The Human Struggle for Positive Freedom

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 24 Mar 2025

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

Clinging to the Light in the Darkest of Times

20 Mar 2025 – Recently, those trying to destroy the diverse institutions of the US government, attacking multiplicity, and hence freedom, forced their way into the US Institute for Peace (USIP) in Washington, DC.  Because the Institute for Peace was legally created as an independent entity, not under the Executive Branch, the USIP refused entry to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) institution-wreckers.  The DOGE criminals came back the next day with what they said were armed “US Marshals” who forced their way in and then changed the locks to keep the legally employed USIP personnel out.

If freedom requires anything it requires multiplicity, diversity, a plurality of independent voices, protected by law, that makes possible the richness of democratic conversations about the future and about who and what we are and should be. Many voices, protected by law and a binding social contract, must agree to disagree. They must give us the possibility of growth, wisdom, and moving into a better future. The Trump administration is trying to stop and disempower this fundamental dimension of democracy and replace institutionalized multiplicity with totalitarian uniformity, conformity, and unfreedom.

In his unhinged, rambling speech at the Department of Justice on March 14, 2025, Trump explicitly identified those who disagree with him as “enemies” to be targeted by law enforcement. He said that the big media corporations like MSNBC that were critical of him were “illegal” and had to be dealt with. A diversity of voices under the protection of law forms the very essence of democracy and freedom. However:

• Trump and the coup plotters are scrubbing the government (and history) clean of diversity, inclusion and equity.
• They are trying to rewrite history to leave out slavery, genocide, and forms of oppression the historical awareness of which they do not like.
• They are trying to impose their own prejudices (“values”) on the rest of us and use government power to enforce conformity to those values.
• They are trying to cement a future dominated by billionaires, corporate CEOs, and tech giants, who solidify their control over all diversity, maximize their systems of exploitation and capital accumulation, and crush the voices of resistance.
• They are targeting those who have spoken out about the US supported genocide in Gaza; they are targeting those who helped prosecute the criminals who attacked the US capital on January 6^th
• They are targeting democratic Congressmen, Senators and Judges who are attempting to obstruct their coup d’etat from democracy to tyranny.
• They are targeting the very minds and intelligence of the people of this nation by destroying our educational system, our literacy programs, our historical museums and memories, our libraries, our scientific research centers, and our health and wellness research institutions.

As George Orwell put it in 1984—for all forms of tyranny, “ignorance is bliss.” These are indeed dark times. Much of this criminalized behavior stems from a fundamental confusion between “freedom from” (negative freedom) and “freedom for” (positive freedom). Human beings have evolved as a species characterized by temporality. We live within a dynamic framework of past, present, and future.

All “normal” human beings naturally and inevitably remember a past, some features of which we like and some of which we do not like.  In the present, we imagine how we might move into the future promoting those things we like and getting rid of those we do not like. We envision what a flourishing freedom should be like. This is the very structure of human life and the above tyrannous actions of the Trump-led assault on our minds and intelligence mutilates our ability to imagine a future of free developments and opportunities transcending the past and giving us our real hope as human beings.

Human beings are also intrinsically social creatures, as more than a century of psychology has demonstrated. That is, we would not speak, or think, or be “human” in any significant way if it were not for being born into a community where interaction with others elicited our innate capacities to speak, think, and act as part of society.  In traditional academic language, human beings have discovered the inseparability of “nurture” and “nature.”

As individuals, we not only draw upon a past that we evaluate in the present with an eye to a better future, we do this also as societies and as a planetary species. Beyond individuals, there is both societal history and human history. The two dimensions, individual and community, are inseparable and ultimately a necessary part of the whole of the human project.

This inseparability can give us insight into the nature of freedom. Individual freedom and social freedom cannot be separated.  If we want freedom (which is intrinsic to being human) then we have to consider how to organize both dimensions simultaneously. First, we need to see that the quest for freedom is at the core of what we are as humans.

As our friends in India declare, vasudhaiva kutumbakam, “the world is one family.” Our temporality puts us all in the quest for freedom. Only an informed intelligence, with knowledge and wisdom, in conjunction with enabling social institutions, can give us back a flourishing (positive) freedom.

Second, we need to understand the dimensions and difficulties of freedom if we want to quest for it satisfactorily. Third, we need to see that “freedom” in the abstract is a rather meaningless idea. We are immediately impelled to ask “Freedom for what?” Freedom is about using a truly remembered past within a dynamic present to envision a better future. We need to envision a positive, not a negative future.

Is freedom my ability to exterminate my enemies?  Is it freedom to rewrite histories that I do not like?  Is it freedom to consolidate my power over others to restrict their freedom?  Is it freedom to manipulate, lie, disempower, and destroy as I wish? Instantly we see that these sorts of “freedom” inevitably turn into unfreedom: tyranny.  That is because they are all forms of “freedom from” (negative freedom).

Some people are under the illusion that they are separate from our collective human project of freedom. They are under the illusion that they are isolated egos that are able to live “free” of their collective companions in the human project on planet Earth.  They are “rugged individuals” living in the Rocky Mountains of the USA. The are billionaires living beyond and above everyone else. They are “rogue” nation-states, lashing out against the emerging community of nations.

