Why does our society have a notion of freedom when it is so increadibly limited? There are so many bureaucratic and procedural things we must do everyday to survive in our world, and there is little to do to escape them. We live in a world where there is little substantive freedom and only formal freedoms like freedom of speech. There is really no choices in our society, and we only pretend to be free individuals. It's as if we lived in a total state. We only act as if we are free.

There is an inherit contradiction between bureaucratic freedom and what we believe is right. You start to wonder how can an individual choose good from evil or right from wrong in such a society. We have the freedom to assembly, petition, and speak, but we lack the freedom to act. Often we have act against our own will to support what society dicates to us as individuals. Protest as you will, but that won't change the world overnight. There is a common interest of all people, but often it becomes more personal and starts to hurt our personal freedom.

The lack of freedom of action in our society can be fustrating. Not only does society deprive you of free action, it punishes you for any action it finds undesirable. People who do not play along in our society either die in the street, are punished, or are labeled as insane. Punishment for being different is terrible, but discrediting the individual by claiming insanity is far worst. We should not be acting like god and pumping psychotropic chemicals into insane people's heads, just because we don't like their beliefs or actions. Freedom seems so anti-thetical when the state can decide how to make belief systems for individuals.

The system of bureaucratic capitalism that controls freedom in our country is morally corrupt and should be repudiated. Not only does it control punishment and labels, but it forces values on unwilling individuals. The classic argument of capitalism and private property is undermined when you consider punishment and psychitry. Both of those things involve state inflicted values on person and property, sometimes with and sometimes without due cause. Due cause is only required in some formalized punishments, it not required in cases of property taxation and other forms of taxation that take something from us with giving us nothing in return.

Everybody is free to fight the state in anyway the want. There is no promises you will escape the organized system of oppression that makes up the state, but all the more power to you. Maybe you want to move to Canada or find a rural place away from the evils of mass-society. It won't work as you'll continue to run into the state wherever you move. Most of hippies who moved to communes quickly learned that. Another alternative would be to rebel against bureaucratic morality and replace it with what you think is more proper. That also failed as the state will inevitably catch up with you and punish you severely. Kathy Boudin robbing the Brink's truck to get money for oppressed minorities is an example of that. That failed and the result was more horrific violence in a society so dominated by violence in the media.

Kathy Boundin's life in prison might not have been all that bad compared to the she was forced to live in before her crime. She lost her freedom of place when she went to prison, but she also gave up the responsibility of doing what was moral. Was it any better then that life of the hippies who lived on dirt poor communes? Probably not, as communes offered a better life. When you consider our limited freedom to the slavery of commune life or that of prison life, it seems the desire for radicalism quickly fades. The good life indeed involves insulting our morality and playing along with rules we find so morally repugent.