Loneliness Is the Price of Freedom

"Anti-communist is a dog" was Sartre's slogan. Even here, for example, when Scruton gets to the chapter on Sartre, it is very interesting. He brings quotes from Sartre, on page one hundred and sixteen, about Sartre and Foucault in France. He says that when news of Stalin's crimes and the Soviet regime reached Europe, instead of condemning it, Sartre said that you should not judge Marxism by its results, but rather by its intentions. And Scruton is outraged by this. This is a good book, I have to say, even though

wants to address why we can refer to the entire left as myth. He says because it operates by default in this way. The left itself says: the left is inherently good. First and foremost, the right is inherently evil. Joining the left's camp means joining the camp of moral virtue throughout history. In Aron's view, this is how myth works.

Myth means reducing the world to two realms, good and evil. And he says the left has done this epistemologically and philosophically throughout history, even while claiming: I am anti-myth. But by the definition of someone like Aron, myth, of course, is not like that at all. I mean, it is not anti-myth. It understands myth.

But his warning is interesting. He says an anti-myth perspective might free you from myth, but could also trap you within the world it constructs. And ultimately he says the left's problem is a moral claim, not a political vision. It is as if when you

trap you within the world it constructs. And ultimately he says the left's problem is a moral claim, not a political vision. It is as if when you are on the left, you are constantly making moral claims about the world. If you are a supporter of left-wing discourse, you are constantly judging others. You are no longer simply a political tendency.

You may perform your everyday life, your protests, as something you must do. You may celebrate, you may dance, you may perform a theatrical dance, you must spend all your time doing things that serve that world. If someone is not in service of the struggle against the capitalist regime, in the fight against the capitalist regime, then all of these people who are engaged in that are misguided and have been corrupted, and you rage at the world.

The left is practically aggressive, from the perspective of someone like Aron, because they see themselves as possessing a higher moral virtue, and they embody that, and they look at the entire world through that lens. In chapter two, parts of

meaning the left romanticizes revolution as a story he says they have a completely romantic view of the concept of revolution they think violence is a temporary phase of the revolution. First, they have a romantic view of revolution, and then they think violence is just a brief, passing phase of the revolution, and that after the revolution the world will be transformed

"liberty, equality, fraternity" -- you cannot achieve all of these together in one society. The issue, for right-wing thinkers, conservative thinkers, in this context, in their reading of the French Revolution, is the difference between the concept of liberty and the concept of equality. From their perspective, these two concepts cannot coexist. That is, any attempt to make people equal means harming, sacrificing, or suppressing their freedom.

You can make a society equal on one condition: take away everyone's freedom. Historically, that is the only way. It means fighting against freedom and stripping people of their freedom so that you can keep all of them equal to one another. And on the other side, if you want a free society, freedom means that people are not equal to one another. People are only equal before the law.

But humans differ in intelligence, in talent, in effort, in family background, in what we might call, for example using Bourdieu's term, cultural capital. They are not equal in these things. In France itself there are people like Pierre Bourdieu, who for example in the book "Distinction" set out to show, specifically to show how these distinctions grow in French society, and they investigate and dig into questions like what percentage of politicians and wealthy people in France had cultural background or economic background, to show that children who grew up in a family with cultural capital study harder, become more successful, go to better universities, and ultimately may become politicians.

They show you that look, this family's cultural capital made this happen, and that poor family, because it lacked cultural capital, did not achieve this. Yes, that is true. But this is not a flaw of the world. This is a feature of the world. Be careful not to let them sell you a feature of the world as a flaw of the world. They will do this, and they will do this

He is greedy, yes, he is a pilgrim, yes, and at the same time a human being can also be pure, can also have moral virtues. But if you attribute this to the harm, the harm of a society, what can you do other than become an enemy of that society? Because there is no way you can change people.

One option remains: crush everyone with an atomic bomb, or turn to genetic engineering and say: I want, like with animals and plants, to create human beings who are no longer greedy, who will work all night, come and give to others. Only in that case would someone sweat and bring the fruit of their own labor and hand it over to a religious institution.

