“And the Lord God commanded the man,
“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden;
but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
for when you eat from it you will certainly die.””
As you might already know, I grew up under communist rule.
The regime described itself as being democratic and promoting freedom. Freedom for all!
The day to day practice, the life we had to endure, proved those words were blatant lies.
Nobody but the dictator was free and the communist democracy was a sham. As soon as anyone opened their mouth – nobody was crazy enough to open their mind! – however slightly, their words were met with extreme caution!
This way I became accustomed with ‘double talk’ before even knowing the book existed!
In a sense, being aware of the fact that words are able to ‘transport’ anything – from abject lies to sublime – is a step further. For the individual. For a society…
When each individual member of a society doubts everything heard or read, that society does have a problem! Disseminated disbelief precedes dissolution.
When individuals no longer trust each-other, things go south fast. Society wise!
Freedom has three dimensions.
‘Phusical’, personal and institutional.
Phusis is the ancient Greek term for ‘growing’ and ‘becoming’. My point being that some things are free in a naturally occurring manner. Also, the phusical freedom is naturally limited. Birds are free to fly only inside the lower strata of the atmosphere.
Personal freedom resides inside our individual minds. Is learned by each individual as a result of social interaction. Is limited by what each individual internalizes during their ‘potty training’.
Institutional freedom is the cultural product of social interaction in a given historical context. I’ll leave aside the fact that history is heavily influenced by geography.
Back in my communist experience, freedom was ‘make believe/belief’. We pretended to be free – otherwise we would have gone nuts – to the tune of convincing ourselves that life was worth living. Otherwise we would have died trying to escape. Furthermore, we convinced the ‘others’ – the ever present ‘political surveyors’ – that we were at least content with what was going on. With how our lives were unfolding.
Our pretenses were the opportunity on which ‘the party’ – the communist party – had built its edifice.
The opportunity grabbed and put in practice by the dictator. Which dictator was the only one enjoying actual freedom. Institutional, personal and, certainly, a lot more phusical freedom than the rest of us.
Another crass example of double talk is how the Americans use the term ‘liberal’. For the Conservative Americans ‘liberal’ is a cuss-word while the Liberals are proud to be called in this manner but the word does have the same meaning for both of them. It includes everything on the left side of the political spectrum, communists included.
The problem with this whole thing being the fact that the communists – the ones inspired by Marx, anyway – are amongst the most conservative political operators ever. No communist has ever changed anything in Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Or doubted anything written by Lenin. No communist has ever accepted that institutional communism, the one that failed, was far more than a crime. A huge error!
Anything familiar?
And what has any of this to do with the First Lie?
With the first lie, perpetrated by the Founding Father at the very beginning of the most important Book?
Which Book is supposed to be read literally by certain individuals having a certain political orientation?
I really can’t wrap this thing up before noting that the First Lie didn’t hold.
The serpent convinced the woman to eat, she passed the fruit along to her man and thus we’ve all became able to ‘tell good from evil’. To a degree, of course.
And nobody died! Not immediately, as a consequence of them eating that darn fruit.
“And the Lord God said,
“The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.
He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat,
and live forever.”
So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden
to work the ground from which he had been taken“.
