The phrase that stands out to me in this is "the riot of human diversity". It's a great phrase. Probably worthy of a book or even a manifesto.
I'm a multicultural person. Dual US/EU citizen. I've spent years living in each of the US, South America, the Caribbean and Europe.
Since the mid-2010s, I've been acutely aware of different societal pressures to conform, and I've been "cancelled" by various groups of aquaintences over having opinions or failing to have opinions that the group demanded. Thankfully, I've got a few loyal friends, and a strong sense of self that have allowed me to recover and thrive.
Through it all, one thing I've learned very well is that people in the world have very diverse views and opinions. It's a beautiful thing, and I will never make someone my enemy over their views. I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm. Beyond that, there is room for tolerance and disagreement.
> I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm.
Right, but who determines what's "harmful"? Is it more harmful to punish a child or to not punish him? Is a cartoon of Jesus harmful? Muhammad? Are "micro-agressions" actually traumatic?
Furthermore, what does it mean to "do" something? Is "meat-eating" a default state, or are you actively "doing" harm every day you continue to not be a vegan? Are you "doing" harm if you purchase some sneakers without knowing whether they were produced in a polluting or exploitative manner?
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I'm personally not a moral relativist; I think there are better and worse answers to most of the issues above. But I've just found that short commandments like "do no evil" or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" don't really offer any real guidance when tested against challenging real-world ethical problems.
> and I've been "cancelled" by various groups of aquaintences over having opinions or failing to have opinions that the group demanded.
Lost a job? Lost housing? Lost income? Were you "cancelled" or did various groups of acquaintances simply decide they didn't enjoy your company and that feeling led to a gradual (or maybe not so gradual) falling away of contact and interaction?
I'm not for one moment suggesting that you should have different opinions. But in general people have both:
1. opinions
2. preferences on how and when opinions are expressed
3. preferences for the company of people who don't violate (2)
If you and your various (past) groups of acquaintances really didn't agree on (1), then it's maybe entirely natural that over time, you'd no longer be a part of those groups. And if you disagreed about (2), then it's more than just natural, it's inevitable.
I have friends with whom I do not agree on a number of things, but they tend to be things that we don't need to talk about much, if ever. If either of us ever pushed their point in these domains, I suspect we would fairly quickly cease to be friends.
I have some other friends (and even a few family members) where we don't agree, but we do agree about how to disagree, how to debate, how to argue, what kinds of evidential levels for our opinions are required if we are going to disagree, and how we will end discussion. In these cases, (1) is not shared but (2) is, and so these are people whose company I can still actively enjoy.
I don't want to hang out much with people who see the world very differently from me, and more importantly, people whose timing and methods of expressing their opinions are quite different than what I find appropriate. If I'm not friends with these people, I haven't "cancelled" them, we've just followed an entirely natural path towards finding groups of people we can enjoy being with.
Never change! Diverse thought is much more important than "diversity" itself. These days it seems there is tolerance for the superficial diversity, but no tolerance for diverse thought. If you have a controversial thought you will be persecuted by the group until you conform. Also it seems if you are part of a certain diversity sometimes you are pressured to have a certain thought even harder than another person.
Try to have a debate with them first, if you are met with hostility they aren't your friends, they don't know how to convey their supposed thoughts or even control their emotions. Politely tell them to fuck off and find a better group of more accepting people.
> do no harm. Beyond that, there is room for tolerance and disagreement.
This is just a nice-sounding platitude. What is or isn't harmful is not written in stone. On the contrary, is a hugely polarizing topic that informs the legal system. People get to live or die because of views and opinions.
>I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm.
How do you define "harm"? What if one's view(s) prompt them to vote in favor of things (or support policies - take your pick) that bring harm to others?
disagree with this and the language of "riot" of diversity is very telling.
It's a sort of purely individual definition of freedom in which a free society is one of permanent dissent. Dissent not as a tool to come to consensus but as a way of life and it is fundamentally anti-governmental, it sounds nice but does not work. If everyone assumed this position, the end result is permanent dysfunction.
I can't remember who said it might have been Zizek but he proposed that the proper understanding of democratic freedom is something akin to: "Say your opinion, say it freely, come to a consensus, but then shut up and obey.". That is to say, in any group that wants to function, diversity or dissent is not a permanent state of affairs, at some point when one needs to act options need to be closed off. Abstract freedom is always embedded within social order. You can only freely walk the street because you rely on the fact that everyone else conforms to the rules of traffic.
"Do no harm" sounds nice but it's not sufficient, it may even be wrong because harm cannot be entirely avoided. You cannot navigate the world and act in the world as a group without actively making concrete choices, sometimes to the detriment of individuals. People like Snowden or Ai Weiwei celebrate resistance because permanent resistance is their job. Rebelling is their profession. It's very sympathetic on the surface but it does not address how people ought to organize society.
Great comment, and tolerance and disagreement is to be encouraged.
Where I find a lot of serious conflict and resentment is when it comes to expanding on 'do no harm'. For example, I'm in favor of democratizing corporations, on the German model perhaps, and I view investment capitalism as a decrepit dead-end system, and the financialization of the economy as an unmitigated disaster.
Now, a lot of people I've talked to view these views as 'harmful' indeed. Investment capitalism, they believe, is the greatest engine of economic and social development in human history and any attempt to role it back would destroy the economy and bring mass ruin, poverty, desperation, North Korean dystopia etc.
I usually respond by saying, well, the employees of a corporation should have just as much power over major corporate decisions as the shareholders in the corporation, and capital flows should not be entirely controlled by a few billionaires and their pet political puppets. If the general public believes capital should go to say, renewable energy corporations rather than fossil fuel corporations, there should be a democratic process, well, why not?
So, we then need people to explicitly describe their own personal views on what 'do no harm' means before we can have a discussion in which participants do not view each other as threats to their own survival...
Excellent article. For years I've suspected that when American 'leaders' look at the kind of power the Chinese government (or the Saudi government) has over its people, their main emotion is not revulsion but rather envy, and this seems rather bipartisan in nature, and is a sentiment found not just in the political sphere but also the corporate sphere.
It's the complete intertwinement of the corporate and political spheres that leads to totalitarian regimes who view their own people as the greatest threat to their continued grasp on power and so institute highly repressive mass surveillance system, mass incarceration of dissidents and so on.
However, there's another aspect to this, in which 'freedom' is not just legal in nature, but economic and physical as well. What does it mean to be 'free' in a company town where the only employers are Amazon and Walmart? What does it mean to be 'free' when energy sources you need for survival are controlled by someone else? The Chinese model seems to be 'we will ensure you have access to food and water and energy and in exchange your total loyalty to the state is required'.
The American model I'm afraid is becoming 'we will ensure you have access to food and water and energy and in exchange your total loyalty to your corporate employer is required.'
It’s not really ‘the American model’ - it’s the model America was founded to try to avoid. The trend you identify seems to be in all political systems.
The fact that america as a political ideal is not immune to the trend does seem to be a failure.
> The Chinese model seems to be 'we will ensure you have access to food and water and energy and in exchange your total loyalty to the state is required'
I can understand how it could be considered that in a very non-free society, but no. Freedom exists only as an equilibrium between your freedom and that of others, between paralyzing order and utter chaos.
