Formula of freedom

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Freedom is a tricky thing and largely individual. Like happiness. You can list many different components that are necessary for a person to feel happy and free, but it is not possible to make this list accurate, comprehensive and universal for everyone.

The matter is complicated by the fact that a person is a creature with a rich imagination and an exorbitant appetite that comes quickly, it is worth trying something tasty. And this also applies to freedom to the full.

For example, two hundred years ago serfdom existed in Russia and the peasant could neither change the landlord, nor go to the city at will. Then serfdom was abolished, and then the landowners were completely dispersed, creating collective and state farms. It became possible to go to the city and to other areas, to master new professions, to choose a job. However, over time, and this seemed to people a little. I wanted not only to move freely within 1/6 of the land, but also to travel outside the Union, and at any time and for any period, and not just to Bulgaria on vouchers from the trade union.

Previously, the head of state was elected without the participation of the population, simply presented with a fact based on the results of a closed meeting of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Now it became possible to go to the polls and put ticks. True, the head of state is still elected at a closed meeting, and going to the polls is purely ritualistic, but nevertheless there is progress - you can register your candidate and throw him a couple of percent of the vote. However, this does not seem enough to people - they already want not only to go to the polls, but also to determine their result.

Another typical example is sodomy. Previously, it was possible to get a term on a bunk for this, but today - please sleep with a creature of any gender. Or even change this very gender at your own discretion. But for some, this is not enough - they want to hold parades, demonstrating their orientation to the whole world.

So how much freedom does a person really need? Where does the necessary minimum of rights and freedoms end and the quirks of those who are banally mad at their freedom, trying to think of something else to devour such, hitherto undeveloped, begin?

There is probably no exact border, because our world is changing and what seemed like a luxury a hundred years ago is gradually becoming the norm.

For example, a telephone. When the project for the first telephone appeared, one official said something like the following: "Voice transmission by wire is impossible, and if it was possible, no one needs it." And today it is not even a wired telephone that has become commonplace, but a mobile phone, which twenty years ago was considered something rare and very prestigious.

However, the telephone is an example of technological progress, and freedom is a social concept. And the trick is that the abundance of freedom in one person can lead to the restriction of the freedom of another person. And not only can, but will inevitably lead to this, because there are many people and among them there are those who live according to the principle “who dared, he ate”, “man is a wolf to man,” “not caught - not a thief,” and so on.

In the language of mathematics, the problem can be formulated as follows. Spaces of freedom of people intersect, and the larger these spaces, the more intersections, the higher the probability of violation by one person of the freedom of another person, therefore.

Simply put, the freer people are, the more often they will interfere with each other to live freely, using their freedom.

For this reason, even in antiquity, states were born, and with them the concepts of law and law.

The law is a restriction of freedom, adopted in society for the simple purpose that one free person does not infringe upon other free people with his freedom.

It is impossible to do without laws (read - restrictions on freedom). However, the laws can be very different.

The stricter the laws, the more order. But if the laws are too strict, then there will be no trace of freedom - life will turn into a continuous barracks with a daily routine, where everything is scheduled by the minute, right down to going to the toilet.

Something like this they live in monasteries, where freedom is reduced to a strict minimum, practically excluding any disturbance to the life of one inhabitant of the monastery on the part of another. But in return for the lost external freedom, the inhabitants of the monastery get the opportunity to think about the eternal and gain spiritual freedom.

Yes, there is such an option - to give up physical freedom and gain spiritual freedom, as if to move into another space, in which your freedom will no longer be limited by anything, only your own views.

However, the majority still do not rush to monasteries, do not become hermits, but choose life in a society with its laws, which are a compromise between excessive severity and excessive liberty. Moreover, many do not just choose to live in society, but prefer to live in cities where traffic rules, restrictions on smoking areas, a ban on making noise at night, and many other written and unwritten rules are added to the general civil laws.

This happens because a person does not need freedom as some kind of abstraction and not the freedom to chatter his tongue or move his arms and legs alone with himself - a person needs opportunities.

Ability to choose a place of residence. The ability to communicate. Opportunity to work. The ability to change jobs. The ability to start a family and raise children. Etc.

