If the freedom offered needs to be taught and be appreciated, there is a fundamentally flaw with that. True freedom should be obvious once it is tasted.
If we had made that our criterion, it would have led us to reject many past advances in our understanding of human rights. Society generally needs to be educated to understand the need for a freedom which has not been generally accepted in the past. Pick almost any advance in human rights, and you'll see that it required educating people who had been taught to consider it absurd. We can see this today, when we look at the campaign to give gay couples equal rights, and the campaign for abortion rights, which has not been won globally. Even freedom of speech was not obvious, and there are still people who don't get it. This is even more true for ideas of freedom that are inconvenient for the large corporations that dominate most of the media. They can use their power to discourage the sort of discussion through which people could start to endorse those ideas of freedom. This makes it even more necessary for us to work to encourage that discussion. _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list