Here, “Freedom to pursue life’s goals” is often a euphemism used by our owner class to make as much capital as they want without taxation, to exploit as many people as they want, and to not be held responsible for the damage to the commons or the environment their pursuit causes. There’s very little about our culture that doesn’t revolve around greed and greed worship. “Freedom to pursue life’s goals” doesn’t mean bird watching or pottery here.
And in that sense, yes, they do conflict, because the freedom for a few (that many poor people defend against their own interests in the self-delusion of one day becoming) to exploit and hoard as much societal value as possible leaves that society without the resources to have other citizen’s basic needs met.
I agree with everything you say but I feel that for the Pew Study to have any intellectual weight they’d have had to step beyond euphemism and make all of that explicit to their respondents. Or one might conclude that, at least in this case, Pew are complicit with the lies that are being told.
I’m not sure of their methodology, but I consider the meaning taken from the proposition of “freedom to pursue life’s goals” in itself is one of the fundamental differences in the American vs. European cultural mindset, before you even get to the answer.
I do see what you mean but you’d need to drill down in the questioning into “How do you define those freedoms?” or “What do you understand life’s goals to mean?” before you could get to meaningful data. I think that this is poor survey design but I agree with your point and I think the survey may have been designed poorly on purpose.
I’m American.
Here, “Freedom to pursue life’s goals” is often a euphemism used by our owner class to make as much capital as they want without taxation, to exploit as many people as they want, and to not be held responsible for the damage to the commons or the environment their pursuit causes. There’s very little about our culture that doesn’t revolve around greed and greed worship. “Freedom to pursue life’s goals” doesn’t mean bird watching or pottery here.
And in that sense, yes, they do conflict, because the freedom for a few (that many poor people defend against their own interests in the self-delusion of one day becoming) to exploit and hoard as much societal value as possible leaves that society without the resources to have other citizen’s basic needs met.
I agree with everything you say but I feel that for the Pew Study to have any intellectual weight they’d have had to step beyond euphemism and make all of that explicit to their respondents. Or one might conclude that, at least in this case, Pew are complicit with the lies that are being told.
I’m not sure of their methodology, but I consider the meaning taken from the proposition of “freedom to pursue life’s goals” in itself is one of the fundamental differences in the American vs. European cultural mindset, before you even get to the answer.
I do see what you mean but you’d need to drill down in the questioning into “How do you define those freedoms?” or “What do you understand life’s goals to mean?” before you could get to meaningful data. I think that this is poor survey design but I agree with your point and I think the survey may have been designed poorly on purpose.
Agreed, this isn’t useful.