Fifth Freedom
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"Fifth Freedom" may refer to:
- a term coined by the cybernetician Norbert Wiener, in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) p.37.
- a concept from the Splinter Cell series of video and computer games and from novels created by American author Tom Clancy
- a concept from The Culture of Terrorism by Noam Chomsky
- The "fifth freedom" may also refer to one of the freedoms of the air, in particular the one that enables the airlines of any two countries to pick up passengers in each other's territories for destinations in other nations.
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
The Fifth Freedom is the fictional freedom possessed by agents of (fictional) Third Echelon in the Splinter Cell series of video games. The freedom is essentially "the freedom to do whatever is deemed necessary to protect the four cornerstones of American moral thought", as defined in one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous speeches. Roosevelt articulated these as
- "freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear."[1]
Within the fictional world of Splinter Cell, this unofficial Fifth Freedom allows an operative to disregard any law, agreement, or framework of ethical behavior in order to accomplish his mission. As Dermot P. Brunton put it, "all means are acceptable." For example, the operative may kill in combat or by assassination, may torture or kidnap people, may deploy on U.S. soil, and may spy on other U.S. government agencies. Fifth Freedom is also used as a verb. To "Fifth Freedom" someone is another way of saying to kill someone.
Noam Chomsky: The Culture of Terrorism
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell is predated in 1987 by Noam Chomsky in his book 'On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures', where the Fifth Freedom also alludes to Roosevelt's "four cornerstones of American moral thought", and is explicated in the following quote:
- "The central--and not very surprising--conclusion that emerges from the documentary and historical record is that the U.S. international and security policy, rooted in the structure of power in the domestic society, has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call the 'Fifth Freedom,' understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced."
- -- from The Culture of Terrorism, 1998 Noam Chomsky