I was thinking, I can currently go from NA to Europe today if I wanted to. But that level of technology and orchestration would not be possible in a lawless and barbaric society (at least I don't think so). This possibility offers me a lot of freedom (traveling around the world) and in exchange, I had to follow rules and work. I gave some freedom and got more in exchange. The same thing applies for many other things like communication, food, entertainment, etc.
But in the end we all win, for each unit of freedom we give away (or invest), we get more back (ideally).
So is equilibrium the right word? Or maybe we are talking about different things. I don't know, I'm not making a statement or counter-argument here, just thinking out loud.
There are definitely attempts in the world to restrict freedom not in the word of efficiency, but control and power. The line between the two can be blurry.
Some freedoms are trade-offs with other people's freedoms, e.g. freedom of movement vs freedom to not get covid. That's where your perspective fits. But other freedoms are more win-win or win-neutral situations and don't require trade-offs. But I agree that the ratio between the former and the latter tends to increase as society becomes more developed and free.
There's also an important difference between negative and positive rights/freedoms.
I notice that this discussion nests inside moral philosophy. We need to grapple with the tools and constructs in that discipline when thinking about freedom.
Yes, freedom is in equilibrium with collectivism in any functioning society.
The mistake people make when acknowledging that a freedom/collectivism equilibrium exists is to assume that freedom/collectivism changes are also in some sort of balance.
The reality is that collectivism is like the dark side of the Force. It's powerful. Seductive. Once you go down the path of embracing collectivism, it's extraordinarily difficult to turn back. Sounds dramatic, I know. But collective state action is a slippery slope. It's really easy to say, "everyone should do X" and in a democratic society, all you need is a slim majority to make X a law. But X isn't always enacted properly. The unforeseen consequences of X are often really unpleasant. But rolling back X is always harder than putting it in place.
You have to remember that every time you hand over a problem X to people in government, X gives them more power. Power is almost never relinquished willingly by the powerful.
No one is ever truly free. Maybe great, great ascetics who are so detached from the world that their freedom has become a prison of their own.
When I was young, I felt every bite at my freedom deeply. Having a job, a schedule, responsibilities. Each one was deleterious to my freedom in a way that, as a young man, I was unequipped to handle.
I've learned at some point in the last few years that we trade in our freedoms every day of our lives. If you have a driver's license or pasteurized milk in your refrigerator, you have traded in some way in your freedom.
What I see today is a contingent of people who don't value their freedom at all. They have no spiritual relationship with their existence as an individual - their identity is predicated on their characteristics and not their innate uniqueness.
Freedom is context-dependent. Living in a civilised society gives you different kinds of freedoms (and obligations) compared to living in some form of a hunter-gatherer society. Like, freedom to pick the desired room temperature from your AC remote, rather than freedom to roam around and hunt whatever animals you choose.
I love your comment. I have a small question with this part:
> What I see today is a contingent of people who don't value their freedom at all. They have no spiritual relationship with their existence as an individual - their identity is predicated on their characteristics and not their innate uniqueness.
Is it possible there is some "hierarchy of needs" for freedom and that "characteristic freedom" must be achieved before "uniqueness freedom" can be achieved? Said another way, maybe these people actually can't feel innately free until they feel their characteristics are accepted as part of free society.
Freedom exists in the mind. Even the most oppressed enslaved people can still be free in their own head.
On the other hand, I use some proprietary non-free software, so I've traded my freedom to use certain technology, but other than that, I consider myself as always being free no matter what the circumstances. All the old sages have said something similar: 'You are enslaved the moment you think you are'
Freedom is the degree to which you are able to navigate the power process. The power process is the ability to identify and change something within a system. For example, if there is a vending machine with coke and you want pepsi. Is there a process that you can use to make that happen? If there is, then you have freedom. This of course extends to bigger things than soda. "Sovereign is he who makes the exception"
This covers positive freedoms, but what about negative freedoms? Contrast these two people:
- The first person lives in a prosperous and authoritarian state. They have high positive freedoms (access to resources, healthcare, etc, thanks to the bounties of their society) but low negative freedoms (no freedom of speech/thought, low freedom of movement, surveillance, etc).
- The second person is a survivalist nomad. They have access to very little resources, but otherwise have no external authority that is constraining them in a negative sense.
So I think there's orthogonal variables here, and each of them could rightly be considered to be "freedom" as it's often defined by different people.
> For example, if there is a vending machine with coke and you want pepsi.
Sometimes, I think that western people are so constrained by some limits in their heads. Like "freedom" is a freedom to choose Pepsi or Cola. I want neither. Or I want tea. Or the drink that is traditional for my culture.
But most of the time I communicate with americans, for example, I becoming convinced that freedom for them is more like: "Everybody drinks Cola and can freely visit Disneyland".
They're so immersed in their heads with the notion that they're in some kind God-chosen people, that they refuse the right of any nation to live by their own rules.
It's hard to convey this thought to me, especially in English. It would be too hard for americans to get it (if someone thinks our american junk food, junk Cola and junk democracy isn't good, they must be madmen and/or China/Russia/Iran spies!).
One tiny example of this. Several years ago while I was still reading reddit, in /r/Cambodia there was a post from american that said something like:
"I came to Cambodia several days ago and I'm impressed that you have neutral attitude to gays. But I don't understand why you don't promote LGBT everywhere. You should have LGBT parades and LGBT signs everywhere!"
I don't remember exact words, nor am I willing to find this exact post on the overloaded site of reddit. It was a shock to me that he arrived just a few days ago and already suggests that people that belong to a culture that is several times older than his, that they should live by his own weird rules.
And it's only one tiny example. Everyone should have McDonalds, even on Mt. Everest. Everyone must drink Coca Cola even in the remote Chinese village. Everyone must have not have their own opinion, but conform to the opinion of the "God-chosen nation".
I think that's a reasonable definition of freedom ... and not at all what Snowden is talking about. That underscores why it's so hard to discuss. The word itself is a Rorschach test.
I dunno, you're talking about what you can and cannot draw into your sphere of influence. You have, in your analogy, the option to refuse anyway. Probably cheaper to not use a vending machine anyway.
This equates power to freedom, where the degree of freedom correlates to the degree of power, and only the truly powerful are free. If that is your thesis, then you are in agreement with Snowden.
Interesting, but it should probaby be divided by the desire / expectations to navigate the power process too. Otherwise, it gets too far away from the common usage of the word.
Perhaps there is some definition of freedom in mathematical terms in which the total scope of decision-making autonomy is maximized over all citizens? The barbarian example would yield a low tally, as the leaders of a hoard are "free," but their subordinates have little decision-making capacity. In terms of the limitations of personal freedoms, the boundary might lie where the diminishment of others' freedoms exceeds the diminishment of one's own if restrained. (E.g. killing someone eliminates all of their future decisions, but preventing a murder eliminates only one decision for the potential murderer?)
1) Your degree of freedom is strictly a relationship between you and those who are able to legitimately use violence against you. Legitimate here meaning you have no means of recourse besides violence of your own.
2) How free you are is then expressed as a graph of all possible actions you may take which are not prohibited by the threat of legitimate violence (often expressed as "law").
3) Then a "free and equal society" is one the total size of the graph is optimized for. This mandates laws which delegitimize violence except where strictly necessary to enforce said delegitimization.
4) The only addition that is typically made in large, agrarian societies is the legitimization of the private ownership and transfer of property. Thus we have "free, equal and orderly" societies.
