Changes
The LinkTitles extension automatically added links to existing pages (https://github.com/bovender/LinkTitles).
LIBERAL FREEDOM
I do [[claim]] that what is sold to us today as [[freedom]] is something from which this more radical [[dimension]] of freedom and [[democracy]] has been removed — in [[other]] [[words]], the [[belief]] that basic decisions [[about]] [[social]] [[development]] are discussed or brought about involving as many as possible, a majority. In this [[sense]], we do not have an actual [[experience]] of freedom today. Our freedoms are increasingly reduced to the freedom to choose your lifestyle. You can even choose your ethnic [[identity]] up to a point.
But this new [[world]] of freedom described by [[people]] like Ulrich Beck, who say everything is a matter of reflective negotiation, of [[choice]], can include new unfreedom. My favourite example is this, and here we have [[ideology]] at its purest: we [[know]] that it is very difficult today in more and more professional domains to get a long-term job. Academics or journalists, for example, now often live on a two- or [[three]]-year contract, that you then have to renegotiate. Of course, most of us experience this as something traumatising, shocking, where you can never be sure. But then, along comes the [[postmodern]] ideologist: 'Oh, but this is just a new freedom, you can reinvent yourself every two years!'
The problem for me is how unfreedom is hidden, concealed in precisely what is presented to us as new freedoms. I [[think]] that the explosion of these new freedoms, which fall under the [[domain]] of what Michel [[Foucault]] called 'care of the [[self]]', involves greater social unfreedom.
Twenty or 30 years ago there was still [[discussion]] as to whether the [[future]] would be fascist, socialist, [[communist]] or [[capitalist]]. Today, nobody even discusses this. These fundamental social choices are simply no longer perceived as a matter to decide. A certain domain of radical social questions has simply been depoliticised.
I find it very sad that, precisely in an era in which tremendous changes are taking [[place]] and, indeed entire social coordinates are transformed, we don't experience this as something about which we decided freely.
[[Category:Politics]]
