Inhumanity is in human power - Part 3

                                                            Zygmunt Bauman

Liberation comes only when we decide to transform the fate of the appointment.

Time to think about what all this entails. And in particular, whether something is clear, from what we could, trying to compose our lives, to learn - for the benefit of us and for others ... Something like this should arise. Not least because it challenges that face us today, and what stood before those born generations, wyrosłymi or come to an old age in the Polish People's Republic, with all the glaring differences were also to each other strikingly similar. I went here and there, and goes a decent life. The freedom from humiliation. About making the world in which they live came out, or at least yourself in it, better than he was or is. That went well and goes to make his life so that all trace of him remained in the world. Marx used to say that people make their history, but in conditions created by them. This, however, made that notwithstanding the conditions of them independent, about the same thing, creating their own history, people care and are seeking ...

O children of men (and who of us is not a human child or does not he?) Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote: "Deprived of speech, inability to maintain upright posture in, uncertain as to what to focus, unable to calculating profits and losses the child is profoundly human, because of his embarrassment promises and promises the coming of what is possible.

Do Not Lose Dignity
Being a child is the same: everything is still in front, there, in this mysterious place, "future" called, which is known to be out there somewhere, but I do not know how it looks, anything can happen, if not now then later. O anything else is not the time to say that can not happen, and even do not yet irretrievably lost. The world of possibilities has no boundaries - and even if it had, it still would not know where to run and how to find them. Each has the desire to ziszczenia same chance, and among plenty of opportunity yet unproven benefits and costs of the settlement has little meaning. There is a children's dictionary of the separation of what is "realistic", the fantasy or "reasonable expectations" from idle fantasies (these distinctions are invented by adults .) Roads are cut down under the feet of countless multitude, and each of them waiting, attracts, persuades, tempted to try it out - like the places where the road is (perhaps) lead, and ways of walking toward them. Being a child is the same as not having "the past", which is known from this after all that implies, holds the neck, captivates with no hope of release, but instead to have boundless plenty of "future", which it promises to solve all the shackles and all chains break down ... Being a child does not have a permanent address check - but I have as a perpetual ticket, valid on all vehicles. The child, in other words, this infinite possibilities.

Ability to lead and bring you to reality, it must persuade (persuade, entice, compel), that is no longer what it was before, "only a possibility." This assistance (help? Violence?) Is called the training or education. Its purpose is to maturity : end of childhood. To become fully human, one must first cease to be a child. A man adult, the term "childish" an affront, and slander of childish behavior is an affront him, insult or condemnation verdict. "Adult" is already-not-child, the more the things being deprived of all opportunities outside of this one, which has developed into reality. The most precious opportunity that educators seek to transform into reality, is to leave the disturbingly broad views and confusing crossroads of only one , even and straight. this path, not swerving and not looking around, must be followed, watching this way and never exceeding the impenetrable (though insidious, because it distorted), the boundary between reality and fantasy, both supervisors expensive social order and philosophers, the guards order thinking.

In the course of maturation / education something to gain: the ability to distinguish between the comme il faut and comme il ne faut pas - between permitted and forbidden, that which is approved and what is condemned, the "you must do this 'or' that you will escape the dry "and" to be sure that "or" will do so at your own peril. " Gains in life in peace and tranquility in the soul - and even at the cost of incapacitation, subordination, obedience, humility and docility. Mature man knows his place and keeps it on the basis of the temptations of the nose or finger insertion, where it belongs. And in the first Republic, and second, and third, and fourth. I considered this a hole in history, the Polish People's Republic ...

In the course of maturation / education comes easily, it can be something to lose: czupurność and persistence, willingness and courage to say "no", the tendency to refuse to adopt things as they are, because they are as they are, and they maintain that the other can not be . Boldness sneezed carrot and stick prowess ignore ... The dignity of the opposition: not to be "set", and harshly treated contemptuously, bully, intimidate, ignore, negotiable. In short, you can destroy human dignity.