These lead us to the usual functions of the military (to protect from external violence), the police (to protect from domestic violence), and the courts (to resolve disputes, usually over property, which would otherwise turn violent). From there, any encroachment of the state (such as mandating participation in various insurance schemes) into the graph of its citizens would be strictly perceived as a curtailing of freedom.
It's important to note that these terms necessarily exclude material circumstance from their definition. They also define violence in the strict sense of physical force. You are not less free because you may be sick or poor, since these are not interactions with people who may use legitimate violence.
there is sort-of, it's called utilitarianism. However, maths isn't a magical cure-all - the ethical dilemma is just shifted onto how you quantise your ethical problems.
Looking from a dialectic perspective, the higher in the social hierarchy you are, the more freedom you have in some of your decisions and less in others. Decisions like where to live, what to wear, who to befriend etc., become more free and at the same time less yours. Taking it to the extreme, is a leader of an authoritarian state free to stop oppressing their people and install democracy? Is a leader of a democratic state free to start oppressing their people and install authoritarianism?
Perhaps the grand theorem of freedom would state that freedom in the Universe is constant.
We could examine this by comparing 'anti-freedom' systems like chattel slavery (Old US South Cotton Plantations) vs. wage slavery (Appalachian Coal Company Towns).
In the former, refusal to work for the masters led to beatings, torture, mutilitaion and death. In the later, refusal to work for the bosses led to homelessness and hunger and death.
Now, one could argue that the coal company town was 'more free' than the cotton plantation, I suppose.
Ultimately freedom requires the dismantling and weakening of hierarchical social power structures. Let's say the people in that coal company town were the ones who elected their bosses, rather than some remote collection of wealthy shareholders.
Wouldn't that be even more free? Democratization of corporations seems like going in the direction of freedom. Germany is ahead in this, as corporate boards in Germany include employee representatives, not just shareholder representatives.
I believe I've gotten downvoted here for voicing a similar thought.
Some things can't be "solved", you constantly have to do the work. Democracy, relationships, tolerance, etc and I guess freedom, but that's similar to democracy.
There's no end goal to them. You can lose them if you don't work at preserving them.
agreed. "The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions."
its a fight against entropy, same as road repairs.
its not that I don't want big sweeping reforms, but I believe in gradient descent. all good progress is good progress. like the UK restricting conversion therapy. I want it gone, but this is still an improvement.
I spent a lot of time reading political philosophy books from smart people with big reputations and the definition and dynamics of liberty was definitely an overriding theme. My takeaway many years later is that it's a very complex topic and many people, all with contradictory positions, have a lot of confidence in their take on it. I trump them all by having no confidence in my take!
Yeah I m in the same boat. I come from France, an old, maybe aging, proud of itself democracy and... when I discovered Singapore then Hong Kong, two semi-dictatorships in different ways, omg: I had never seen people so free in ways we cant be free in France.
So now that Im a permanent resident in Hong Kong, joking with everyone next step is Chinese citizenship, I'm a bit at a loss when it comes to freedom. Not corruption, efficiency, representativity, predictable justice or even fairness, where clearly I cant argue against France and for China/HK. But just freedom itself, I feel it goes so much beyond the ability to vote and complain publicly. I cant define it just like you, but when I look around me in the middle of a street in Hong Kong, even now, I feel so much freer that in Paris... it's weird.
it is my belief that market forces, democratic decline, and a toxic obsession with "national security" — a euphemism for state supremacy — are drawing the US and China to meet in the middle: a common extreme.
Amen brother.
I realized that National Security is all about US Gov security & US Gov partner's security & major campaign donor security and that's about it.
I thought the discussion will be around the culture revolution, not so much as 'freedom' but I guess there are intricate links. Quite unlike many other 90s kids growing up in China, I read a lot of the old books and journals from that era inherited from my grandfather. Novels, novelette, magazines what not. Not to nitpick but I think a rightist (Aì Qīng) in chinese political spectrum is actually left-wing (in the sense of aligning with the west, pursuing free individuality and less compliant with conservative values etc). I was in Tate London where Ai's exhibition was on and there was actually pretty cool footages accompanying the sunflower seeds.
Regarding Edward's article and his connection to Ai's book, I think I could understand it from memory of reading culture revolution books. They are all about human nature and individual struggles, very little is about actually political stances. It often portraits intellectuals against village fools (mob riding the revolution waves to obtain power over everyone), their realisation of life and coming of age (since protagonists are often from privileged background and aristocrat families who have leftist values, or rather, called rightists in China). The value clash between total opposite sides, tribal, village, modern, metropolitan, aspiration, destination, mundane, soul crashing... It resonates with ordinary people because it's picturing societal and individual psychologies. This is my naive take.
> building out a similar technological and political infrastructure, using similar the justifications of countering terrorism, misinformation, sedition, and subjective “social harms.”
FWIW, this seems to be a common thread in many countries apart from China and the US. “Sedition”, for example, has become the stick to use for any kind of dissent uttered in India over the last few years (a lot more so compared to before).
> rather, it is my belief that market forces, democratic decline, and a toxic obsession with “national security”—a euphemism for state supremacy—are drawing the US and China to meet in the middle: a common extreme. A consensus-challenging internet is perceived by both governments as a threat to central authority, and the pervasive surveillance and speech restrictions they’ve begun to mutually embrace will produce an authoritarian center of gravity that over time will compress every aspect of individual and national political differences until little distance remains.
Again, please add India to this list. It would take a lot to detail out how things are in the country. So let me share one recent set of incidents in a major city (where Google has its largest offices). Police, without the backing of any law or specific authorization, were stopping people on the streets and asking them to unlock their phones and show their WhatsApp chats so that the police could read and see if the person was involved in transacting ganja (marijuana/weed).
But such things go on without the courts batting an eye or punishing the abuse of power with serious consequences.
I’ve kinda lost faith in democracies and the claims of checks and balances with the executive, legislature and judiciary. Power corrupts all of them equally, and they all side with each other rather than with the people who they took an oath to serve.
I'd suggest that rather than losing faith in democracy you could look to the spectrum of democracies and see where India's is failing. In the UK we have to turn to the courts to restrain the horrors that our government commit, more and more of late.
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters." - Winston Churchill, 1947
'On Wednesday, Uttar Pradesh Police tweeted that five people had been arrested in incidents throughout the state after "anti-national elements used disrespectful words against the Indian cricket team and made anti-India comments which disrupted peace."'
I like this point. To others, the statement is not a definition of freedom, but a guide on how to make decisions. If you think of freedom as a point, that needs to be achieved, defended, or maintained, you’ll act in opposition to other forces, and choose angles to defend around the past basis. If instead, freedom is a vector, your goal is positive, to expand it, to open new freedoms, and to ensure that as society moves forward freedom continues to grow and be maintained with it.
That statement's pretty vague without defining "freedom". And if you go on that journey, you'll find out it'll be a long one that never ends. For instance, for whom do you define freedom? Freedom to do what? Freedom from what?
>society moves forward freedom continues to grow
That's a big claim to say we have more freedoms now. We're encumbered by far more laws now than almost any time in history and watched by more authorities than anyone in history who have access to far more systems to know who you are, when you are, etc. Those same authorities also have more power than ever to execute those powers for "justice" and more power than ever to catch you. But hey, at least you have material freedoms, now you can choose Coke or Pepsi and forget about the other freedoms closing in around you.
