Freedom to take a third job to repay that medical debt
Why is this framed as opposing ideas?
To be clear the question was framed as “Which is more important: Freedom to pursue life’s goals without state interference or State guarantees nobody is in need.”
Life’s goals are ill defined, freedom from need is also a life goal.
This is fucking nonsense
I’m American.
Here, “Freedom to pursue life’s goals” is often a euphemism used by our owner class to make as much capital as they want without taxation, to exploit as many people as they want, and to not be held responsible for the damage to the commons or the environment their pursuit causes. There’s very little about our culture that doesn’t revolve around greed and greed worship. “Freedom to pursue life’s goals” doesn’t mean bird watching or pottery here.
And in that sense, yes, they do conflict, because the freedom for a few (that many poor people defend against their own interests in the self-delusion of one day becoming) to exploit and hoard as much societal value as possible leaves that society without the resources to have other citizen’s basic needs met.
I agree with everything you say but I feel that for the Pew Study to have any intellectual weight they’d have had to step beyond euphemism and make all of that explicit to their respondents. Or one might conclude that, at least in this case, Pew are complicit with the lies that are being told.
I’m not sure of their methodology, but I consider the meaning taken from the proposition of “freedom to pursue life’s goals” in itself is one of the fundamental differences in the American vs. European cultural mindset, before you even get to the answer.
I do see what you mean but you’d need to drill down in the questioning into “How do you define those freedoms?” or “What do you understand life’s goals to mean?” before you could get to meaningful data. I think that this is poor survey design but I agree with your point and I think the survey may have been designed poorly on purpose.
Agreed, this isn’t useful.
I didn’t know my meme, so I googled it for me (and maybe for others too): https://youtu.be/g7kymm30gA8
Good reference :)
Man without that narrator I would have had no idea what was going on!!
These values have a pretty large overlap. I suspect the real difference is in the US belief in personal destiny, in other words that people not only can can be self-sufficient, but would be if external interference were removed. They don’t see it as the universe itself being difficult and humanity collectively creating a solution. They know the game is rigged to keep them poor, property-less, and dependent, but they see social programs and corporate/wealth interests as about equally responsible for that (as in fact they are often well aligned in practice, since in practice the wealthy get what they want no matter what they call it), as opposed to the magic of personal willpower. So the slogan “no one in need” doesn’t sound benign at all, and “freedom” sounds like the path to fulfillment.
Either way, in the US, the reason to remove need would be to have more freedom, and the result of freedom is the elimination of need.
Graphics on page 7 of this document, the research is from 2011: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2011/11/Pew-Global-Attitudes-Values-Report-FINAL-November-17-2011-10AM-EST1.pdf
These aren’t mutually exclusive… Or opposites. What a bad question.
Interesting, I’ll have to look at that research.
The American-Western European Values Gap report from 2011 https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2011/11/17/the-american-western-european-values-gap/ Ope, morgunkorn already posted it
Your google-fu is strong! thank you for looking it up :)
I couldn’t find it immediately on DDG, but switching to Google helped
Thanks!
I haven’t found the source yet, but let me know if you do
edit: found it, posted as top level comment
deleted by creator
They do (EDIT: “people in need also have life goals”), but self-actualisation is on the top of the pyramid, the other needs below usually need to be met to be able to even think about those greater ideals
Edit: restored the bit this comment is answering to
I’m American, and I concur that Freedom is the most important value for a society to uphold.
Thank you for your input, that just confirms what the studies showed. Freedom has many faces, not being left on the roadside because you can’t outcompete in the gig-economy is also a form of freedom.
There’s an excellent video on the youtube channel Second Thought that goes through a list of freedoms, I encourage you to watch it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xqouhMCJBI
They expose the positive freedoms (“freedom to…”) and negative freedoms (“freedom from…”) – and also show how capitalism opposes all those freedoms, because they’re based.
Examples :
- Positive Freedom: having the capacity to act according to one’s free will
- Negative Freedom: the freedom from coercion by others
LOL another Capitalism Bad post, how original.
Let me just say for the record, to all of the America haters who will hate my post, that my life in America is fuckin’ awesome and I do whatever I want all the time. FreedoMurica! Yeehaw!
Glad you love your life dude, I love mine on the other side of the pond too.
Thanks
Thank you for providing evidence of how much our country sucks.
Well I’m sorry you’re such a pessimist, because you could do better. Pessimism leads you down the path of dissatisfaction with every facet of life.
I’ve lived through poverty for many years and seen the bottom of the barrel that our country has to offer. I also persevered through that and built a great life for myself and my family, thanks to the freedom and opportunities that America offered me. I recognize that the standard of living we have as a baseline for the average American is something to cherish, in comparison to what a majority of the rest of the world experiences.
As an American, yes we are a garbage people with garbage values, and we’re making the rest of the world worse trying to make actual societies like you as greedy as us. I wish I could do something to get us to stop, but our owner class is too fucking greedy, and here, they make all the rules.
We are as antisocial, regressive, selfish, and willfully ignorant as you think we are and then some.
I am ashamed to live here. We aren’t a society, we’re an exploitation farm.
You could eat them.
Their numbers are few, but they are defended by millions of pathetic, deluded temporarily embarrassed millionaires who believe kissing ass will let their peasant asses in the little country club one day despite the US being way down on the list for upward mobility in the developed world.
A few of which have commented out of ignorance in this very post.
Those millions arent in their houses at night or outside the offices in the car parks.
I don’t feel like going to prison to maybe get one that the owners would then use their media empires to propagandize sympathy for the persecuted rich.
It’s hard to understand the depth to which our small owner class has most of the American citizenry in a testicular vice. We lost the class war half a century ago here. We’ve lived in class occupation ever since. You might as well tell Winson Smith to eat Big Brother.
A few knuckledraggers almost took down your entire government a few years ago and you’re saying it’s impossible.
You lost because you stopped fighting, to win back whats been taken from you since the last time you fought, you need to fight again. There is no other alternative.
I stopped fighting, because it became apparent most of the people are so deluded into playing the rigged con game, and so far into the sunk cost fallacy of it, that they’d rather fight me and the homeless victims of our society than their economic oppressors.
Also those idiots threw a tantrum and ransacked some offices. They weren’t even attacking real power, they were attacking the well bribed middle managers that power pays off here.
The Occupy Wall Street movement actually confronted power here, and accomplished nothing but ridicule by those we were trying to help as power shuffled us away.
Protesting doesn’t work.
There are 735 billionaires in the US, you can personally help reduce this number.
It doesn’t matter if you’re ridiculed, whats more important your ego or the world?
And apparently we speak for everyone in the country
One of these is a realistic value
