Happy 250th Birthday, America.
This is a shorter comment.
Acknowledged:
The Pledge of Allegiance
Google Translate
(American) English
English uniquely separates Freedom and Liberty.
As I am from Siberia, with confidence:
- Russian: “свобода” (svoboda) both.
Sketching with Google Translate:
- Germanic Languages: versions of “freiheit” both.
- Latin Languages: versions of “libertas” both.
- Greek: “ελευθερία” (eleftheria) both.
- Arabic: “حرية” huriya / “الحرية” alhuriya.
- Hindi: “स्वतंत्रता” (swatantrata) both.
- East Asian Languages: “Ziyou, jiyu, jayu” both.
Google Translate picks up the difference for Arabic a little, infinitesimally differentiating freedom (huriya) and liberty (alhuriya, the freedom). I have also looked at Bengali, Urdu, Swahili, Amharic, Yoruba, Malay.
English looked at both Germanic “freiheit” and Latin “libertas”, and decided that both are important. So important that it used both.
I noticed this two months before I randomly fell 40 ft offtrail and almost died in the mountains before being found.
Interpretation
- How did I interpret this abstractly?
Graph: X is time and Y is “ability to”. “Freedom” implies there is no upper bound, no restraint on the amount of ability to one may have. “Liberty” implies an existence of a positive lower bound on the amount of ability to. No matter how restrained you are in society, your ability to is always greater than your dis-ability to.
The word “Freedom” has no implication that the “ability to” needs stay positive.
I love America. I look at its foundations with pure adoration and jubilation.
- How did I interpret this socioeconomically?
I can’t even begin describing it post my brain injury. My voice breaks down into evil guttural sounds. My face starts twitching. My eyes see no darkness. My eyes see a blinding white of pure rage.
America’s statue is of liberty (gifted by the Latin-language France, huh). In schools, the ending of the pledge is: “…with liberty and justice for all”. Yet since the Cold War, America, in its haste to differentiate from the Soviet Union, became about “freedom”. We use liberty less in our lexicon, we mistake liberty’s intention, we dilute liberty’s meaning.
Because of course the world is boolean. True and False. 0 and 1. Black and white. Us and them. Left and Right. USA and USSR. Freiheit and Libertas. Wouldn’t a staunch atheist be as deplorable as a fanatical believer, in their hypocrisy engaging in the same thinking, just from a different viewpoint? There is for sure no higher power! There for sure is! Humans are fleeting and thus need an urgent meaning. In desperation, humans converge their confidence to 100%.
And since the generations that were born in the 1950s do not care about whether their ability to is positively bounded – just that it can go up infinitely, like their precious stock market – why not take their ability to beat their colorless hearts? Now they whimper about their liberty, not so caring about yours.
True societal freedom is a consequence of liberty. Without liberty, society’s freedom is a mere martingale, ready to collapse into authoritarianism’s dis-ability to.
Happy 250th birthday, America.
— dvp, July 4th, 2026
Don’t be stupid.