A consensus-challenging internet is perceived by both governments as a threat to central authority, and the pervasive surveillance and speech restrictions they’ve begun to mutually embrace will produce an authoritarian center of gravity that over time will compress every aspect of individual and national political differences until little distance remains.
This is why both parties are so bizarrely hostile to Section 230.
The only way to not have freedom is for others to remove it from you by force or threat of it. The threat of it is what causes us to self limit our own freedoms. (sometimes for a greater good, sometimes not)
That means nothing: I want to be free to copulate with any mate - what should you do when I approach yours? Well, this is this balance and how to reach it that is the difficulty: what you say has no substance and everyone agrees.
Not sure I agree with the title. Freedom should be a right that isn't to be taken from you, not a journey or a goal.
Shame the rest of the article reads like a love letter to Ai (not a complaining about the artist I like his work).
But given the article's author, whenever he speaks or writes I'm expecting more somehow...
"Freedom" is a symbol. Like all symbols and all symbolism it means nothing to Bob and everything to Bill. It means one things to Sarah and another to Sally.
One person's freedom is another's tyranny and vice versa.
freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose - Janis Joplin
i didn't read the article because i'm free to not have to ;) I know it's shallow but, to me, freedom is a road trip. Being able to drive across the country without having to get permits or passports or anything, just being able to move about is freedom to me.
I'd argue that before freedom can be a goal or a direction it's necessarily an identity first. When we think of freedom as an external thing, it's a reaction that defines itself as inferiorized to the thing one is becoming free from.
I like Snowden's thinking and think he's one of the greatest exemplars of courage alive today, and not to use his personal email newsletter as a foil, but I think he missed some key depth.
The crux I think of the culture war is whether the ideal of freedom originates from identity - or is the effect of experience. This crux is related to the tension between individual and collective good, but not defined by it. I think the line is deeper.
The peculiar aspect of viewing freedom as an identity is it necessitates - if not a belief in the divine, at least a presumption of it. If you believe freedom is an effect of circumstances, it relates you to the material world as being subject of it. If you see freedom as a state of existence or an axiom of being, it has to originate from somewhere, which implies it was made or granted - and not by humanity.
This is why the culture war isn't intellectual or about ideas or a specific "religion," but it is the exact same kind of religious conflict we've recorded for milennia, because it's over beliefs about identity. "Attacks" or subjugation of freedom isn't an attack on an ideal, they become an attack on "free people."
However, the complement or opposition to this free identity is the one where people identify as un-free, or as subjects to forces - unfortunately for us all, those forces are of the freedom-identified. Unlike freedom, this view doesn't come from divine presumption, but material physical expereince, either of real direct oppression and abuse, or via the logic of ideas in language. Their belief comes from things that mostly happened to them. It's a founding axiom of their identity, where your first words are for things that reflect your identity as a subject, slave, or oppressed. This identity requires an earthly oppressor, independent of whether it is real or mostly symbolic. For all my criticisms of it, it's a consequence of lived experience and not faith in some divine force.
Anyway, into heady territory here, but on this freedom/culture issue I think we've tried everything else.
If we're doing pithy aphorisms, I'd say instead that identities are irreconcilable. We can co-exist, but we cannot fully know or understand each other, even if the greatest thing in life is the little bits we do get to know and understand about others.
I'd say that recognizing freedom as those parts of others we existentially cannot understand and treating it as unexplored opportunity for growth goes a long way to reconciling the interests of those who identify as free, and those who do not.
I am glad that they posted this with the subtitle instead of the original title "Cultural Revolutions" which was posted a couple of days ago and sadly got no traction.
From the time I began studying China’s quest to intermediate the information space of its domestic internet, as part of my classified work at the NSA, I’d experience an unpleasant spinal tingle whenever I came across a new report indicating that the United States government, was, piece by piece, building out a similar technological and political infrastructure, using similar the justifications of countering terrorism, misinformation, sedition, and subjective “social harms.” I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying “East” and “West” were, or are, the same; rather, it is my belief that market forces, democratic decline, and a toxic obsession with “national security”—a euphemism for state supremacy—are drawing the US and China to meet in the middle: a common extreme. A consensus-challenging internet is perceived by both governments as a threat to central authority, and the pervasive surveillance and speech restrictions they’ve begun to mutually embrace will produce an authoritarian center of gravity that over time will compress every aspect of individual and national political differences until little distance remains.
> You do not extend tolerance to those who would deny your humanity.
Probably a bad ethos to harbour, one that I imagine quickly rationalizes violent behavior.
And I think we're all fortunate that in the US there is no prevailing force denying any specific race of their humanity. Is there scar tissue from the past? Certainly.
As Snowden states "freedom is a direction" and we've certainly moved in the right direction over the past 30 years.
> Racism in the US is just fascism that hasn't hit white people yet.
Odd foreshadowing, but let's hope that true fascism never metastasizes in the US.
I am curious as to who you believe is currently denying your /others humanity in the US?
> Racism in the US is just fascism that hasn't hit white people yet.
It's rooted in classism and in a special breed of expressively-aggressive individualism. Self-identification and self-expression is paramount. You are forced to identify as a member of many different groups and outwardly express your thoughts and opinions.
Racism has deep roots in humanity, and likely other apes and beyond. Its roots are in an evolutionary-beneficial distrust of others that is now maladaptive.
Which groups fighting racism are you referring to specifically?
So... is Snowden on the right or left? Think carefully before you answer.
If he's on the left, why are you responding negatively to his concern for cancel culture by attacking the right? If he's on the right, then perhaps there is more cancelling on the right than you want to admit?
It used to be called boycotting but it, as a thought-stopping cliche, couldn't be assigned to only one party and wouldn't be as catchy so they had to make one up. Same with "political correctness" or "sjw". In the US if you said the wrong things, historically, that weren't politically correct, you'd be ostracized or if you were of the wrong class, race or religion, the social warriors at the time would want justice and seek to persecute you as you upset the order of what they saw as just. This has been going on all throughout history but if you assign them, these actions that you don't like and of a group you don't like, a new name and equate it with a certain political group, you can more effectively distinguish and dehumanize the other group as an out-group.
Personally, Horseshoe Theory makes sense. The extremes of both, as Snowden was implying with China and the US, are more like each other than not. Should any get their way and you're in the out-group, you're on a scale of fucked. Even the "peaceful" religions or ideologies are guilty of persecuting those in the outgroup in sometimes very heinous ways. Incidentally, it's strange, but not surprising, that he didn't mention Russia, his own host, where censorship is even worse than the US.
> Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are too often curbed
Uh-huh. I can only assume this refers to the so-called "cancel-culture" which probably doesn't exist (I am not claiming that there aren't "cancellation" incidents, but for this to exist as a "culture" or a trend, it needs to be shown that fewer people today can express and publicly disseminate fewer opinions than in the past; this is probably the very opposite of reality).
Freedom is almost self-contradictory. A person living alone in the world can be free, but two cannot. Either they have the freedom to curtail the other's freedom, or they do not. Either way, someone here is not fully free. So whenever people speak of more freedom, the question is, more freedom for whom and at the expense of whom. Like anything political, freedom is a resource that needs to be allocated among people, and there are valid debates over how. But within reasonable circumstances, there is no one direction toward freedom, but many directions, each giving more freedom to some and less to others.
> A person living alone in the world can be free, but two cannot. Either they have the freedom to curtail the other's freedom, or they do not.
