On Freedom

Humanity’s ability to restructure our behaviors is what gives us our advantage in resource acquisition throughout evolutionary time. Though we can format ourselves and grow comfortable in that format, it is human to radicalize and change behaviors when our resource acquisition process is threatened. I’m not sure if this is instinctual or cultural, but it seems to be a rule—at least of human cultural evolution—that when stressed, the human imagination is put to work trying to invent a new mode of operation.

The need to have freedom of thought is also evident in developmental psychology, where, in order to discover our strengths, we need to be free to experiment and grow. To play with life and discover ourselves is fundamentally human. The chaos of the child is something to be molded, if not contained, but if it were not for this chaos, there would be no authentic fitting into that mold to begin with—as if to say that by trying to break the barriers, we understand their utility.

Yet security always comes first. Securing our minds from cultural decay means having a culture that is organized and stable enough to endure human freedom. Culture will then always act to counter and contain human freedom in the same way a parent contains a child’s chaotic play, so that, though free to grow, no undue harm befalls society.

And yet, unsurprisingly, the very economies of resource distribution and acquisition require great degrees of entrenchment and stability, which in turn create an unnatural amount of stress on the chaotic mind of the population. Often, there is no more inhospitable environment for a human mind than the very resource acquisition systems we construct around ourselves to compete with other human societies.

So, though there are brief reprieves and resistances where the resources and freedoms are just enough that human creativity can flourish, for the most part, humanity finds itself either in a state of uncontrolled vulgarity and chaos, or we find ourselves in industrial shackles as cultural security constrains human freedom.

Is It possible to make a humanistic culture where order does not constrain human freedom? It seems to be—in small, culturally uniform populations, there is enough trust that the structure can be lessened, and the population understands that the freedoms they are granted come at the cost of obeying certain norms and ethics of self-governance. However, for large, diverse nations, the uniformity of law must clamp down on the chaos of diversity so that, no matter who does what, the law prevents the resource acquisition system from failing.

This means that unless there is a sorting mechanism where multiple groups of people in a society can collect, organize, and self-legislate, large nations will always favor strict laws in times of prosperity and harsh totalitarian regimes when the resource acquisition system is under threat to eliminate disorder from cultures. This does not mean that these states are permanent or inevitable—just that we have yet to produce a democratic system where a large population can diversify without ripping the country apart.

The closest thing we had was the United States of America, but as we have discovered, the freedom of that society left it vulnerable to cultural interference by outside powers and a general tendency to slip into anti-authoritarianism, which led to the collapse of their democracy and Western values after the recent Trump election. Whether they will be able to regain control of their cyberspace and remove their despot president remains to be seen, but it would be a herculean task for the now complacent and apathetic Americans to risk their lives for their freedoms.

Now, the freedom of human capacity to act being a necessity for human dominance means that we have to have a certain degree of respect for human creative freedoms as well. We must assume that any system that is used to discriminate can quite easily be used to discriminate against us or someone we care about. Because of this, equal rights stem from a respect for human creative potential—to make rules that do not cause undue harm. Though there is due harm, such as discriminating against willful criminals, we need to uphold the precedent that all people need equal measures of security, or the system may yet be tilted to find a way of discriminating against those of different races, sexes, nationalities, skill levels, or, most commonly and insidiously, income.

Freedom to travel, freedom to live, freedom to own property, freedom to vote, freedom to speak—these are all just basic things humans do, and we all need to be able to do them if we can reasonably expect ourselves to be guaranteed to do them. It stems directly from the human drive to ensure that we have the dominant hand as a society, without unnecessary infighting and drawing each other down with harmful discrimination.

With all of that said, it is still worth stating that this is all easier said than done. Human beings are also opportunistic and can be trained to take away the freedoms of others, especially if their society is built around taking as their primary means of resource acquisition. We have tried more egalitarian systems, such as communism, but that did not work because, even when authority was the only currency, keeping everyone working at the tip of a gun bred a different kind of taking: taking people’s freedom to think.

Trade always results in some sort of game where one person seeks an advantage over the other to gain the upper hand in life. Though I like the idea of psychologically reconditioning people so that they are called to charity more often than they are expected to work—to balance the mindset of taking—I know that it would take a much more structured approach to the organization of large countries, like the Autonomous Nations model, and implementing some sort of nationalist bot farm, as described in my essay On Cyber Campaigns, to create some form of cultural insulation from external influence.

Making a free world in the digital age is going to be harder than building it up in the last age was, especially since we lost the free world’s greatest ally as of late. That being said, it is human to make a free world, and if the world becomes oppressively authoritarian, then out of that oppression will come revolution—be it in the form of inventing a new way to be free or reverting to an old way through the destruction of the chains that bind us.