So is freedom. In fact, so is this “thought” that you say is being shaped by the “media”.
Why not? The fact that a given person might be obsessed with a particular issue at this point in time doesn’t mean he or she doesn’t have a choice. The current political race occupies a miniscule amount of my conscious thought on a day to day basis, and I know I’m not alone. In an anarchy I’d be spending all of my time paranoid about my safety. There goes my freedom of thought. 
Speaking of which…
If you put me in a room with three doors, one of which leads to safety while the others lead to instant death, and give me the freedom to choose whichever one I want, I don’t know that that’s really freedom. In theory I’m free, but practically I’m immobile, knowing that it’s likely that any choice I make will lead to my death. If you put me in the same room, and said, “don’t go through those two doors, I forbid it, they lead to death!” I might have some of my choices removed, but I’d be more free in a sense because I could go forward without fear of death.
Weird analogy, I know.
Oh, Lopsang. I followed you here from your other thread. I’m glad that I did. You have just explained to me why I am very content in what some describe as agoraphobia and which I have just accepted as the label.
I’ve made a reasonably free space for myself. Hear me out.
I live in a house that is basically okay with me. My time is my own. I don’t work or live by anyone’s schedule. My husband and I both prefer to stay at home and keep cycles independent of each other and yet we include each other many times during the day.
I’ve had my car since March of 2000 and it has less than 14,000 miles on it. My life is full of books, music, Straight Dope, television, time, movies, a wouldbe terrorist arrested at the neighborhood Krispy Kreme, piano, beading, sewing, designing, anxiety, decorating, flamenco, meditation, a wicker swing, scents, a cat, an occasion grandchild, Auburn football, walks through a bamboo glade, spices, colors, merriment, Presidential debates, anger, a multi-cultured neighborhood, old friends, Titan football, forgetfulness, confusion, concern, Monet’s garden, passion, memory, grieving, redemption, sleep, morning.
My concerns are big and I know that I do very little. I’ve done better. And I talk about those concerns a lot here, as many do. But you have only a corner of us in a room in a fragment of our long, multi-demensional lives. We are not limited by what you see of us here anymore than the depth of your subject can be defined and limited by language.
I can set the limitations of words aside and hear what you are getting at – I think.
And you may be right that we will never have perfect freedom.
But some of us may be closer than we convey in our words also.
I think I see someone coming with a hook…
The moral of this thread is that one should always remember to take one’s meds.
Lopsang, go here:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=5350697#post5350697
panache, go to your room…
I’m afraid I agree that on one level there is no such thing as a country. I’ve never met one and you haven’t either. A country is a story that people share. A group of expectations that they agree on. It might even be a verb.
But is seems that in order to deal with each other properly, we have an inborn need to concretize the conception of the group we belong to and to personify our group almost as if it were a living entity. Our family, our neighborhood, our city. . .our expectation of the way that our sort of people should act. It’s useful to rely on that need and build on it to get people working together instead of against each other. People in groups can accomplish much more that the same number of individuals can ever hope to.
The level at which there is no country is either a very abstract one or a very concrete one. I’m not sure which. It’s the level of the madman or the enlightened one. The rest of us have a need to be part of a tribe, with tribal markings, tribal stories, and tribal expectations. We fit ourselves into a tribe, even if we call it a nation.
Freedom is one of the tribal markings of America. It doesn’t matter how Free you are, personally. It doesn’t matter how Free the people around you are. If you don’t claim Freedom, you’re not part of the American tribe. Any claim that America is not Free is blasphemy. So any abstract exploration of what Freedom actually means, and whether it’s actually possible to be Completely Free and still be a human being, with a need to react to a concretized group, is going to punch peoples buttons.
I think Lobsang had a couple of ideas and wanted to explore them on a very abstract level. Or maybe not. Maybe he had just become really aware of the abstracts and wanted to start exploring how these abstracts might apply to the nuts and bolts of ongoing government and citizen participation.
He might not be expressing himself well, but he’s not totally off track. I work for a city. Every vote may be equal to every other vote, but if voting is your only involvement with your community, there are other people with more community influence.
Media is one of the ways to influence a community. It’s not the only way, but it seems to work well for candidates. Just buying media won’t do it though. You have to successfully work with the metaphors of the community. That means that you have to act as if there is such a thing as a City or a Country.
Now I’d better stop. Next I’ll be saying, “How can I tell that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?”
I suggest that we back up and concentrate on what is a human and what is freedom for just a little bit. Or not. It’s just that everyone seems to be reacting to this thread at a different level of abstraction. And the OP keeps expanding the territory. If we don’t rein this in a bit, it’s going to start whipping around like a dropped fire hose.