I mean, even a person living alone in the world would lack the "freedom to curtail another's freedom" in that sense. Furthermore, he would still be bound to the laws of physics, for example, and would never achieve your definition of freedom. I think the freedom the author is discussing is something deeper than "capability to do x", more like the specific liberty of being heterogenous to the culture you live in (hence his lionizing of tolerance).
I think you're absolutely right that there is a scarcity of this freedom that is precipitated by a scarcity of resources, as in your example. I think history has proven that it's not a zero-sum game, however, and that certain cultures have managed to produce a higher degree of this "freedom" than others. A culture that values and protects open scientific inquiry, for example, would perhaps discover advancements that reduced the aforementioned scarcity of resources which should have the effect of increasing the freedom that was previously diminished.
Perhaps why freedom should not be regarded as a goal is because, as you have pointed out, it cannot be absolutely attained, neither by an individual or much less a plurality of them. To instead orient a culture in the direction of increased freedom seems more achievable and fruitful.
> So whenever people speak of more freedom, the question is, more freedom for whom and at the expense of whom.
This only applies at the very boundary of freedom. I would argue we are not frequently at that boundary - often freedom is curtailed for reasons other than preserving the freedom of others.
A silly example: Suppose the government outlawed wearing red shirts. Regaining that freedom would not impede the freedom of others in any way.
A real life example: It is illegal for me to buy raw milk from my local farmer. Allowing two consenting adults to make a transaction would not affect anyone else's freedom.
You can view laws on a spectrum from "strictly exists to protect other's freedoms" on the left to "strictly exists to curtail individual freedom" on the right. I would argue that making raw milk illegal is a law on the far right side of that spectrum. It is up for debate where current political issues fall on that spectrum. Gun control advocates say that the existence of easy access to guns restricts their freedoms, and so put gun control laws on the left side of the spectrum. Gun rights advocates disagree, and put gun control on the right side of the spectrum.
Regardless, nobody would argue that all current laws are at the far left. If we wanted to maximize freedom as a society, we have some easy gains before we have to start worrying balancing the conflicting freedoms of others. The problem is that most people don't want to maximize freedom - they want just enough freedom to do what they want to do, but enough regulation to stop others from doing things they don't like.
That assumes that second person necessarily takes away something from the first person by the nature of her existence. In reality, this is not the case. Two persons can cooperate and kill a mammoth together, so both now have more spare time - a measure of freedom. A tribe can capture more territory - a measure of freedom.
> A person living alone in the world can be free, but two cannot.
This seems to say that the opposite of freedom is impact. That is, freedom is lost when one person impacts another. I feel restraint is a more effective antonym.
> A close review of Snowden's official employment records and submissions reveals a pattern of intentional lying. He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints. He claimed to have obtained a high school degree equivalent when in fact he never did. He claimed to have worked for the CIA as a "senior advisor," which was a gross exaggeration of his entry-level duties as a computer technician. He also doctored his performance evaluations and obtained new positions at NSA by exaggerating his resume and stealing the answers to an employment test. In May 2013, Snowden informed his supervisor that he would be out of the office to receive treatment for worsening epilepsy. In reality, he was on his way to Hong Kong with stolen secrets.
yosito|4 years ago
I'm a multicultural person. Dual US/EU citizen. I've spent years living in each of the US, South America, the Caribbean and Europe.
Since the mid-2010s, I've been acutely aware of different societal pressures to conform, and I've been "cancelled" by various groups of aquaintences over having opinions or failing to have opinions that the group demanded. Thankfully, I've got a few loyal friends, and a strong sense of self that have allowed me to recover and thrive.
Through it all, one thing I've learned very well is that people in the world have very diverse views and opinions. It's a beautiful thing, and I will never make someone my enemy over their views. I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm. Beyond that, there is room for tolerance and disagreement.
lodi|4 years ago
Right, but who determines what's "harmful"? Is it more harmful to punish a child or to not punish him? Is a cartoon of Jesus harmful? Muhammad? Are "micro-agressions" actually traumatic?
Furthermore, what does it mean to "do" something? Is "meat-eating" a default state, or are you actively "doing" harm every day you continue to not be a vegan? Are you "doing" harm if you purchase some sneakers without knowing whether they were produced in a polluting or exploitative manner?
---
I'm personally not a moral relativist; I think there are better and worse answers to most of the issues above. But I've just found that short commandments like "do no evil" or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" don't really offer any real guidance when tested against challenging real-world ethical problems.
PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago
Lost a job? Lost housing? Lost income? Were you "cancelled" or did various groups of acquaintances simply decide they didn't enjoy your company and that feeling led to a gradual (or maybe not so gradual) falling away of contact and interaction?
I'm not for one moment suggesting that you should have different opinions. But in general people have both:
If you and your various (past) groups of acquaintances really didn't agree on (1), then it's maybe entirely natural that over time, you'd no longer be a part of those groups. And if you disagreed about (2), then it's more than just natural, it's inevitable.I have friends with whom I do not agree on a number of things, but they tend to be things that we don't need to talk about much, if ever. If either of us ever pushed their point in these domains, I suspect we would fairly quickly cease to be friends.
I have some other friends (and even a few family members) where we don't agree, but we do agree about how to disagree, how to debate, how to argue, what kinds of evidential levels for our opinions are required if we are going to disagree, and how we will end discussion. In these cases, (1) is not shared but (2) is, and so these are people whose company I can still actively enjoy.
I don't want to hang out much with people who see the world very differently from me, and more importantly, people whose timing and methods of expressing their opinions are quite different than what I find appropriate. If I'm not friends with these people, I haven't "cancelled" them, we've just followed an entirely natural path towards finding groups of people we can enjoy being with.
hunterb123|4 years ago
Try to have a debate with them first, if you are met with hostility they aren't your friends, they don't know how to convey their supposed thoughts or even control their emotions. Politely tell them to fuck off and find a better group of more accepting people.
goodpoint|4 years ago
This is just a nice-sounding platitude. What is or isn't harmful is not written in stone. On the contrary, is a hugely polarizing topic that informs the legal system. People get to live or die because of views and opinions.
jjulius|4 years ago
How do you define "harm"? What if one's view(s) prompt them to vote in favor of things (or support policies - take your pick) that bring harm to others?
Barrin92|4 years ago
It's a sort of purely individual definition of freedom in which a free society is one of permanent dissent. Dissent not as a tool to come to consensus but as a way of life and it is fundamentally anti-governmental, it sounds nice but does not work. If everyone assumed this position, the end result is permanent dysfunction.
I can't remember who said it might have been Zizek but he proposed that the proper understanding of democratic freedom is something akin to: "Say your opinion, say it freely, come to a consensus, but then shut up and obey.". That is to say, in any group that wants to function, diversity or dissent is not a permanent state of affairs, at some point when one needs to act options need to be closed off. Abstract freedom is always embedded within social order. You can only freely walk the street because you rely on the fact that everyone else conforms to the rules of traffic.
"Do no harm" sounds nice but it's not sufficient, it may even be wrong because harm cannot be entirely avoided. You cannot navigate the world and act in the world as a group without actively making concrete choices, sometimes to the detriment of individuals. People like Snowden or Ai Weiwei celebrate resistance because permanent resistance is their job. Rebelling is their profession. It's very sympathetic on the surface but it does not address how people ought to organize society.
photochemsyn|4 years ago
Where I find a lot of serious conflict and resentment is when it comes to expanding on 'do no harm'. For example, I'm in favor of democratizing corporations, on the German model perhaps, and I view investment capitalism as a decrepit dead-end system, and the financialization of the economy as an unmitigated disaster.
