People Don't Want Freedom, They Want Security
Harold Hark
8 April 2003

Along with Norman Mailer's suggestion that "fascism, not democracy, is the natural human state", and Frank Campbell's statement: "today the geneticists tell us that human nature is Thatcherite" [1], the truism that people would rather have security than freedom paints a desolate picture of the species. It explains the almost routine triumph of conservative cowardice and its fascist manifestations throughout history.

Sure, we all need security to maintain equilibrium. That's what governments are for. Governments look after law and order, defence, and the social policies that prevent chaos so that we can live our lives according to the destinies, or the lack of them, we have chosen. Beyond these basic requirements for civilisation, the need for more security becomes a psychopathic manifestation of fear, the paranoia that masks emptiness.

Once this basic security is established, freedom should become the predominant urge of any healthy society. The freedom to think, to create, to "do what thou wilt" without harming others. Western societies have more or less enjoyed this balance between the need to feel safe and the urge to explore the limitless self without hindrance since the end of World War II.

Yet the primordial fear of human potential and its lack of boundaries is strong. And nowhere is the fear more palpable than with conservatives and religious fundamentalists, who "seek certainty, fixed answers and absolutism as a fearful response to the complexity of the world and to our vulnerability as creatures in a mysterious universe" [2]. In the United States these cynical anti-visionaries, the ultra-conservative Republican right wing, believe the mind is nothing more than a glorified abacus and that the only way forward is to regress to the safety of the womb (while simultaneously making an independent life for the womb-bearers as difficult as possible). And they have used the war against terrorism as an excuse to terrorise their own citizens.

Frightened out of their isolated wits by the bombings of September 11, an event almost commonplace in many parts of the world, a majority of Americans have shown their bellies to this opportunistic, illegal gang of Neo Conservatives by agreeing to let them sacrifice the precepts upon which their great country was founded.

"We'll give up our rights," the followers say, "and even change our own Uncle Sam™ diapers if you promise to make us warm and snugly forever and ever amen."

That is in fact what Americans who support George W. Bush are saying, as he, through his ventriloquists, rolls back freedom after right with the USA PATRIOT Act, the National Security Strategy, Homeland Security, and a tacit encouragement of vigilante crackdowns on dissent.

Now, Dubya may be dumb enough to believe America still has a Constitution, but the Stalinist Troika headed by Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz of Arabia, are sniggering over their tulips of Stoli as they take turns ripping it apart. Indeed, Bush seems more and more like a figurehead, like a dummy about to fall off its chair in a disused heap on the stage of an empty house. Because you hear a lot more from the Troika than you do from Dubya.

Except for the headless chooks running around with a flag in one hand and a bible in the other--the zombies who always support repressive right wing agendas to cover their inadequacies--millions of Americans who are not followers are being forced to hand over their rights and freedoms in the name of that which should only be guaranteed to senior citizens who have earned the right to step off the treadmill.

A life based on insuring that nothing bad will ever happen is no life at all, but a voluntary imprisonment. If anything, it is turning America into the biggest enclave in history.

The opposite of security is not necessarily risk. Yet, by holding security as the most important goal, by going to war for it, and by rescinding rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the NeoCon's who stole the White House are risking the very future of their nation.

Kenneth Davidson said in a recent column for The Age: "Bush personifies the American quest for absolute security. Americans don't yet understand or care that this status can only be achieved by making everybody else absolutely insecure."

That is the future for the rest of us unless Americans take back their government. Anyone for a Second Revolution?

[1] (Frank Campbell's review of James Oliver's They F*** You Up, The Weekend Australian, 15-16 March 2003)
[2] David Tacey, The Spirituality Revolution: Why We Need the Sacred.

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