Key Eight, The Principle of Freedom
2021 Gathering, Part Thirty-One
JJ: Principle number eight is the principle of freedom.
I never revealed it before [as a Key of Knowledge], but I’ve talked about it. You would think that freedom would be easy to understand, but it’s not because everybody claims to be fighting for freedom and everybody has a different idea of what freedom is.
How about Hitler? Do you think Hitler was felt like he was fighting for freedom?
Asaph: Yes.
Other audience member: No!
JJ: Yes, he often talked about freedom that he was fighting for and the freedom of the German people . . . to do whatever they wanted, even if it meant exterminating all the Jews.
How about the southern slave owners? Did they feel like they were fighting for freedom?
Audience member: States’ rights.
JJ: Right, states’ rights. That’s right. And even as far as slavery goes, they thought that slavery was a win-win. They thought that the Black race could not govern themselves and that they needed assistance, and they were there to help them out. In return, the Black race provided them with a whole bunch of free labor. So in their minds it was win-win, and maximum freedom for everybody. That’s the way they looked at it.
Abraham Lincoln looked at that and he says, you know, the South really has a strange idea of what freedom is. He says, I’d like to see them be slaves for a while, to see if they thought that was being free.
So anyway, people have a lot of different ideas of what freedom is. It is like the second key of judgment: to understand where an understanding of it is difficult to put in a black and white formula. Where the maximum freedom is, requires judgment because freedom is neither to the extreme of one side or the other.
Let’s look at the two extremes. On one extreme, we have North Korea, where you don’t have freedom to say “boo.” You show up to a rally for the Dear Leader, and they take photographs of everybody, and they look through the photographs, and if somebody doesn’t have a big grin on their face, like they’re really happy with their Dear Leader, they’re visited to find out what their problem is. So when you show up, you have to look like you’re thrilled to see the Dear Leader.
Could you imagine living in such a state? It’s hard to imagine anything much worse than that. But look at the pictures of the audiences in North Korea. They all look like they’re just so happy to be there, but they have to look that way because if you frown, if you have a frown on your face in connection to anything the Dear Leader says you’re in big trouble over there.
You don’t have power to express yourself the way that you want. You don’t have power to be a member of any religion you want. You don’t have power to speak your mind. You don’t have power to work the job you want to work. You’re completely controlled. So that’s one extreme.
The other extreme is where there’s no laws at all. And that’s all. That would be almost as bad. If there were no laws or no control, then what would we have? We would have the country ruled by roaming mobs. There would be mobs moving around, and since there would be no laws to control them, the mob leaders would be the ones in charge of everything.
So you have to have a certain amount of law and control for maximum freedom, because if we have no structure at all, no civilization at all controlling anything, we would be in a similar situation as North Korea. You couldn’t say “boo.” because some mob leader would have your head.
So both extremes would produce pretty much the same result. In other words, there has to be some controls of freedom in some circumstances. For instance, you don’t have freedom to be a burglar and burglarize your neighbor’s home. If you just go to your neighbor’s home, open the door and go in there and take his television set . . . there has to be a restriction of your freedom to do that.
But why? Why restrict the guy? Why take away Asaph’s freedom over here (We’ll pick on him) to steal Tyler’s TV? Asaph wants a TV. How come he doesn’t have freedom to just go take it?
Asaph: Because he is stronger than me.
JJ: He’s bigger than you. Okay, That’s one reason. So in other words, if you have freedom to burglarize other people’s homes, then that diminishes their freedom to be in charge of their possessions. So, in other words, if your freedom gives you extra freedom but diminishes somebody else’s freedom even more than that, that freedom should not exist.
So the freedom to burglarize a home should not exist because it takes away more freedom than it gives. Slavery should not exist. They said that slavery was good because it gave the South power or the slaveholders power to have free time, educate their kids, take vacations. It seemed to give them more freedom, but it took away more freedom that it gave. So that made it wrong.
So the principle of freedom circulates around this idea that the laws governing freedom must be built around the idea of maximum freedom – not complete freedom or complete imprisonment, but around the idea of maximum freedom.
