Guest Column: Whither the Independent?

Obsolete phrase: “independence of mind”
By Jon Rappoport [Full original column here.]

Like a car with high fins and long protruding tail lights, the phrase “independence of mind” has gone out of style, especially at colleges and universities where it ought to be the most profound ideal. The thugs have taken over.

As recently as 2008, a professor of Jurisprudence at King’s College London, Timothy Macklem, described the phrase in this fashion:

“Independence of Mind [explores] the ways in which the fundamental freedoms help us to achieve something even more profound, by enabling us to arrive at beliefs, convictions and voices of our own, so that we truly come to think, believe, and speak for ourselves in the rich and various ways that the freedoms then protect. Privacy grants us the distance and refuge from others necessary to develop views of our own; freedom of speech calls on us to imagine ways of expressing ourselves that are both true to the views we have developed and innovative in their own right; freedom of conscience enables each of us to create a distinctive rational personality in which to embed the convictions that we wish to treat as non-negotiable…” Continue reading