A plea for freedom

A contribution from one of our donor members in the context of an email exchange about support for our organisation.

Editor’s note

We were so touched by the lines of this enlightened citizen that we asked him if he would be willing to have them published on our website. He was not only happy to offer us his contribution, he is also doing so in his name. He considers “taking full responsibility for my words, both in private and in public, to be a very good (mental) exercise”. What a pleasure it is to discover people around us who not only use their freedom of opinion, but also have the civic courage to use their freedom of expression.

Thank you, Tom Kieffer, for your inspiring words.

Convincing more people… I’ve been thinking about it all week.

In my company, for several years, I have been passing on the message that force is no match for conviction, and that instead of trying to force people, you have to convince them.

Forcing is actually pathetic. You have to check all the time that the forced measures are respected. Everyone works reluctantly. Why is that? To implement a received idea. Strong ideas however are established by their intrinsic arguments and do not need to be forced upon us.

“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo

How to convince more people … it would be necessary that these people are ready to invest themselves to look for real information, at the source or at really independent sources. How to convince, if by a simple diffuse threat of not being able to go on holiday, most people are ready to abandon their “convictions” without hesitation? It seems that the strongest idea that ever existed in human beings, the idea of freedom, is no longer a criterion. The idea that so many people fought for, we (as a society) are willingly selling to the operators of large databases, be it the state, Google or Amazon. Comfort seems to be the only criterion above everything else, be it fundamental rights, health, environment or anything else. 

We have negative interest and pay to save. The standardised food we produce has become as much poison as it was medicine in the time of Hippocrates. Life expectancy is increasing, but allergies, autoimmune diseases and rare diseases are proliferating from an early age.

Instead of an immune system we use a mask. It is no wonder that sacrificing society for the sake of the so-called health of the individual is now called solidarity. I am sure that George Orwell could not have imagined us.

Convincing can only be done by setting a different example, with better results. And for this, I hope in the first instance that those who do not swallow everything that is presented to them, and for whom truth is more important than comfort, can come together and draw strength and inspiration from it. For that is what is most needed to set a different example.  

Sincerely

Tom

This text was sent to us in French and we used deepl for the translation into German and English. On the Luxembourg page we have published the French original.