Question

Can someone help me with this question?

Answer 1

What is the cartoonist saying about individual freedom?

Answer 2

To do something alone or independently, especially something that is normally or better done in groups.
in other words he chose to do what ever he wanted to do alone and now he is asking for help.

Answer 3

It's an ironic cartoon. The bum is saying the reason he needs to ask for help now is that he chose not to ask for help earlier. Presumably his earlier decision to not ask for help was stupid, and led to some failure that put him in his sad position now.

The larger suggestion is that the ideal of individual liberty can be fetishized, over-emphasized, because human beings definitely do need to help each other to prosper as both individuals and a group (tribe, community, nation, species). We cannot survive all by our lonesome -- we are designed to succeed only as members of a group, working together. Therefore, one should temper one's enthusiasm for individual liberty with the recognition that if we do not work together to some extent, we will not prosper, even as individuals. (Or as I believe Ben Franklin said, with reference to the Revolution, if we do not hang together, we will assuredly hang separately.)

What the cartoonist glosses over -- and the very nature of cartooning is that you gloss over, oversimplify -- is the question of how, exactly, individual liberty is circumscribed by the necessity of working together. Is it the free choice of the individual? That is, does the bum voluntarily circumscribe his liberty by, say, taking a job, where he has to report to work at hours not of his choosing, where he has to fulfill expectations not of his choosing, according to someone else's deadlines? Or is his liberty circumscribed for him, by force -- for example, he is drafted into the army, or a forced labor regime, where he also has limits on his hours of work, goals, deadlines, but where the first step, into the limiting situation, is NOT of his choosing?

This is ideed where the rubber hits the road. Many people (including very likely the cartoonist) believe there isn't any significant difference between the two. There is no really important difference between volunteering to be a worker (or soldier) and being drafted by force into it. Either way, you end up with your daily choices circumscribed. Why should the initial choice matter so much? Such people are often fond of social structures that are coercive of our big choices, but leave freedom in the small daily choices. You may not choose your job, or your rate of pay, but you can mouth off to your boss freely (in part because he can't choose his job either), and you can do your job well or poorly without fear of losing it. You can express yourself sexually any way you please -- but whether you have children, and how many, and how you rear them are coerced by society at large for the good of all. The emphasis is on overall order, less freedom in the big choices, combined with more freedom in the small choices.

On the other side you have people who think freedom in the big choices is more important. That is, you should be free to choose a job, or not choose a job, but once you have chosen the job, if it turns out to be brutally coercive -- the boss requires you to salute him, wear a uniform, take drug tests, have cameras installed in your bedroom -- then that's OK, because you always have the option of not taking the job, or quitting.

An important assumption underlying both points of view is what you think of people's ability to use freedom wisely. The cartoonist clearly believes that people in general use freedom poorly. Here's a bum who used his freedom to destroy himself, for example, and the idea is that this is probably typical of people who trust their own judgment instead of the judgment of people wiser than he. The opposing camp things this is nonsense, and that generally individuals can be trusted to make wise use of their liberty.

Answer 4

thank you both for the help.