EDITOR -- It is a lesson that modern-day fighters for individual liberty learned decades ago. In ensuring and protecting freedom of society, on a pragmatic level, individual liberty is a concept that sees the health and happiness of the parts as leading to the health of the whole-not the reverse.Put another way, individual liberty is organic-when not blocked artificially, it flows naturally and creates healthy relationships in an ever-expanding web of mutually- beneficial interactions among people.
On the other hand, much of todays political and economic structure is not organic but artificial. It comes from the Top down, not the bottom up. It does not flow naturally, easily, and quickly but with artificial constraints that are marked by dissension, delays and waste. It is, by nature, coercive. You do what we say because you have to and at the ultimate point of a gun. You do not do it voluntarily.
With this in mind, we can se that the larger structures being created or expanded in the 21st Century are not geared to preserving or even considering individual freedom. Rather, they are all about mass uniformity and commercialism in the worst forms.
Whether it is the African Union or the still in-utero Zimbabwe coalition government, their object is the same: stifling individualism in favour of a collectivistic uniformity, Yes, of course, lip service will be paid to the individual with such a hollow slogans as `Land of the Free, Ivhu Kumwana Wevhu, Home of the Brave; but it is still the whole consuming the parts. It is still artificial, stiff, and unnatural.
Livingstone Mujokoro, by email
Post published in: Opinions