Freedom is a responsibility

"Do not leave the world as it is" - he wrote in his notebook, Janusz Korczak probably so that these commandment przewodziło his actions. Jozef Tischner wrote down another admonition: "Let's stop the world accountable, and let's start with ourselves accountable." Sounded like a retort ... But it really was a riposte? An expression of opposition? Perhaps contrary to appearances, however, was not.It is difficult to Korczak's admonition to resist the call, if we compare them with the observation by Tischner also recorded that "freedom is not a man crawls after reading the books, freedom comes after a meeting of the second free man." Tischner was a thinker as few consistently - even in the description and the vivisection of inconsistency, this widespread human vices, which many times in his writings came back with sorrow, but with the right of his contemplation of human destiny indulgence ...

When a record from the second set, will emerge as a consistent and clear message, and certainly consistent with an appeal Korczak: Reconciliation of himself, and not a world that does not often encounter on their way free people. We charge each other, because - as you can see - the people we met, after meeting us, freedom does not come. Therefore, we charge ourselves with the fact that we did not quite free. If we do that, the world is no longer the world as it is, there will be no world in which they rarely, too rarely, rarely painful, free people she meets. And so we should not settle the world, instead of clearing himself, but not to account for themselves, without accounting for the world.

Do not leave the world as it is, if you do not leave ourselves as we are. And let themselves "such as we" should not, because I suffer in this world - then again, few of our settlement with each other that resulted. The circle is closed. "Nobody can be completely free," says Tischner, when "the others around him are slaves." "An appropriate restriction of human freedom is not, as is sometimes said, the freedom of another human being, but his captivity." "The liberation of man begins from within. It could not begin, however, had not met the person next to each other and freedom if he had not choked her."

But what is this freedom, the Jozef Tischner also told that "he would have given it to first place from all the values that are in Poland?" Lots of answers uzbierałoby on this question, if thoroughly browse through the contents of libraries, but the closest to capturing the essence of freedom seems to Joseph Brodsky, poet, thinker and an experienced similar to our fate, when he says that a free man is one who "is not addictive when the bear failure ", which, in other words, takes responsibility for his actions and their consequences. Which of liability does not run away and do not try to protect it before it wider than your back, and the charge of desertion and cowardice is not a magic formula twists, "I was told," had "or" I could not get otherwise. " Who actively denies the same despicable suggestion that Fyodor Dostoyevsky put in the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor, that "the most tiring of human concern is to find someone who could give the gift of freedom."

And what is it again to "accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions? What other consequences referred to here? Of course on the impact that our actions or our failure to act will have on the fate of other people. Because whatever we do (and before doing anything to shrink), changes the circumstances under which the work falls to others around us: a set of objectives which may be a sensible place, and measures which can be used to achieve them.

This is true regardless of whether we thought about it and whether or not we are aware of the interrelatedness of our destinies, whether we realize that - like the deeds of other people make up our fate - our actions and our inaction are part of their fate. Have we aware of it or not, whether we like it or not, we bear responsibility for what happened to us happen to another. But as long as that fact does not count and as long as we behave as if he were not, and we, and others around us are, so to speak, "igraszkami fate." We are not free. Liberation comes only when we decide to transform the fate of the establishment, where, in other words, we assume responsibility for this responsibility, and so we assume, after all, and from which we can not escape, for which we can, at most, we can forget or ignore - not to let her memory guide our actions, and submitting the same slavery over freedom.

Assuming responsibility for this responsibility, which is always, willy-nilly, knowing or not knowing, we assume, for what would happen to others, we open the gates of freedom. But open them at the risk of error, for which we will henceforth only himself to blame and for which in his own chest to fight we will. Together with our consent to the risk of error, at risk, without which freedom can not come, we open a door conscience, it will be our judge now investigating and adjudicating at the same time, strict and incorruptible, from which judgments can no longer mock us, explaining that the what we have done, or to neglect his duty to make, forced us coercion or pushed someone else's own ignorance.

Zygmunt Bauman, Roman Kubicki, Anna Zeidler-Janiszewska, "Life in contexts. Talk about what is behind us and what is before us"

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Publisher WAiP, 2009
Source: Gazeta Wyborcza