions for the analysis work).

It is always useful - not only as a stimulus for future thinking and acting, but also for judging and evaluating the present - to have a yardstick that can be related to reality. Such a standard is offered here. For the time being, it is only about the presentation of an idea and not already about a fixed plan in which the idea seems to be condensed into a concrete idea or even into an instruction for action.

The birth of an idea can also be an important "step forward" without this. Ideas sensitize people. Afterwards its effect sometimes unfolds without much intervention. - A hundred years ago Heinrich Heine warned the French against underestimating the power of ideas... He called Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the sword that had cut off the head of European deism and described Rousseau's works as the bloody weapon that had smashed the ancien regime in Robespierre's hands" (Isaiah Berlin, 2006).

Utopians live from the fact that they try to inspire us with elaborately decorated fetish societies. The suggestions given in #free-society, on the other hand, are almost prosaic. This is already because they do not claim to change society, but only to have an enlightening and consciousness-raising effect.

No one can choose the group of people in whose midst he is born. In this group a historically grown form of sociality is given. The ego adopts this form, initially through imitation. Later it often frees itself from imitation. In any case, it is advantageous for one's own well-being to find a social situation which makes it easy for the individual at the stage of development of developed consciousness to give subsequent consent to the fate of being born into it.

In the early days of civilization it was still possible to spatially escape an obsolete social system. A group or a couple, which came into conflict with the traditional and wanted to live according to freer rules, set itself apart from the others, established itself in a new home and continued to work there. Today "dropouts" find themselves in a decidedly different situation. No one can leave one of the world's most widespread human societies.

This circumstance provides the framework for possible innovations:

1 If inconsistencies in society are to be eliminated, this must happen in the here and now. Change can only be brought about in the form of a revision and innovation of what is currently in force.

1. there must be convergence between the source of criticism of the existing and the ideas of renewal. This means that a new form of sociality must correspond to the same principles that guided the criticism of the old.

The questions that I want to pursue together with my readers must be formulated within this framework:

• What form does a society appropriate to the ego - in its role as a carrier of freedom - need?

• How can the relationship of the liberty-gifted ego to the power instances of society be so relaxed that there is no reasonable reason to resist them?

• Can the established state enterprise guarantee the free development of the self living in society?

The answers I give to these questions are not always easy to catch. Sometimes it is also necessary to break a deep-seated taboo. Therefore, I expect that some readers will turn away indignantly when confronted with some of these answers.

In the later parts, at the latest, readers will learn what far-reaching consequences can be drawn from the thinking of the European Enlightenment regarding a truly #free-society. It is not pleasing that studies with a claim to enlightenment should lead to the decline of fond ideas of value and purpose. But this must be accepted in an age in which freedom of thought is an achievement.

As an introduction for the coming parts of the #free-society
Should this be enough.

To part 9

Your @zeitgedanken

#free-society #anarchy #freedom #voluntaryism #utopian-io