land of the free

I am convinced that many of our problems stem from freedom - abuse of freedom, and fear of freedom. Western society has materially recreated the world to its specifications, almost completely obviating our need to tend to survival and freeing us to exercise choice in virtually every aspect of our existence : we each define ourselves individually and socially, we each ponder and decide which philosophies suit our psychologies, we each determine what it is that constitutes our happiness. The modern emphasis on the primacy of the individual - the valuation of rights over obligations, for example - has arisen to occupy, indeed compel, our attention in the absence of any real need to consider ourselves, for the sake of survival, as part of a community. But maybe human consciousness isn't ready, has not satisfactorily evolved, yet enough to keep pace with our relative triumph over our materiality. Rather, we when given the opportunity of complete freedom seem to value only more materiality, more physicality, as the proper end of our choices. Thus, when freed to live life by our own design, many of us devolve to sex and wealth as objects of our interest. This, to me, devalues freedom. And we - on a private, individual basis - know it. we know better. And that knowledge makes our devaluation of freedom, our poor choices, abuses of freedom; much of our personal regrets, resentments, failures, are outcroppings of our inability to use freedom to become the people we know we should be rather than the people we allow ourselves to be. And some of the idiotic manifestions of freedom - we all know them, they're all around us in our culture - scare others who, when they see the flamboyant choices of others (mostly the recreationalists who think that life is a party), conclude that they are being left behind somehow in life's contest to see who can be the happiest, and therefore think that the best way all around is to shut down everybody else's exercise of (bad) choice. There is in our society awareness of the means for development of humanity toward the horizon of higher consciousness which is humanity's end, but in my view we are in danger of losing that awareness through simple inattention while we are otherwise focused on celebrating our materiality. By accident of rhetoric it seems that the fearful devoted to shutting down freedom altogether have appropriated the language of freedom to do so - the Palins, and hannity, etc., who always seem to be "scared" of something, and indeed I suppose they are. But of the wrong thing.