Freedom vs. Permissiveness

Written by Potash

The true meaning of freedom is the ability to control the life and death aspects of one's existence. If someone else has control over the life and death aspects of your existence, then you do not have freedom, regardless of the shape in which that control may manifest itself. Permissive control cannot be mistaken for freedom.

Freedom has been one of the most influential motives throughout history. The striving for freedom (or at least what was perceived as freedom) in one shape or another has been the backbone of many revolutions. The idea of freedom has cemented itself as one of the most appealing concepts in human history. Few would want to live in a society which they viewed as unfree, and so technological society has much to gain from convincing us that we have abundant freedom within the system (when the reality is starkly different). This is why almost every nation on Earth claims to be a democracy, regardless of what their actual political system may be.[1] Most countries, especially in the West, go out of their way to provide the illusion of freedom. The West has claimed the mantra of liberty. The narrative it has propagated is that liberal democracies, unlike the autocracies of the world, are free because they grant their citizens a certain number of predetermined rights. The right to vote in elections, the right to a fair and speedy trial, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, economic freedom, etc., etc. Aside from a few exceptions, and partisanship occasionally getting in the way, most people have accepted this idea. We are led to believe that freedom is a set of specific liberties to only be exercised in certain narrowly prescribed ways–in effect, this is the technological system simply keeping us on a longer leash.

Admittedly, these prescribed freedoms are not completely useless. All else being equal, a society with these rights may end up freer--though not in a significantly meaningful way--than a society without such. However, at most, what they offer is permissive control, not freedom. What good is freedom if it is only the freedom to do what someone else has allowed you to do in the way he has allowed you to do it? No matter how many predetermined rights a modern individual might have, they are still under the thumb of the technological system and will never be free.

Even the limited and regulated freedoms which we do have have been adopted primarily because they are useful to the technological system. It is widely believed that democracy was adopted out of a desire for liberty; however, upon closer inspection it becomes clear that democracy was adopted because it was believed to be conducive to economic growth and technological progress[2]. Furthermore, when autocratic nations succeed in achieving adequate levels of economic and technological progress, interest in democracy is often lost. Otto Von Bismarck was able to preserve monarchy in Germany by showing the German middle classes that industrialization would be preserved without democratization. The same could be said for most of our other rights. “Thus the bourgeois’s ‘free’ man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system.” [3] The other side of the coin is that when these rights impede the functioning of the system, it often does away with them.

If someone else has control over the life and death aspects of your existence, no matter how generous, permissive, accepting, egalitarian, or democratic that control may be, you do not have freedom. The only way to be free is to control the circumstances of your own life. Not the unimportant recreational/lifestylist aspects of life–such as being able to choose what religion you might believe in, or what hobbies you might partake in–but life and death matters, such as food, shelter, and clothing. If someone else has control over the life and death aspects of your existence, then you are dependent on them. If you are dependent on someone else for the necessities of life, then you have lost the ability to control the circumstances of your life. You are at their mercy. You must live in accordance with however they have deemed as necessary to receive the basic necessities of life from them. You must live life going down the path which they have set up for you. You are subject to whatever decisions they may make, regardless of what you have to say about it. One can never be free under this condition. To be free, you must be dependent on yourself, or a group of people small enough so that you have influence over it for the basic necessities of life. Only then can you have real control, and thus real freedom.

This conception of freedom has become so niche as to be almost unheard of in the mainstream today. This is not necessarily out of any moral opposition to such an idea, although such certainly does exist. Rather, it’s because in a society as complex and technologically advanced as ours, such freedom is impossible. The technological system could not function if everyone produced the basic necessities of life for themselves. In a world of 8 billion people, mass production is the only option. By its very nature, the technological system must make us dependent on large organizations which we cannot significantly influence as individuals. The size and power of these organizations grow in tandem with the technological system. The more complex the system becomes the more human behavior must be modified to be compliant with the needs of the system. The system progressively creates more and more effective tools for regulating human behavior. These tools include, among other things, surveillance [4], AI [5], and antidepressants.[6]

The technological system cannot give us true freedom. But, since freedom is one of the most innate and basic values in human consciousness, the system cannot just ignore the idea either. In order to keep the public satiated, it must pay lip service to the idea. So the system has redefined freedom as permissiveness. Unlike freedom, the system can offer us permissiveness and it is often to the advantage of the system to do so. Permissiveness can appear similar to freedom (with the right propaganda), and so it can be easy to mistake one for the other. What makes this sleight of hand so effective is the fact that some nations are less permissive than others. The system points to other less permissive nations, or to previous times in history where the system was not as permissive, to provide the illusion of freedom. Ironically the system can do this even if we have less freedom (in important areas) then the people living in times that the system decries as “intolerant” or “backwards”. It is generally believed that the Enlightenment ended the monarchical tyranny of the past, and gifted us with freedom in the form of representative democracy and constitutional rights. However even with these regulated liberties, there is much evidence to suggest that we have less freedom than the people who lived under feudal monarchies of the past. Of course, this is not out of any benevolence on the behalf of the monarchs, their desire for control was just as strong as the politicians of today are. What was different was that they lacked the proper mechanisms for completely enforcing all of their nominal controls. They could try to be as tyrannical as they wished, but only so much could be enforced. This is one of the reasons why punishments were far harsher before the industrial revolution, since these monarchies lacked efficient means of enforcement of the rules, they had to resort to fear of punishment. In the modern era, the technological system has developed far more efficient means of enforcement, and so it can allow for softer punishments for similar crimes.

The technological system may be allowing for more tolerance in unimportant areas then it has previously, but in all important regards the system regulates us now more than ever. The technological system poses an unavoidable threat to human freedom, and it fundamentally cannot be reformed in such a way as to make it compatible with freedom. The only way to restore the capacity for true human freedom is to end the technological system.

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NOTES:

[1] DeSilver, Drew. “Despite Global Concerns about Democracy, More than Half of Countries Are Democratic.” Pew Research Center, May 14, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/14/more-than-half-of-countries-are-democratic/.

[2] Miller, Michael K. “Democracy by Example? Why Democracy Spreads When the World’s Democracies Prosper.” Comparative Politics 49, no. 1 (October 1, 2016): 83–116. https://doi.org/10.5129/001041516819582946.

[3] Kaczynski, Theodore John, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” ¶¶ 97

[4]Wilson, Lisa. “Mass Surveillance in the Digital Age: The Rise of Co-Appearance Tracking.” The Pioneer. Last Accessed September 17, 2024. https://thepioneeronline.com/47465/uncategorized/mass-surveillance-in-the-digital-age-the-rise-of-co-appearance-tracking/.

[5] Funk, Allie, Adrian Shahbaz, and Kian Vesteinsson. “The Repressive Power of Artificial Intelligence.” Freedom House. Last Accessed September 17, 2024. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2023/repressive-power-artificial-intelligence.

[6] These tools are all used to control human behavior in their own way. Surveillance allows the system to monitor human behavior in a fashion far more intrusive than ever seen before. Never before in human history has the system been able to access the private information of individuals on such a scale as this. AI is a very powerful tool which has greatly expanded the power of the technological system, and as the system's power grows so does its ability to control human behavior. AI has enabled censorship on a scale previously unheard of, by censoring content at a rate far faster then what humans are capable of. Antidepressants allow individuals to tolerate conditions which would be intolerable under normal circumstances. Letting the system endlessly expand the stresses which we are subject to without consequence.