Margaret Atwood: Our governments now treat us like cattle – governed by fear,

[G_j]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/18/margaret-atwood-we-are-double-plus-unfree

Margaret Atwood: we are double-plus unfree

Our governments now treat us like cattle – governed by fear, we have surrendered too many of our hard-won freedoms. It’s time to recapture the territory we’ve ceded

Margaret Atwood
Friday 18 September 2015 06.


“A Robin Redbreast in a cage, Puts all Heaven in a Rage,” wrote William Blake. “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” wrote John Milton, channelling God’s musings about mankind and free will in the third book of Paradise Lost. “Freedom, high-day, high-day, freedom … !” chants Caliban in The Tempest. Mind you, he is drunk at the time, and overly optimistic: the choice he is making is not freedom, but subjection to a tyrant.

We’re always talking about it, this “freedom”. But what do we mean by it? “There is more than one kind of freedom,” Aunt Lydia lectures the captive Handmaids in my 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”

The robin redbreast is safer in the cage: it won’t get eaten by cats or smash into windows. It will have lots to eat. But it will also not be able to fly wherever it likes. Presumably this is what troubles the inhabitants of heaven: they object to the restriction placed on the flight options of a fellow winged being. The robin should live in nature, where it belongs: it should have “freedom to”, the active mode, rather than “freedom from”, the passive mode.

That’s all very well for robins. Hooray for Blake, we say! But what about us? Should we choose “freedom from” or “freedom to”? The safe cage or the dangerous wild? Comfort, inertia and boredom, or activity, risk and peril? Being human and therefore of mixed motives, we want both; though, as a rule, alternately. Sometimes the desire for risk leads to boundary-crossing and criminal activity, and sometimes the craving for safety leads to self-imprisonment.
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[Mnemosyne]

1. Such a chilling book... Remember a few years ago when, iirc, the Kansas AG was trying to get records of

the women that had abortions there? More chilling.

[ladyVet]

2. I read The Handmaid's Tale when it first came out.

I was horrified, because I knew such a situation could happen. The religious fanatics could get control of the country.

Personally, I'd rather be free than in a cage. I'll take my chances someone is going to bomb the airplane, or blow up a building. Much better to put our efforts into finding why people must react that way, than to cage the object of their hate.

[MisterP]

3. the danger is not that we accept security, but that we accept security THEATER:

that we accede to things the government, the passengers, the enforcers, and the managers all know are fake--it's the nudie scanner, not the metal detector or x-rays, that hold everyone up

(and hey she predicted TERFs--their lot was as important as the televangelists in creating Gilead)