Now, a lot of people I've talked to view these views as 'harmful' indeed. Investment capitalism, they believe, is the greatest engine of economic and social development in human history and any attempt to role it back would destroy the economy and bring mass ruin, poverty, desperation, North Korean dystopia etc.
I usually respond by saying, well, the employees of a corporation should have just as much power over major corporate decisions as the shareholders in the corporation, and capital flows should not be entirely controlled by a few billionaires and their pet political puppets. If the general public believes capital should go to say, renewable energy corporations rather than fossil fuel corporations, there should be a democratic process, well, why not?
So, we then need people to explicitly describe their own personal views on what 'do no harm' means before we can have a discussion in which participants do not view each other as threats to their own survival...
photochemsyn|4 years ago
It's the complete intertwinement of the corporate and political spheres that leads to totalitarian regimes who view their own people as the greatest threat to their continued grasp on power and so institute highly repressive mass surveillance system, mass incarceration of dissidents and so on.
However, there's another aspect to this, in which 'freedom' is not just legal in nature, but economic and physical as well. What does it mean to be 'free' in a company town where the only employers are Amazon and Walmart? What does it mean to be 'free' when energy sources you need for survival are controlled by someone else? The Chinese model seems to be 'we will ensure you have access to food and water and energy and in exchange your total loyalty to the state is required'.
The American model I'm afraid is becoming 'we will ensure you have access to food and water and energy and in exchange your total loyalty to your corporate employer is required.'
zepto|4 years ago
The fact that america as a political ideal is not immune to the trend does seem to be a failure.
yosito|4 years ago
Judging based on the most recent incidence of mass starvation, which model do you think worked better? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
arnoooooo|4 years ago
mfcl|4 years ago
But in the end we all win, for each unit of freedom we give away (or invest), we get more back (ideally).
So is equilibrium the right word? Or maybe we are talking about different things. I don't know, I'm not making a statement or counter-argument here, just thinking out loud.
There are definitely attempts in the world to restrict freedom not in the word of efficiency, but control and power. The line between the two can be blurry.
ekianjo|4 years ago
What are you talking about? Snowden is talking about the Freedom of the mind.
csee|4 years ago
There's also an important difference between negative and positive rights/freedoms.
I notice that this discussion nests inside moral philosophy. We need to grapple with the tools and constructs in that discipline when thinking about freedom.
bko|4 years ago
What does this mean? As in your freedom to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose? Or something else?
myfavoritedog|4 years ago
The mistake people make when acknowledging that a freedom/collectivism equilibrium exists is to assume that freedom/collectivism changes are also in some sort of balance.
The reality is that collectivism is like the dark side of the Force. It's powerful. Seductive. Once you go down the path of embracing collectivism, it's extraordinarily difficult to turn back. Sounds dramatic, I know. But collective state action is a slippery slope. It's really easy to say, "everyone should do X" and in a democratic society, all you need is a slim majority to make X a law. But X isn't always enacted properly. The unforeseen consequences of X are often really unpleasant. But rolling back X is always harder than putting it in place.
You have to remember that every time you hand over a problem X to people in government, X gives them more power. Power is almost never relinquished willingly by the powerful.
testing192847|4 years ago
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debacle|4 years ago
When I was young, I felt every bite at my freedom deeply. Having a job, a schedule, responsibilities. Each one was deleterious to my freedom in a way that, as a young man, I was unequipped to handle.
I've learned at some point in the last few years that we trade in our freedoms every day of our lives. If you have a driver's license or pasteurized milk in your refrigerator, you have traded in some way in your freedom.
What I see today is a contingent of people who don't value their freedom at all. They have no spiritual relationship with their existence as an individual - their identity is predicated on their characteristics and not their innate uniqueness.
Down that road is every manner of tyranny.
bluetomcat|4 years ago
long_time_gone|4 years ago
> What I see today is a contingent of people who don't value their freedom at all. They have no spiritual relationship with their existence as an individual - their identity is predicated on their characteristics and not their innate uniqueness.
Is it possible there is some "hierarchy of needs" for freedom and that "characteristic freedom" must be achieved before "uniqueness freedom" can be achieved? Said another way, maybe these people actually can't feel innately free until they feel their characteristics are accepted as part of free society.
sysadm1n|4 years ago
Freedom exists in the mind. Even the most oppressed enslaved people can still be free in their own head.
On the other hand, I use some proprietary non-free software, so I've traded my freedom to use certain technology, but other than that, I consider myself as always being free no matter what the circumstances. All the old sages have said something similar: 'You are enslaved the moment you think you are'
samuelizdat|4 years ago
csee|4 years ago
- The first person lives in a prosperous and authoritarian state. They have high positive freedoms (access to resources, healthcare, etc, thanks to the bounties of their society) but low negative freedoms (no freedom of speech/thought, low freedom of movement, surveillance, etc).
- The second person is a survivalist nomad. They have access to very little resources, but otherwise have no external authority that is constraining them in a negative sense.
So I think there's orthogonal variables here, and each of them could rightly be considered to be "freedom" as it's often defined by different people.
anticodon|4 years ago
Sometimes, I think that western people are so constrained by some limits in their heads. Like "freedom" is a freedom to choose Pepsi or Cola. I want neither. Or I want tea. Or the drink that is traditional for my culture.
But most of the time I communicate with americans, for example, I becoming convinced that freedom for them is more like: "Everybody drinks Cola and can freely visit Disneyland".
They're so immersed in their heads with the notion that they're in some kind God-chosen people, that they refuse the right of any nation to live by their own rules.
It's hard to convey this thought to me, especially in English. It would be too hard for americans to get it (if someone thinks our american junk food, junk Cola and junk democracy isn't good, they must be madmen and/or China/Russia/Iran spies!).
One tiny example of this. Several years ago while I was still reading reddit, in /r/Cambodia there was a post from american that said something like:
"I came to Cambodia several days ago and I'm impressed that you have neutral attitude to gays. But I don't understand why you don't promote LGBT everywhere. You should have LGBT parades and LGBT signs everywhere!"
I don't remember exact words, nor am I willing to find this exact post on the overloaded site of reddit. It was a shock to me that he arrived just a few days ago and already suggests that people that belong to a culture that is several times older than his, that they should live by his own weird rules.
And it's only one tiny example. Everyone should have McDonalds, even on Mt. Everest. Everyone must drink Coca Cola even in the remote Chinese village. Everyone must have not have their own opinion, but conform to the opinion of the "God-chosen nation".
hirundo|4 years ago
Cthulhu_|4 years ago
glitchc|4 years ago
slx26|4 years ago
pharke|4 years ago
evancoop|4 years ago
thegrimmest|4 years ago
1) Your degree of freedom is strictly a relationship between you and those who are able to legitimately use violence against you. Legitimate here meaning you have no means of recourse besides violence of your own.
2) How free you are is then expressed as a graph of all possible actions you may take which are not prohibited by the threat of legitimate violence (often expressed as "law").
3) Then a "free and equal society" is one the total size of the graph is optimized for. This mandates laws which delegitimize violence except where strictly necessary to enforce said delegitimization.
