Thanks. That was interesting, from someone sharp
and thoughtful.
You are brought up in one system. That system is you. If it feels right, you'll think everyone should have it. For example, if the system is democracy and you can say wonderful things about it, you'll find find a way to force feed it to everyone else ..... especially if in this way you can co-opt some or all of of what they have materially. Ultimately they will lose their culture because you'll give them McDonald's and bury their art, and because you feel like God, you'll create their men in your image. If this sounds brutal, the truth invariably is.
You are brought up in another system. It does not feel as good as that glitzy system over there (well, the grass is always greener somewhere) and the people over there say "yeah, come on over". And just as is the case in your system, that system over there has its clever people, its sharks, its clowns and its dumbos. Everyone goes to make up a society and people use other people all the time.
Freedom is a nebulous thing. Law is a nebulous thing. These are what somebody with more power than you can make them be, and you can twiddle your thumbs and wonder what to do about it. In the end you convince yourself that freedom must be the ability to fight what is being done to you and not be persecuted for it. Then you spend your life doing just that, and at the end of your life you write papers and give talks on how your fight has worked. But was your life free? You were captured by that task which did not give you the freedom you wanted in the first place.
Life is just this. You have more of something or you have less of something. There is always something someone else has that you want (gold, freedom, hair, teeth :) ) .... and when you start to think about it more deeply you face the truth of how unsettling deep thoughts can be. So you go back to markets and politics where everybody feels safer. :) So this is all true, but said in some jest.
If freedom means the ability to waltz about with asymptomatic covid and share it with everyone else then that is the freedom we must all settle for. If freedom comes with restrictions, then we should understand what and why we have those restrictions. If freedom is a calculation that 5% of the young and 50% of the old can and must die so the young can move on to driverless cars and bigger carnival ships ..... then we start to realize that we don't really understand what freedom means. We just experience examples of what it should not mean and we know we do not like it. But we cannot know the real cost of what we'd like. |
