/lit/ - Literature

>>16750772
>Incidentally, emerging from that same liberal thesis which contends that man is free, it follows that he is always free to say ‘no’, to say this to whomever he will. This, in fact, constitutes the dangerous moment of the philosophy of freedom, which under the aegis of absolute freedom begins to remove the freedom to say ‘no’ to freedom itself. The Western liberal model says: you want to oppose us? Please, you have the right; but, look: you will not want to give your washing machine back, right? The washing machine is the absolute argument of the supporters of progress. After all, everyone wants a washing machine — Black people, native peoples, conservatives and the orthodox. Communists, too, according to a different logic, spoke of the necessity and irreversibility of structural change. They said that socialism would come after capitalism. Socialism came, although we plainly never had capitalism. It stayed around for some time, destroyed quite a lot of people, and then disappeared. It is exactly thus with the washing machine. If one thinks about the metaphysics of the washing machine, to what extent it is coupled with the real values of a philosophical system, one will be able to come to the conclusion that, in general, human life is possible, and perhaps even has the potential to be entirely happy, without the washing machine.
>But for a liberal society, this is a terrifying thing, almost sacrilege. We can understand everything, but life without the washing machine? That’s already a really unscientific saying: life without the washing machine is impossible. There is no such thing. Life is the washing machine. In this resides the effect of the force of the liberal argument, which takes on a totalitarian character. There is always an element of some kind of constraint in liberation — this is the paradox of freedom. At the very least, there are the constraints of having to think that freedom is the highest value. Imagine that one person says, ‘Freedom is the highest value.’ Another responds, ‘No, it isn’t.’ Then the first answers, ‘You’re against freedom? I will kill for freedom!’