this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Tbf The american public has been bombarded with propaganda since birth but still thinks it's free. Very bad education, and lot's of entertainment and fast food.
This is so pronounced and obvious when speaking with Americans of any political stripe online (and offline) and it's so grating
As an American who has been against the "pledge of allegiance" since I understood what "pledge" and "allegiance" meant. It's hard to convince people around me how much propaganda we are subjected to daily. How we indoctrinate our children. Like, I have spent hours trying to convince people how insidious the "pledge of allegiance" is. And they just think it's good to follow your country.
I feel for Americans like you :(. It's crazy how effective it is, like you'll see people lamenting about the US political situation and Trump ruling like a dictator and then in the same breath claim the US is still the most free and greatest country in the world. The propaganda seems so deeply ingrained it's honestly impressive
I cringe when I see our flag everywhere and I can't stand the national anthem at every sports event.
I don't want to be proud of my country because I was born here. I WANT to be proud of it because of how good of a place it is to live. I want to be proud of a place that takes care of my neighbors. Provides us with enough food, healthcare, and housing. I want to be proud of a place where knowledge is invested in and the population is educated. Where people can make art and music because their needs are met.
But where I live is stress inducing.
My neighbors are being rounded up and deported.
People are going hungry and SNAP benefits are being restored after being used for political leverage. Where we throw out more food on a daily basis than it would take to feed everyone for a month. Where too many people rely on food banks.
Where healthcare is tied to employment. Where even after paying in for years, some profit seeking corporation can override what my highly educated, licensed doctor says is "medically necessary." Where after years of payment, I can just lose the ability to pay for healthcare. Where being sick is used as a reason to prevent people from being able to get healthcare.
Where homelessness is increasing and we have more vacant houses than we have homeless. Where corporations have the ability to buy up every house and artificially keep people paying them rent until they die.
Where there is a ware against people having access to books. Where the government wants to decrease the standards for education. Where a large portion of the populace want religious texts being the basis for teaching than science. Where our higher education institutions are being blackmailed by the presidents and his regime. Where teachers can't make a living and still are expected to spend their own salary on school supplies for their classrooms.
Where people seem to believe that art and music are only worthwhile if you can make money off them. Otherwise artists need to "get a job" to pay for food, healthcare, and housing.
Where liberalism is taking hold and regulations are being rolled back that protected the citizens from being taken advantage by corporations. All in some bizarre lie that "you too can be an entrepreneur and these regulations are somehow depriving you of your freedoms."
For generations.
That's because there's two kinds of freedom: negative and positive freedom.
Negative freedom is the "freedom from". It's the "I can do what I want and face no consequences, nobody tells me what to do" type of freedom. A man starving alone in the desert has perfect negative freedom. Nobody tells him where to die.
Positive freedom is the "freedom to". It's the "Thanks to society and corporation I can do things that would have been impossible to kings just 150 years ago" type of freedom.
These two types of freedom often contradict and often to increase positive freedoms, negatice freedoms need to be sacrificed.
The highway code is a good example of that. Thanks to the highway system, you can drive whenever, whereever you want to, at speeds that were straight-up impossible 150 years ago. No king of that era could travel as fast and without relying on anyone else as an ordinary citizen can today.
The only reason we can do so though is because there's a huge list of laws that govern in detail what you cannot do on the road. I can safely travel down the highway at high speed because I am not allowed to do so on the wrong side of the road.
Now remember which type of freedom right-wing politicians invoke over and over again and which one they want to sacrifice for it.
Where did you learn about this negative and positive freedom? This is very interesting to me and I'd like to read more on the topic. Thanks in advance.
Others have linked Wikipedia, but Stanford has a great repo of philosophical thought that you can read. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/
If you can read German, the Wiki page summarizes everything quite well: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_und_positive_Freiheit
If not, maybe an autotranslation might be good enough.
For those of us whose German is not up to par.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty