An Assessment of World Freedom: Why We're Not All Bad

Once again, welcome to the blog!



I know that this post is not weekly on Sunday as promised, but I had tons of homework yesterday, and watchmen is a movie that you cannot stop watching, and I'm sorry for that. Let's get right to the point of this post: I will be making an assessment of overall world freedom in our modern era, including the status of human rights, the achievements of popularly elected governments, and an overall rating for how our world measures on human freedom. It should also be noted that once a month, I will take a break from any series of posts to comment on a larger debate in a longer post. For instance, at the end of this month, I will tell you all a comprehensive answer to why I am a communist. But more on that later.



Anyway, freedom is an especially difficult topic to debate and discuss. Why, you ask? Because, while most people believe that freedom is either absolute or not there at all, this could be no further from the truth. People do not require absolute freedom in all aspects to be truly "free." Like beauty, freedom is in the mind and heart of the beholder. I view freedom as all that is needed to be happy in life. While having absolute freedom may feel nice, it is not necessarily what is best for all people. At the same time, I do believe that humans deserve some degree of freedom; as such, countries where people have no freedom nearly always disgust me. And don't try to tell me that communism takes away all freedoms, because that is bogus. Fascism removes all freedoms, while communism does not. Just like capitalism, communism takes some freedoms but provides others as accommodation. The view of which freedoms are absolutely necessary in each system is what is different between the two. That is why you can't tell me that China is not free; China is definitely free. Many people think that communism automatically ensures that people have no economic or social freedom, and that all property belongs to the state. While this was mostly true under Stalin-ruled Russia, it was outdated quickly and has become an inefficient model of communism. That is why in modern China, there is private ownership. People enjoy a number of economic and social freedoms, and don't try telling me about the one-child law. I'd like to ask you: if you had a country with about one sixth of the world's population growing at an alarming rate, how would you stop it? Try to promote abstinence? Sell more condoms? Either way, there was no great solution to the problem, and we know both of those alternatives I stated would have failed. Me and my peers are taught about abstinence since fifth grade, but many high schoolers and college students still have sex. This is a fact of life, and no amount of preaching the horrors of child birth will stop that in the foreseeable future.



But I digress. Based on the amount of countries I see that I consider free, I would give the world a B in terms of grading our progression of freedom. An 8 out of 10. A little off the beaten path, but not enough to ruin the trip or get lost. My reasoning for this is because while there are some terrible places out there that foster horrible oppression of their citizens (Bolivia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, etc.), the amount of countries that do the opposite outweigh them. Almost all of North and South American countries can be considered free (to me, including Cuba and to a lesser extent Venezuela), and so can most European and Asian countries. And while some countries (Serbia, Iraq, and Afghanistan) may not be the best places to live, there are only so many of them. And while Africa may be experiencing trouble, the majority of countries there are free. Plus, most of them have had just 50 years or less to begin developing after centuries of not governing themselves. You have to give them time to learn how running a government effectively and fairly works, especially after the treatment they endured. If you still don't see things my way, consider the world on a time continuum. In the past, imperial powers ruled over and dominated other peoples of no right of their own. Terrible dictatorships and fascist powers sprung up between the 1920s and 1930s, ensuring the oppression and degradation of their people. Continual wars marred the earth for decades of the 20th century, and only in recent years have the total amount of wars going on started to subside. You may say "But what about Iraq and Afghanistan? The Kosovar war? And etc.?" The fact of the matter is, that war probably will exist for a very long time. As long as resources are limited, the desire for control of them will exist as well. It is this desire, along with other factors, which most commonly leads to war, and it will for most of the foreseeable future. In the past, wars were going on all over the place for all different reasons. Hate-filled governments and rebellions came and went, with deaths and casualties abounding. The last century brought the two most devastating wars of all time, along with multiple other ones that scarred us even further.



And things were no better back before the 20th century. Until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, European countries had always been at war since medieval times. Wars in sub-Saharan Africa were common, and civil wars of Asian empires came at the turn of each dynastic cycle. In the Americas, with the turn of each empire came violent struggles for power, just like in most of the rest of the world. The past also had the Crusades, which I view as the lowest point in human history. My point here is that through time, on a global scale we have improved, and although some hatred and totalitarianism may linger, we have done good bringing freedom and prosperity to the human race. If we stay on this path, I believe that the possibilities for the future are endless and promising. However, I also do see a consistent threat to our progress. It becomes aware to me at least once per day. There are those that vie for a return to the ways of the past, who stress tradition, and a change to the way things were. No matter how good it may seem to return to the "good old' days," the fact of the matter is that tradition really has no place in governance, and that ideologies must be willing to accept new ideas if they ever want to keep up with the current tide of the world. This is why I dispute conservatism. The more we long for the past, the more we forget that that time is no longer here. The ideas of tradition become outdated and useless as more time passes, and this was proven while Bush was president. The trickledown theory had already failed under Reagan, but Bush tried to revive it. The fact of the matter is this: once a theory fails in the past that means it will fail worse if tried again in the future. It did exactly that, and we feel the failure of those policies even today. As such, if we wish to stay on a positive path in which freedom of the world's people can be brought about, we must be willing to move alongside it in the same progression. We must not yearn for the past, for if we return to the old ways we will most likely be left behind to rot.



Wow, that was some tangent. However, I feel my argument has come to its conclusion. We are on the right road, and all we have to do now is follow it. If we do, then freedom for all is not too far off. That doesn't sound too hard for the payoff, now does it? We're not all bad, so let's keep it that way, and strive to make it even better. If you have questions or comments, once again you can leave them in the comments for this section. If you would rather email me, once again my email is zerospintop@live.com. I also have a Facebook and, more recently, a twitter, so you can go to those as well if you wish. This is SuperJew McLovin, a.k.a Ben Goldberg, signing off.