4) The only addition that is typically made in large, agrarian societies is the legitimization of the private ownership and transfer of property. Thus we have "free, equal and orderly" societies.
These lead us to the usual functions of the military (to protect from external violence), the police (to protect from domestic violence), and the courts (to resolve disputes, usually over property, which would otherwise turn violent). From there, any encroachment of the state (such as mandating participation in various insurance schemes) into the graph of its citizens would be strictly perceived as a curtailing of freedom.
It's important to note that these terms necessarily exclude material circumstance from their definition. They also define violence in the strict sense of physical force. You are not less free because you may be sick or poor, since these are not interactions with people who may use legitimate violence.
beaconstudios|4 years ago
ComodoHacker|4 years ago
Perhaps the grand theorem of freedom would state that freedom in the Universe is constant.
photochemsyn|4 years ago
In the former, refusal to work for the masters led to beatings, torture, mutilitaion and death. In the later, refusal to work for the bosses led to homelessness and hunger and death.
Now, one could argue that the coal company town was 'more free' than the cotton plantation, I suppose.
Ultimately freedom requires the dismantling and weakening of hierarchical social power structures. Let's say the people in that coal company town were the ones who elected their bosses, rather than some remote collection of wealthy shareholders.
Wouldn't that be even more free? Democratization of corporations seems like going in the direction of freedom. Germany is ahead in this, as corporate boards in Germany include employee representatives, not just shareholder representatives.
bena|4 years ago
Some things can't be "solved", you constantly have to do the work. Democracy, relationships, tolerance, etc and I guess freedom, but that's similar to democracy.
There's no end goal to them. You can lose them if you don't work at preserving them.
ReactiveJelly|4 years ago
its a fight against entropy, same as road repairs.
its not that I don't want big sweeping reforms, but I believe in gradient descent. all good progress is good progress. like the UK restricting conversion therapy. I want it gone, but this is still an improvement.
user3939382|4 years ago
secondaryacct|4 years ago
So now that Im a permanent resident in Hong Kong, joking with everyone next step is Chinese citizenship, I'm a bit at a loss when it comes to freedom. Not corruption, efficiency, representativity, predictable justice or even fairness, where clearly I cant argue against France and for China/HK. But just freedom itself, I feel it goes so much beyond the ability to vote and complain publicly. I cant define it just like you, but when I look around me in the middle of a street in Hong Kong, even now, I feel so much freer that in Paris... it's weird.
foxhop|4 years ago
This is because people look at it from the FREEDOM TO perspective rather than the more valid FREEDOM FROM perspective.
WarOnPrivacy|4 years ago
Amen brother.
I realized that National Security is all about US Gov security & US Gov partner's security & major campaign donor security and that's about it.
dumb1224|4 years ago
Regarding Edward's article and his connection to Ai's book, I think I could understand it from memory of reading culture revolution books. They are all about human nature and individual struggles, very little is about actually political stances. It often portraits intellectuals against village fools (mob riding the revolution waves to obtain power over everyone), their realisation of life and coming of age (since protagonists are often from privileged background and aristocrat families who have leftist values, or rather, called rightists in China). The value clash between total opposite sides, tribal, village, modern, metropolitan, aspiration, destination, mundane, soul crashing... It resonates with ordinary people because it's picturing societal and individual psychologies. This is my naive take.
hereme888|4 years ago
outside1234|4 years ago
It seems to me we are good at identifying the negative trend but aren't actually acting on them. Or am I just missing the obvious?
fsflover|4 years ago
wtmt|4 years ago
FWIW, this seems to be a common thread in many countries apart from China and the US. “Sedition”, for example, has become the stick to use for any kind of dissent uttered in India over the last few years (a lot more so compared to before).
> rather, it is my belief that market forces, democratic decline, and a toxic obsession with “national security”—a euphemism for state supremacy—are drawing the US and China to meet in the middle: a common extreme. A consensus-challenging internet is perceived by both governments as a threat to central authority, and the pervasive surveillance and speech restrictions they’ve begun to mutually embrace will produce an authoritarian center of gravity that over time will compress every aspect of individual and national political differences until little distance remains.
Again, please add India to this list. It would take a lot to detail out how things are in the country. So let me share one recent set of incidents in a major city (where Google has its largest offices). Police, without the backing of any law or specific authorization, were stopping people on the streets and asking them to unlock their phones and show their WhatsApp chats so that the police could read and see if the person was involved in transacting ganja (marijuana/weed).
But such things go on without the courts batting an eye or punishing the abuse of power with serious consequences.
I’ve kinda lost faith in democracies and the claims of checks and balances with the executive, legislature and judiciary. Power corrupts all of them equally, and they all side with each other rather than with the people who they took an oath to serve.
bogle|4 years ago
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters." - Winston Churchill, 1947
[https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1947/nov/...]
fennecfoxen|4 years ago
If you cheer on the Pakistani cricket team, that's sedition.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/28/sport/india-arrest-kashmiri-m...
'On Wednesday, Uttar Pradesh Police tweeted that five people had been arrested in incidents throughout the state after "anti-national elements used disrespectful words against the Indian cricket team and made anti-India comments which disrupted peace."'
twobitshifter|4 years ago
0134340|4 years ago
>society moves forward freedom continues to grow
That's a big claim to say we have more freedoms now. We're encumbered by far more laws now than almost any time in history and watched by more authorities than anyone in history who have access to far more systems to know who you are, when you are, etc. Those same authorities also have more power than ever to execute those powers for "justice" and more power than ever to catch you. But hey, at least you have material freedoms, now you can choose Coke or Pepsi and forget about the other freedoms closing in around you.
WarOnPrivacy|4 years ago
This is why both parties are so bizarrely hostile to Section 230.
unknown|4 years ago
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RobertRoberts|4 years ago
The only way to not have freedom is for others to remove it from you by force or threat of it. The threat of it is what causes us to self limit our own freedoms. (sometimes for a greater good, sometimes not)
elliekelly|4 years ago
secondaryacct|4 years ago
milky2028|4 years ago
milky2028|4 years ago
unknown|4 years ago
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rob_c|4 years ago
But given the article's author, whenever he speaks or writes I'm expecting more somehow...
ukj|4 years ago
One person's freedom is another's tyranny and vice versa.
It's all a treacherous language game.
myfavoritedog|4 years ago
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dghughes|4 years ago
sdave|4 years ago
chasd00|4 years ago
i didn't read the article because i'm free to not have to ;) I know it's shallow but, to me, freedom is a road trip. Being able to drive across the country without having to get permits or passports or anything, just being able to move about is freedom to me.
motohagiography|4 years ago
I like Snowden's thinking and think he's one of the greatest exemplars of courage alive today, and not to use his personal email newsletter as a foil, but I think he missed some key depth.
The crux I think of the culture war is whether the ideal of freedom originates from identity - or is the effect of experience. This crux is related to the tension between individual and collective good, but not defined by it. I think the line is deeper.
The peculiar aspect of viewing freedom as an identity is it necessitates - if not a belief in the divine, at least a presumption of it. If you believe freedom is an effect of circumstances, it relates you to the material world as being subject of it. If you see freedom as a state of existence or an axiom of being, it has to originate from somewhere, which implies it was made or granted - and not by humanity.
This is why the culture war isn't intellectual or about ideas or a specific "religion," but it is the exact same kind of religious conflict we've recorded for milennia, because it's over beliefs about identity. "Attacks" or subjugation of freedom isn't an attack on an ideal, they become an attack on "free people."
