No notes, no drafts, no outline - I guess we’re blogging like in the old days again! I’ve recently found myself with a lot of time to think about things. And thanks to the first dose of my MS Therapy, I’ve now got the mental clarity to actually put these thoughts onto paper in a semi-coherent form. Or at least as coherent as any of my blog posts are these days. Anyway, my life has gone through a bit of a roller coaster over the last year and a half. I’ve written about this here and over on one of my other blogs. This roller coaster ride has made a few things a lot clearer to me, and made me realise just how lucky I really am.I’ve always been someone who’s been raised to see the value of work, to earn your keep. Not in a bad way, mind you. It’s just that both of my parents were highly intelligent, ambitious, and hard working. Seeing this on a daily basis rubbed off on me as a kid, especially since I could see the benefits of that hard work with things like our move abroad in the 1990s. This subconsciously set the signals for my own life, indeed my move to Ireland nearly fourteen years (jeez, I’m really getting old!) ago mirrored that move! At the same time, my family was very much left of center in its views. We were social democrats, at least until the massacre of the second chancellorship of Gerhard Schröder, and the importance of a strong social security net, and the responsibility that those in society have for those that are less well off was something that was often discussed and reinforced at home.
And yet, for the longest time, this was primarily an academic discussion. I never had any problems with the taxes and social charges that came out of my pay cheques because whilst money was important, I genuinely enjoyed the jobs that I was working, and I generally still had enough left over to finance the life style I’d always wanted to live, which to be fair was mostly traveling and gadgets. It wasn’t until my health finally gave out in 2024 and forced me to leave my job of five and a half years that the reality of these systems hit me. For the first time in my life, I was left temporarily incapable of living the life I wanted, not because I didn’t have a job, but because my body was in a condition that made it impossible. I’ve since been forced to rely on social welfare, and more lately illness benefit, payments to keep me afloat, the public health system to deal with the recent blows to my health, and on Ireland’s social housing system in an attempt to find a stable roof over my head. The academic, the theoretical, has suddenly become very real.
And it is only now that I realise just how much of a lifeline these systems truly are. Despite my health issues, the burnout, being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and despite the other issues that I’m dealing with, I’m still able to live life. And yes, I mean live, not just exist. I’m still able to meet with friends, and I’d be able to enjoy the summer here in Ireland if that bastard actually bothered to show up for a change. I not only have the time and space needed to heal but thanks to Ireland’s public health system, I’m also able to access Ocrevus, one of the disease management drugs for multiple sclerosis that’ll allow me to live a normal life without facing crippling debt or personal insolvency. Well, that’s the hope anyway, I’ve only started my treatment regime.
This whole post started as an offshoot of a longer one talking about my personal experience with Ireland’s social welfare system, in particular the online aspect of it, something I was genuinely positively surprised by. Social welfare often gets shit on as the realm of work-shy spongers that just steal from honest, hard-working people. I never subscribed to that view, even before being forced to rely on it myself. No one wants to experience their life crumbling to dust around them. I’ve had it happen to me a few times, it is not fun, believe me. Knowing that there’s a system to fall back on whilst you’re trying to sort things out can very literally be the difference between life and death.
In his writings and presentations, the Russian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin coined something that he phrased as “two concepts of liberty”. The first of these concepts is “negative liberty”, and probably the closest to the classic concept of liberty being bandied about these days. It amounts to “freedom from…”, that is being free from coercion or control by an external political body or organisation. “Positive liberty”, by contrast, refers to what a person is free to achieve, “freedom to do…” in effect. Now, this being a philosophical concept, there are naturally tons and tons of arguments, papers, presentations and books out there that discuss every single aspect of this concept to death. I swear, philosophers seem to hate trees almost as much as public servants, given the amount of paper they use. The principle is simple though, and there’s a reason I bring this up.
You see, the availability of a social security net and/or a public healthcare system is, in my eyes, a guarantor of positive liberty as defined by Isaiah Berlin. It is what allows people to weather disruptive events, be they personal, professional or medical. It means that losing one’s job does not mean losing everything. It gives people the time to properly come to grips with a potentially life-shattering medical diagnosis without burying their entire family under insane medical debt. Hell, Ocrevus, the drug I’m getting to deal with multiple sclerosis, costs 78,000 dollars for a year’s course, which is two doses. There’s no way in hell I’d have been able to afford that out of pocket even when I was still working!
Don’t get me wrong, Berlin’s negative liberty is just as vital as it’s ever been. Freedom from undue government or societal interference, no matter what shape it takes, is vital, especially in today’s hypertransparent world. Yet for some reason, I can’t feel like positive liberty is somewhat underappreciated, not just by other people but until recently by me as well. The freedom to get your life back in order, to find your feet again, is the type of freedom no one thinks about until they need it.
Comments
Post a Comment