They may govern a “sovereign” nation-state believing it can determine its future apart from the existence of the rest of humanity and the diversity of other “sovereign” states. These ideas of “freedom” are self-defeating because they simply violate the reality of our common human condition of deep interdependence. We are all in this mess together, this quest for positive freedom, and any genuine solution will have to involve this “togetherness.”

Our discussion of the illusory nature of “negative freedom” reveals another dimension of freedom that makes clear that authentic freedom is positive freedom.  Freedom also implies morality, values, responsibility for oneself and others.  Exterminating one’s enemies, rewriting history, consolidating power and restricting others, constricting research and knowledge, manipulating, lying, and disempowering others are all forms of immoral behavior. Negative freedom: the drive to “get rid of” impediments to my separate, individualized freedom, necessarily results in the destruction of virtue, morality, justice, and ultimately freedom itself.

To be free is to be responsible, and to be responsible means recognizing duties to myself and others: duties of justice, honesty, integrity, compassion, solidarity, friendship, peace, and security.  Those who pursue negative freedom necessarily violate all of these values. That is why it has been said repeatedly that Trump and Musk are engaging in “intentional cruelty.” Their negative freedom is cruel, immoral, and ultimately destroys the freedom of the rest of us. White Christian Nationalists, who would place the 10 Commandments in all the nation’s classrooms, are destroying not only the freedom of the rest, but the very possibility of a morally grounded and alive national community.

We have seen that positive freedom is based on the inseparability of the individual and the human community.  And we have seen that positive freedom alone makes morality possible. There is another essential feature of positive freedom: it must include our bodily selves, that fact that a human being is not abstract, disembodied freedom, but a concrete physical embodied creature (living in communities) moving from a past, through a present, toward a future that is hoped to be better.

A community (or government) that wants to empower freedom must be one that ensures a sufficient income for all its citizens, one that ensures quality healthcare, housing, and community solidarity so that each person, family, and town may move from the past through the present into a future with reasonable economic security and stability. This feature necessarily follows from the reality of the human species as embodied freedom. A person who is extremely poor, struggling from paycheck to paycheck, or homeless, is not free. They are subjected to an economic system which itself is based on merely negative freedom. And any country that allows this disgrace cannot possibly be called “the land of freedom.” Freedom arises from a community grounded in morality and dedicated to the independent empowerment of freedom for all.

Finally, given that human beings are constituted as embodied freedom, we must solve the problem of freedom at the planetary level or we will never be able to solve it at the national and local levels.  You cannot have a collection of some 193 “sovereign” nations, each claiming its own negative freedom, each saying it is “sovereign” (i.e. negatively “free”) and claiming the right to self-determination when freedom and self-determination are necessarily collective human values and goals that cannot be adequately actualized at the fragmented level of nation-states.

In the name of the negative freedom of the United States, Trump is bombing the Houthis, promoting the genocide of Palestinians, and supporting the on-going war in Ukraine, and threatening Canada, Greenland, Iran, and Panama. He is also threatening the nations of the world with tariffs and other punishments if they do not accede to US demands.  Not only is this destructive of the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for these victim peoples, it is ultimately destructive of USA freedom as well. Negative freedom is all that most of these sovereign nation-states know, and it is leading the world toward Armageddon, while simultaneously destroying our planetary biosphere.

Out of its 13.7 billion years of existence, the universe has evolved a species that embodies the quest for freedom, simply because we are locked into the dimension of temporality as described above. (There is a complementary freedom linked with the experience of timelessness that I will not enter into here.) The quest for temporal freedom requires species cooperation, planetary morally-grounded action, concern to sustain all human persons (and their bodies) everywhere, and ultimately requires world union under a democratic Earth Constitution.

Negative freedom uses its false freedom to destroy all of these features. As the Trump Administration so clearly illustrates, negative freedom destroys the very possibility of freedom and morality everywhere. It is the vision of positive freedom that can and should unite us.

The vision of positive freedom needs to be fundamental to our understanding of what will come after Trump is defeated.  It cannot be more of the pre-Trump status quo, which was a very poor attempt to compromise between false negative freedom and truly liberating positive freedom. How do we institutionalize freedom?

How do we commit to our common human dignity that arises from our freedom? How do we create a global social contract that unites all national contracts in a world of peace, freedom, and justice?  It cannot be by maintaining a nation that refuses to ensure freedom for its poor because it caters to the negative, exclusionary freedom of the private accumulation of wealth at the expense of people and nature.

We are truly a species still on the way, still learning who and what we are, still trying to find ways to live successfully and freely together on this planet. At the moment, we are experiencing very dark times. We are in danger of destroying ourselves through this quest for negative freedom. Both ending war and protecting the global environment require a global social contract grounded in positive freedom.

Can we unite around the vision of positive freedom?  Can we overcome the Donald Trumps and Elon Musks of this world with a truly hopeful vision of positive freedom for all humanity?  This task must include a real and urgent “freedom revolution” in the United States. But it is also a task for all nations and peoples. This is the task of the 21^st century. The very fate of humanity rests on how well we accomplish this task.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 24 Mar 2025.

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