"...not just [dependence] on Empire, but on painkillers, central banks, government intervention, silence, complicity.
Dependence limits freedom.
The dependent person, household or nation cannot truly be free; their actions and choices are severely limited, and the deeper their dependence, the greater the erosion of their will to become less dependent.
...independence boils down to not being dependent on systems you have no control over.
Independence isn't taken from us; we surrender it.
...it's often easier to accept dependence than struggle to maintain our independence.
Our culture has developed a self-destructive response to pain: we want any sort of pain, physical, spiritual, financial, to go away immediately and magically. We don't care about the mechanism, just make it go away.
...Pain communicates that something is damaged, dysfunctional, not working or in conflict.
...The quick fix does not address the source or solve the underlying problem: it simply makes the symptoms go away. It eliminates the message that something's wrong and needs to be addressed in a fundamental way.
...eliminating the message and the symptoms doesn't fix anything. What it does do is make us dependent on the fix. A dose of highly addictive heroin is called a fix for good reason: like any other painkiller, the addict depends on it to fix the pain and the symptoms that are shouting that something's terribly wrong.
...the Federal Reserve's interventions monetary heroin: the global financial meltdown caused pain, and rather than deal with the sources of financial dysfunction, the Fed chose the highly addictive fix of zero interest rates, unlimited credit and easy money.
...And so now we're hooked, dependent: whether we understand it or not, we have surrendered our independence and our ability to learn from pain and directly address the sources of the dysfunction.
Free money, in all its guises--welfare, corporate welfare, subsidies, tax breaks, bribes--is the easy fix, the easy pill that makes the symptoms go away.
What happens to systems that ignore symptoms? They break.
Whatever is causing the pain continues unaddressed, and so it gets worse.
Making the symptoms go away ...enables the problem to spread and grow even more destructive.
Becoming dependent on the fixes issued by the Federal Reserve and the central state does not solve the problems causing the pain; it simply makes us dependent on the quick, easy opiate.
...Our democracy has already been gutted by the financial fix, and our claims of independence ring hollow."
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2014/07/independence-day-2014-freedom-from-pain.html
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