However, the complement or opposition to this free identity is the one where people identify as un-free, or as subjects to forces - unfortunately for us all, those forces are of the freedom-identified. Unlike freedom, this view doesn't come from divine presumption, but material physical expereince, either of real direct oppression and abuse, or via the logic of ideas in language. Their belief comes from things that mostly happened to them. It's a founding axiom of their identity, where your first words are for things that reflect your identity as a subject, slave, or oppressed. This identity requires an earthly oppressor, independent of whether it is real or mostly symbolic. For all my criticisms of it, it's a consequence of lived experience and not faith in some divine force.
Anyway, into heady territory here, but on this freedom/culture issue I think we've tried everything else. If we're doing pithy aphorisms, I'd say instead that identities are irreconcilable. We can co-exist, but we cannot fully know or understand each other, even if the greatest thing in life is the little bits we do get to know and understand about others.
I'd say that recognizing freedom as those parts of others we existentially cannot understand and treating it as unexplored opportunity for growth goes a long way to reconciling the interests of those who identify as free, and those who do not.
tomp|4 years ago
1cvmask|4 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29247018
The way Edward Snowden weaves Ai Wei-Wei's account of his journey through the Cultural Revolution (1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246165/1000-years-o...) and his own is great:
From the time I began studying China’s quest to intermediate the information space of its domestic internet, as part of my classified work at the NSA, I’d experience an unpleasant spinal tingle whenever I came across a new report indicating that the United States government, was, piece by piece, building out a similar technological and political infrastructure, using similar the justifications of countering terrorism, misinformation, sedition, and subjective “social harms.” I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying “East” and “West” were, or are, the same; rather, it is my belief that market forces, democratic decline, and a toxic obsession with “national security”—a euphemism for state supremacy—are drawing the US and China to meet in the middle: a common extreme. A consensus-challenging internet is perceived by both governments as a threat to central authority, and the pervasive surveillance and speech restrictions they’ve begun to mutually embrace will produce an authoritarian center of gravity that over time will compress every aspect of individual and national political differences until little distance remains.
ttfkam|4 years ago
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bobornotbob|4 years ago
the_drunkard|4 years ago
Probably a bad ethos to harbour, one that I imagine quickly rationalizes violent behavior.
And I think we're all fortunate that in the US there is no prevailing force denying any specific race of their humanity. Is there scar tissue from the past? Certainly.
As Snowden states "freedom is a direction" and we've certainly moved in the right direction over the past 30 years.
> Racism in the US is just fascism that hasn't hit white people yet.
Odd foreshadowing, but let's hope that true fascism never metastasizes in the US.
I am curious as to who you believe is currently denying your /others humanity in the US?
NikolaeVarius|4 years ago
And this is how fascism starts
bluetomcat|4 years ago
It's rooted in classism and in a special breed of expressively-aggressive individualism. Self-identification and self-expression is paramount. You are forced to identify as a member of many different groups and outwardly express your thoughts and opinions.
the__alchemist|4 years ago
Which groups fighting racism are you referring to specifically?
0xdeadb00f|4 years ago
0134340|4 years ago
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defaultprimate|4 years ago
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testing192847|4 years ago
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b1gb4dc0v1d|4 years ago
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ttfkam|4 years ago
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jtbayly|4 years ago
If he's on the left, why are you responding negatively to his concern for cancel culture by attacking the right? If he's on the right, then perhaps there is more cancelling on the right than you want to admit?
0134340|4 years ago
Personally, Horseshoe Theory makes sense. The extremes of both, as Snowden was implying with China and the US, are more like each other than not. Should any get their way and you're in the out-group, you're on a scale of fucked. Even the "peaceful" religions or ideologies are guilty of persecuting those in the outgroup in sometimes very heinous ways. Incidentally, it's strange, but not surprising, that he didn't mention Russia, his own host, where censorship is even worse than the US.
beaconstudios|4 years ago
h2odragon|4 years ago
missinfo|4 years ago
sharemywin|4 years ago
pron|4 years ago
Uh-huh. I can only assume this refers to the so-called "cancel-culture" which probably doesn't exist (I am not claiming that there aren't "cancellation" incidents, but for this to exist as a "culture" or a trend, it needs to be shown that fewer people today can express and publicly disseminate fewer opinions than in the past; this is probably the very opposite of reality).
Freedom is almost self-contradictory. A person living alone in the world can be free, but two cannot. Either they have the freedom to curtail the other's freedom, or they do not. Either way, someone here is not fully free. So whenever people speak of more freedom, the question is, more freedom for whom and at the expense of whom. Like anything political, freedom is a resource that needs to be allocated among people, and there are valid debates over how. But within reasonable circumstances, there is no one direction toward freedom, but many directions, each giving more freedom to some and less to others.
memelordxx|4 years ago
I mean, even a person living alone in the world would lack the "freedom to curtail another's freedom" in that sense. Furthermore, he would still be bound to the laws of physics, for example, and would never achieve your definition of freedom. I think the freedom the author is discussing is something deeper than "capability to do x", more like the specific liberty of being heterogenous to the culture you live in (hence his lionizing of tolerance).
I think you're absolutely right that there is a scarcity of this freedom that is precipitated by a scarcity of resources, as in your example. I think history has proven that it's not a zero-sum game, however, and that certain cultures have managed to produce a higher degree of this "freedom" than others. A culture that values and protects open scientific inquiry, for example, would perhaps discover advancements that reduced the aforementioned scarcity of resources which should have the effect of increasing the freedom that was previously diminished.
Perhaps why freedom should not be regarded as a goal is because, as you have pointed out, it cannot be absolutely attained, neither by an individual or much less a plurality of them. To instead orient a culture in the direction of increased freedom seems more achievable and fruitful.
dahfizz|4 years ago
This only applies at the very boundary of freedom. I would argue we are not frequently at that boundary - often freedom is curtailed for reasons other than preserving the freedom of others.
A silly example: Suppose the government outlawed wearing red shirts. Regaining that freedom would not impede the freedom of others in any way.
A real life example: It is illegal for me to buy raw milk from my local farmer. Allowing two consenting adults to make a transaction would not affect anyone else's freedom.
You can view laws on a spectrum from "strictly exists to protect other's freedoms" on the left to "strictly exists to curtail individual freedom" on the right. I would argue that making raw milk illegal is a law on the far right side of that spectrum. It is up for debate where current political issues fall on that spectrum. Gun control advocates say that the existence of easy access to guns restricts their freedoms, and so put gun control laws on the left side of the spectrum. Gun rights advocates disagree, and put gun control on the right side of the spectrum.
Regardless, nobody would argue that all current laws are at the far left. If we wanted to maximize freedom as a society, we have some easy gains before we have to start worrying balancing the conflicting freedoms of others. The problem is that most people don't want to maximize freedom - they want just enough freedom to do what they want to do, but enough regulation to stop others from doing things they don't like.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|4 years ago
WarOnPrivacy|4 years ago
This seems to say that the opposite of freedom is impact. That is, freedom is lost when one person impacts another. I feel restraint is a more effective antonym.
gz5|4 years ago
"with freedom comes responsibility" (Eleanor Roosevelt's context was different, but the phrase is important)
2OEH8eoCRo0|4 years ago
cochne|4 years ago