Summery of liberty and discipline?
class 11
Answers
Answer:
Discipline is necessary to continue liberty. Liberty is a state of being that requires a person to take care of themselves. If someone else has to take care of them, then they lose their liberty to do what they want to survive and are required to do as the supplier of their needs demands. Those who wish to live with liberty must not succumb to the desire to be lazy and let someone else take care of them and that requires self discipline.
Explanation:
To improve your English Grammar and to learn Spoken English follow my YouTube channel : Easy English by Iconic Priya
Liberty and Discipline
Field Marshal Sir William Slim, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, held the
highest office in the British Army. He is well qualified to speak on the subject of
discipline and the relation it bears to liberty. This chapter has been condensed from
an article contributed by Sir William Sliam to The Fortnightly, London. This will be
of special interest to all those who are rightly worried about the general disquiet for
lack of discipline both at the personal and the national level.
When you get in your car or on your bicycle you can choose where you want
to go. That is liberty. But, as you drive or ride through the streets, you will keep
to the left of the road. That is discipline.
There are four reasons why you will keep to the left:
(i)
your own advantage
(ii)
consideration for others
(iii)
confidence in your fellows; and
(iv)
fear of punishment
It is the relative weight which we give to each of these reasons that decides
what sort of discipline we have. And that can vary from the pure self-
discipline of the Sermon on the Mount to the discipline of the concentration
camp, the enforced discipline of fear.
Inspite of all our squabbles, the British are united when it comes to most of the
things that matter and liberty is one of them. We believe in freedom to think
what we like, say what we like, work at what we like, and go where we like.
Discipline is a restraint on liberty, so many of us have a very natural
inclination to avoid it. But we cannot. Man, ever since the dim prehistoric past,
has had no option but to accept the discipline of some kind. For a modern man,
living in complex communities, in which every individual is dependent on
others, discipline is more than ever unavoidable.
All history teaches that when through either idleness, weakness or faction, the
sense of order fades in a nation, its economic life sinks into decay, then, as its
standard of living falls and security vanishes, one of two things happens.
Liberty and Discipline
4
27
Either some more virile militant power steps in to impose its own brand of
discipline or a dictator arises and clamps down the iron control of the police
state. Somehow, eventually, discipline is again enforced. The problem is not;
“Shall we accept discipline?” – sooner or later we have to-; it is “How shall we
accept it?” Shall it be imposed by physical violence and fear, by grim
economic necessity, or accepted by consent and understanding? Shall it come
from without or from within?
The word “discipline” for some flashes on to the screen of the mind a jack-
booted commissar bawling commands across the barrack square at tramping
squads. But that is dictatorship, not discipline. The voluntary, reasoned
discipline accepted by free, intelligent men and women is another thing. It is
binding on all, from top to bottom.
One morning, long ago, as a brand new second-lieutenant, I was walking on to
parade. A private soldier passed me and saluted. I acknowledged his salute
with an airy wave of the hand. Suddenly behind me, a voice rasped out my
name. I spun round and there was my Colonel, for whom I had a most
wholesome respect, and with him the Regimental Sergeant Major, of whom
also I stood in some awe. “I see,” said the Colonel, “you don't know how to
return a salute. Sergeant Major, plant your staff in the ground, and let Mr. Slim
practise saluting it until he does know how to return a salute!” So to and fro I
marched in sight of the whole battalion, saluting the Sergeant Major's cane. (I
could cheerfully have murdered the Colonel, the Sergeant Major, and my
grinning fellow-subalterns). At the end of ten minutes, the Colonel called me
up to him. All he said was: “Now remember, discipline begins with the
officers!”
And so it does. The leader must be ready, not only to accept a higher degree of
responsibility but a severer standard of self-discipline than those he leads. If
you hold a position of authority, whether you are the managing director or the
charge-head, you must impose discipline on yourself first. Then forget the
easy way of trying to enforce it on others-by just giving orders and expecting
them to be obeyed. You will give orders and you will see they are obeyed, but
you will only build up the leadership of your team on the discipline of
understanding.
There is more to a soldier's discipline than blind obedience and to take men