Freedom and Security: Society as Phenomenality

So this horrendous Ariel Castro deal led me to some thoughts...

The specific cultural logic in which we live (capitalism, patriarchy, the racial order, etc.) presents itself to us as Reality. This Reality is one of dualism, in other words Maya. The capitalist structure of government and social interaction creates not only opposing (as in logically negated) concepts, but forces concepts into opposition in novel and shitty ways. For example, the opposition between security and freedom that is so often discussed. This rests on a specific and unnecessary opposition between the two concepts, resting on (of course) private property relations. People believe they have the right to do whatever they want with/on their property. Privacy conceptions (as opposed to private property ownership) interact dialectically with the technical level of society, often reacting against the technological development which has engendered a state or conception of non-privacy. Next (or before, as the case may be) the ideology of property comes in, strengthened.

These considerations lead me to believe that opposition occurs due to social context (the old Marxist axiom). Thus they are highly variable. Formal logic's insistence on "logical negation" is contrived on two levels: the way people interact with the world, and cultural logic on a social level, do not conceive of binary negation, meaning there is always a "taintedness" to concepts; second, the individual concept of binary negation is doubly contrived because it is based on social context as well as on a process of dry abstraction which cuts horizontal relations completely out of the picture, thus bastardizing even the social context. There is no such thing as negation on the level of Brahman, of course. Maya functions on the level of phenomenality--in other words, on the level of the social.

So going back to Castro, ideally there would be no ability to do what he did, or to do a lot of related-but-not-as-extremely-shocking things that happen much more commonly and on a much wider scale, because there would be no debate on security and freedom, no conception of private property on which that could base itself, and no socially-defined opposition between the two things that I'm sure everyone wants: freedom and security.

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/8026418953/