Phillip: The way Rebecca and I were taught this principle was that you have the equality as a base and that if you have a law, it needs to apply to everybody equally. But the goal of the society should be to always move toward greater freedom. But you can’t give freedom without responsibility. And so if the people are not responsible to governing themselves according to morality, if somebody is trying to steal somebody else’s TV, then you have to create rules about or laws about stealing the TV and you create these laws that restrict freedom.
But the goal is always to educate the people to become more moral or righteous. So that you can always move toward greater freedom, as much freedom as the society is ready and able to receive or accept.
JJ: And the more advanced society becomes, the fewer laws they will have to have.
Phillip: Right.
JJ: Like this group here . . . we don’t have to tell anybody in this group, if you steal something, you’re going to be punished. We don’t worry about anybody here stealing anything. We know that people in this group are not that way inclined.
Joshua: Well, you know, people here are way too smart to get caught. (laughter)
JJ: That might be it. But it’d be great to live in a civilization where people were spiritually advanced enough that you didn’t need hardly any laws at all. And that’s what Zion, hopefully, will be like where we will not need any laws. As a matter of fact, the Scripture says, “you will have no laws but my laws when I come.” That means His coming may be some distance away. We have all kinds of laws right now, and they want more laws all the time.
How many laws do they put on the books every year? I think it’s over a thousand, and the trouble is, they keep adding these new laws, and they don’t take off the old ones.
As a matter of fact, they were going after Trump a while back on some law that was 150 years old that was never used. I can’t remember what it was, but that’s how desperate they were to get the guy that, they tried to use an old law that was on the books. And that’s what they do. If the powers-that-be want to go after you, they will look through all the thousands of laws back ten years ago, twenty-years-ago, “ah here’s a fifty-year-old law. We can get this guy on this this silly little law.”
We’ve got so many laws that if the powers-that-be want to get you, they could probably find something wrong with anybody here, here in this room, if they wanted to, because there are just so many laws out there. But fortunately, unless you really offend the beast, they just go by, you know, the standard laws that normally affect humanity. But if they want to go after you, they can dig out some old stuff and find something.
Like I was looking at some old laws in Boise. I think there is one that says you can ride a giraffe in Main Street in the middle of the day or something like that. There are a lot of crazy laws out there. You can’t spit on the sidewalk. You can’t do this. You can’t do that. There’s humorous books written about silly laws. I’ve read a number of them, not books, but I read several quotations of silly, outdated laws, and they’re kind of funny because there’s really some crazy ones out there. Fortunately most of them are not enforced unless somebody decides they want to go after somebody.
But the basic principle of freedom then is found neither in the extreme right or extreme left, but that which will create maximum freedom. It is different for different societies, for different people, for different consciousness. If we had a group of people that had what we call a Zion consciousness, then we would basically need very, very few laws . . . we might need some, you know, basic rules just for clarity’s sake. Like if you have a house, you want to know where your border is, so you don’t infringe on your neighbor.
But if we had a very evolved society, we would need just a very minimal number of laws. The less evolved a society is, the more laws you need for the maximum freedom for that people. In Afghanistan, you know, they needed quite a few laws over there to hold them together and here we don’t need so many laws. But the powers-that-be think we need a lot of laws. So, they’re passing more laws all the time, whether we need them or not.
The trouble with our governments is that they think their job description is to make more laws and spend more money. We need to change their job description into serving the people rather than just increasing their base of power through buying votes and creating more laws that will restrict freedom.
We need to change their job description. So I’d be willing to give them a bonus in money if we could change the job description to make fewer laws and spend less borrowed money. I don’t care if they spend money that we have, even if they waste it to some degree, which is to be expected. But spending money that will have to be paid off by our grandkids I think is pretty outrageous. Our political leaders are completely unconcerned about that.
To search the website, containing millions of words, replace the word “search” with the word or phrase you want to find and place the entire line in the Google search box.
“Search” site:freeread.com
Easy Access to All the Writings
For Free Book go HERE and other books HERE
JJ’s Amazon page HERE
Check out JJ’s Facebook Group HERE