What Does Freedom Mean To Me?

India´s sweetest rose

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First of all, the freedom to ramble incoherently about freedom.
Freedom is a state of mind.
The absence of chains does not mean you are free.
So there is objective and subjective freedom.
And both come in varying degrees.
If you got chains all over you, but you are too blind to see them, you might feel free, but any outsider able to see the chains would tell you that you are not.
The body might be in jail, but the mind can be free.

The worst kind of unfreedom, in German there is such a word => Unfreiheit, while in English it is called bondage, is the slave who loves his chains.
Though Germans once had created one of the worst dictatorships in human history ever, albeit with the help of an Austrian, the German language with its definitional exactitude would be much more effective in discussing matters of freedom and philosophy than English, but English grants you an intuitive freedom of interpretation.
We can be only as freethinking as our language allows us to be. 😉

As long as we are bound by this body there is no absolute freedom.
Apparently the great Indian saint Anandamayi Ma stopped eating at one stage of her life, because she was not the body anymore, but her students, eager not to lose her, kept feeding her.

If you want to know more about freedom, check out some of the greatest philosophical thinkers regarding freedom, the anarchists, and let all hope cease 😉, since there you will learn that as long as you live in a state, under the State, you are not free.
So unfortunately nobody is.

But I feel free to share my favorite Bakunin quote right here and now:
I despise Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because humanity is for me unthinkable without liberty

You could go and live in the forest like Thoreau and you would be pretty free there, until, like in Germany for example, government thugs would come and tell you that this was illegal and you needed a home address and an ID.

Since a few years I sometimes feel pretty bad about something the German government did to the people. They came up with some law or regulation or whatever the legalese is, so that every household in Germany has to pay currently 52,50 € every quarter to those so-called public television corporations, like ARD and ZDF, so basically you are forced by law to pay the very state propaganda which manipulates your mind.
And you even have to pay if you don´t own a TV, like I do, because they argue, you could watch it via internet. In the good old days of freedom in Germany you had to pay only if you owned a TV, and many people did not pay though they owned one, that´s why there were cars with big antennas prowling the streets occasionally, trying to find those illegal TV watchers. 😊

Even the cavalry couldn´t save Maggie. 😋

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So basically this is similar to a poll tax like in Thatcher´s England, but while England, oh England a country so great, revolted with some serious poll tax riots and lots of people, up to 30 % in some areas, refused to pay, making the cost of collecting the tax rise steeply and tax returns fall, nothing of similar proportions happened in Germany.

My favourite nationalistic song

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There is some organized and some individual resistance against those TV fees in Germany, sometimes people even go to jail to maintain their freedom of not paying 😉, but the silent majority pays.
I am also one of them, because I could not be bothered to go through the trouble of not paying, but sometimes I feel free to feel bad about it.

That´s why I think I will leave Germany in the long run and get residency in a country like Paraguay, a long established safe haven for German homesteaders and other Nazis.

Once de-registered in Germany (yes there is such a word in German) I don´t have to pay this fucking state propaganda anymore, I don´t have to pay income tax and no more compulsory health insurance.

Now some of my American friends envy us Germans for our healthcare system, and true, in the Land of the Free you´re also free to die if you have no money for your medical bills or to become homeless after you paid them, but it ain´t all rainbows and unicorns with the German system either.
Basically, like all State governed adventures, it is expensive and inefficient, plus, because there is now also private health insurance for the rich kids, we have a two class medical system now.

So once I am out of Germany with residency in another country I guess I would feel much more free.
There is also a moral side to not paying taxes to a government which does a lot of stupid things with your money, like sending troops to Afghanistan, and arms to conflict zones because of some jobs in the German military-industrial-complex, or was it corporate profits?

Now, not paying tax while still a resident of Germany can lead to jail time, ask Uli Hoeness, president of Germany´s most successful football club Bayern München, of whom an example was made to show everybody what happens if you don´t pay your tax.

So if the government or State is in a position to put you in jail, if you don´t give them money, are you free then?
But even property.
Are you really the owner of the land your house is built on if every year you have to pay property tax or land tax or whatever it is called by the Mafia thugs of different jurisdictions or otherwise you can lose your house?

People think they are free because every four or five years they get to vote and can decide if they prefer to get kicked in the ass by a right boot or a left boot while in other countries there is no freedom of choice.

And now I feel free to abruptly and unceremoniously end my rant.





So this rant is my entry into @sagescrub´s #freedomchallenge, the rules (ahem!) for writing about freedom can be found in his introductory post here:
https://steemit.com/freedomchallenge/@sagescrub/freedom-challenge-1-what-does-freedom-mean-to-you-sbd-payout-to-winner





For more inspiring posts by a merry bunch of freedom lovers check out @ecotrain.