catastro and coricocat are having a pleasant refreshment in a public bar. catastro is an alkie so when offered a drink of wine he's not really free to turn it down. he lacks positive freedom or freedom 'to' (self-control, antonomy, the capacity to act in his own best interests).
coricocat is not an alkie. she has positive freedom, but also negative freedom or freedom 'from' (nothing external interferes with her liberty) so she joins catastro in the wine but then upsets the people at the next table by singing loudly, denying them the freedom to enjoy a quiet evening. the pub landlord, John Stuart Mill, comes over and tells coricocat she'll get barred if she keeps singing. but then coricocat argues with him, telling him that the only reason she's in his pub drinking with a view to getting drunk is because she has fuck all else to do and that she can't help singing when she's drunk, thus questioning the extent to which she really has positive freedom. a barfly called Isaiah Berlin intercedes with a view to sorting out the argument. he tells the landlord that if coricocat is to fully express her positive freedom then her morally rational self must triumph over her baser appetites, for which she needs the landlord's help. the landlord then takes coricocat's glass of wine off her and throws her out the pub. coricocat calls the landlord a fascist, Isaiah orders another bottle of wine for him and catastro, then gets up on the table and shouts:
to manipulate (wo)men to propel them towards goals which you - the public landlord come social reformer - see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
and then falls off the table, blind drunk.
while catastro sits quietly enjoying the rest of the wine on his own.
and the moral of this story is, if you have a philosophical view on freedom, you're more likely to enjoy freedom if you keep it to yourself.
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