/lit/ - Literature

>>14269892
If you want to have even a small workshop, let along a factory, you need land to put it on. Having land isn't some status symbol, it's the bare minimum to being a free and independent citizen. The ancients understood this intuitively.

Lets say you want to circulate a small newspaper to get your political message to the masses. If you don't have funds to do it yourself, you either need to find a source of funding or run advertisements in order to make the paper turn a profit. If you find a source of funding, you'll need to tow the line for your new boss, either by running stories they like or in the best case avoiding stories they don't.

If you run the paper for profit, you're even more restricted. You need to constantly follow the infatuations and melodramas of the day in order to gain a large enough readership. You also need to sanitize everything in order to attract advertisers. The whole project becomes an appeal to the lowest common denominator, with a very occasional sprinkling of whatever it was you originally set out to do, tucked into the back of the paper on an unnumbered page.

If you don't have land, then you also need to be constantly aware that saying the wrong thing could lose you your job or anger your landlord, and that whenever your current rental contract ends, you could easily find yourself living on the streets. Therefore you are always bound by certain unwritten rules, the transgression of which could ruin you.

Now if you have land, you can set up a couple printing machines in your garage for less than a grand, and with the money gained from renting out your guest-room can afford enough ink and paper to run weekly prints in the thousands on whatever subjects you desire. Even if you lose your job, you can grow vegetables in your backyard and have a couple of chickens. Even in the worst poverty and social isolation you'll have a roof over your head and food on the table.

This is the fundamental idea. People like >>14268703 talk about freedom like it's some abstract religious mystery to be contemplated and worshiped, but it's a lot simpler than that. Freedom is the capacity to be free, and some people are greater in this capacity than others. Politics is mostly power relations, and ideology functions to make that bitter pill easier to swallow.

>>14268660
Everyone will tell you to read Democracy in America, and you absolutely should, but if you're starting with him I'd recommend 'Recollections'. It's his account of serving in parliament during several revolutionary crises. Perhaps read Karl Marx's pamphlet on Louis Napoleon Bonaparte first, it will give you some context. It's a great book, full of swashbuckling moments, and gives a first-hand account of the many weird instances that come about during a revolution, and also the insanity of it all. For Kissinger read 'A World Restored'. It was written while he was a teacher at Harvard, and is a kind of commentary on Spengler's notions of western universalism.