[split] Ethics - parental responsibility re: children

[Belacqua]

[...]

I think most people are OK with being slaves (or at least, OK enough to not do anything about it) just as long as their "betters" grant them some kind of superficial freedom. But most people's lives aren't real freedom, and those of us (i.e. me) who want to live lives of true freedom are severely limited in what we can do by the majority opinion of things, which is that, it's OK (or even good/noble/cool etc.) to be a slave. Most people are fucking clueless. I wish I could live on some other planet, away from the idiots.

It's always strange to hear people boast about freedom in America, which often amounts to the freedom one has to either work a job or die in the gutter. When "freedom" amounts to one choice vs. homeless hopeless death, it's really slavery.

There are other levels of unfreedom, of course, and I think you're alluding to these too. Ideological unfreedom comes from accepting all the propaganda about how we ought to live.

Then there's various kinds of unfreedom that aren't imposed by outside power. Like if a person is addicted to alcohol, that person isn't free to choose -- he'd most likely prefer to be free of his addiction, but he is stuck. An OCD person might like to be free of his obsession. 

This leads to some various fairly tricky diagnoses. There are cases where it's hard to tell whether a person's quirky traits are genuine choices or habits he'd be better off free from -- and would choose to be free from if he could. This is complicated by the fact that people are good at finding justifications for doing the things that they are impelled to do. It's often hard to tell whether a person honestly chooses to be a certain way (which would be freedom) or is that way because of some fixation, weakness, or other compelling factor (which would be slavery). 

Obviously people should be free to live as they wish, in a much wider diversity than the scolding people generally approve of. It's just hard, from the outside, to tell whether their choices are truly free or the result of complexes, fears, or other slave-making factors.