That is why I say that these people ultimately become enemies of society. One of the reasons is that they portray the fundamental characteristics of a society as harmful, and then they damage that society at its core, meaning they construct a harmful image of it, or present a harmful portrayal of society. And again,

Society is not built by love. It is built by respect. Society is not built by self-sacrifice, not purely by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice means a moment, a moment in history when you need to make a sacrifice. An earthquake has struck and you give of yourself. You send blankets to Baluchestan, you send blankets to Kermanshah.

But if you show that this moment in history, this exceptional situation, is what it takes for you to be able to make a sacrifice, and then you hold that expectation throughout history, expecting people to send blankets to their neighbor every single day, that society is fundamentally broken. That history has a problem. And with that expectation of yours, you are keeping that society stuck at that same stage.

Goffman has a concept called "civil inattention." Goffman is a sociologist who focuses on everyday society. Interaction matters to him. He says, he says civil inattention means that people, that the modern citizen, expects that when walking down the street, no one will stare at them like this. No one will look at them that way.

They expect inattention from others. Meaning: do not pay that much attention to me. Now if you see this inattention in a city and you ask, why isn't everyone smiling at everyone else, and if you conclude from that that this society, this kind of society, is a broken one, you will ultimately become an enemy of that society and an enemy of its citizens. You demanded something from that society that is not a property of that society.

also don't actually demand that you bring me out of my deep loneliness. That is to say, taking on the burden of a personal life alone is so difficult that many people unconsciously trade away their freedom by exchanging it for belonging to a group. Because being free also comes with the hardships of being free. That is, being free

In the modern world, since we were talking about women, the issue of women in the modern world is this: for the first time, a subject has been created in the world that has no archetype, meaning that independent woman, that free woman, does not know what her myth is. She does not know what her story is.

A myth in my mind can touch me, can align me, can calibrate me against a pattern, a template, so that if I get stuck somewhere, I can look at how that pattern behaved, and it gives me a kind of compass, a guide through life. I can model myself after it. According to Campbell, the problem of the modern woman is that she has no myth of her own, and she may collapse, because this is the first time that society has ever encountered such a subject, and society looks at her with suspicion, and she herself, epistemologically and historically, lacks any traditional foundation she can turn to. One of the functions of tradition is

for why intellectuals have no special connection to their homeland. He says an intellectual believes their first mission is to put society on trial. Without understanding it. Something I have repeatedly proposed as a methodological point: before you go into diagnosing something, first understand the order of that thing deeply. Before putting a phenomenon on trial, understand it first.

So, one: before understanding their own society, they put it on trial. Two: he says the intellectual believes that all thinkers must always define themselves in opposition, in opposition to an order, not within an order. They always say we are against something. Meaning their orientation is negative. This is one characteristic of leftist thought

leftist thought The left has the same trait, it is intensely oriented toward negation. Its entire stance toward the world is anti-order. And this runs into a historical problem every time it tries to establish order, because its entire knowledge base is built on being against the existing order. So when it becomes the order itself, it does not know what to do.

It cannot produce an affirmative discourse, because its discourse has always been against something. So that stance of being against something must be preserved, especially in the part where it forms a political order. It has to maintain it. That means creating enemies. When it forms a state, it needs enemies both within itself and outside itself.

It starts fighting against certain ideas, certain bodies of knowledge, or certain groups within society, and as an established order it is constantly at war with various groups. It cannot set this aside, because no affirmative domain remains for it. The only way it can say "I am a civilization and I am building a civilization" is to be against something within that civilization.

This was one of the problems of the political order that emerged after the 1979 revolution in Iran as well. Both the leftists and the Islamists had spent their entire lives fighting against other things in the world that represented order. Now they themselves had become the order. Now they themselves had become the order.

So now what do we do? Now what do we do? We cannot build. We have no affirmative discourse. Our affirmation must always be defined in relation to negation. We have to be able to negate something. So it goes back to constantly being at war with something outside, and also within, because if you ask it, "What happened to that civilization you said you were going to build?" it has no answer. It has to say that it is still in a state of revolution, still in a critical current moment. Yes, in a