The more opportunities a person has, the more freedom he feels using these opportunities. At the same time, it happens that a person has a lot of opportunities, but some one is not enough - the one that he wants most of all, and then the person feels very unfree.

For example, you can sing, and dance, and work, and go to the dacha on weekends, and start a family … but you want to go to Israel. Or in the USA. And they do not allow to leave. And a person will complain that his freedom is limited, although he is full of opportunities.

It happens, and vice versa, that there are few opportunities, but it is precisely them that a person uses, does not pretend to others and feels completely free.

It is according to this principle that a person who goes to a monastery changes a lot of opportunities that have ceased to please him for the only one - spiritual development and communication with God, which he needs more than anyone else. And it becomes free.

Thus, there are two ways to find freedom:

1) Search and acquisition of missing opportunities.

2) Setting up to use the capabilities that are already there.

Of course, to convince a person who is firmly convinced that for greater freedom he lacks the opportunity to walk without panties with a six-color flag as part of a large column of people like him is not an easy task. The argument that he could instead pick up a file and work in an electromechanical plant, or even just sit at home and watch a movie, is unlikely to be accepted. An attempt to convince, especially if it is rude, a person will certainly perceive as an obvious restriction of his freedom, which means that he will begin to achieve his goal with a vengeance.

But on the scale of the whole society and over long periods of time, it is possible to solve the problem by educating new generations, making some opportunities more popular and others less. In order not to provoke the appearance of excessive desires, especially those that lead to a clash of rights and freedoms of different people (for example, those who want to walk in a column without panties and do not want to see it).

Moreover, all the same can be done in the reverse order, making people feel not free in the same two ways:

1) Deprivation of opportunities.

2) Focusing on missing opportunities.

A similar thing happened to Soviet society during the Perestroika period. On the one hand, a sharp reduction in goods in stores pushed people into a severe deficit, humiliating queues, and then coupons. In fact, it was a restriction of everyday freedom.

But there was another side - Hollywood films showing the life of "free people" in the "damned west". True, in those films only the facade of Western life was shown - houses and cars available to a minority. But the people, accustomed to realism by Soviet cinema, took Hollywood products at face value - and wanted the same.

So the Soviet society in the second half of the 80s felt very unfree, deprived of many opportunities, deceived, humiliated and … I will not retell further.

Whether this was a well-planned provocation, elementary stupidity or a historical pattern - a separate conversation, and we will not be distracted by it here.

Let's better try to understand how to make society free.

The problem of the formation of a free society cannot be solved by the correct education of new generations alone. No matter how much you explain to a person that working with a file in a factory is more correct than driving in a limousine, and a file has more degrees of freedom in his hands than at the helm of the coolest car - sooner or later a person will think about whether it really is. And he wants to check. And if you systematically restrict a person, he will begin to systematically look for ways to circumvent the prohibitions and break the system of restrictions. And in the end he will get his way.

Therefore, in order for a person to feel free and break less and build more, he must be given a wide range of different possibilities.

But how to do that?

In the modern market system, there is a very simple solution to the problem of providing access to most of the existing opportunities, which is formulated as follows: "If you want, buy. If you want to ride a limousine, live in a house by the sea, pay."

Almost every opportunity in a market system comes at a cost - even the ability to break laws. The price here is either in the form of a bribe, or in the form of a team of lawyers and mercenaries who are ready to break the law in the interests of the boss and, if necessary, sit for it, or in the form of an official certificate (deputy mandate).

If you have a lot of money, you can become a politician, finance someone's political campaign - and take advantage of opportunities that are not sold in regular stores and do not have a regular price.

Money and power - this is what gives freedom in a modern society, living according to the laws of market democracy. Whoever has more money and power has more freedom.

Formally, freedom is guaranteed for all citizens, but in reality the level of freedom of an employee who is afraid of losing his job and lives from paycheck to paycheck is very different from the level of freedom of the CEO of some large corporation.

One can afford to go to the country house once a week, and the other can spend every weekend in Europe. One can afford a pack of aspirin, and the other - complex treatment in a German or Israeli clinic at the highest level.

One has a mortgage and two loans, after payments on which it remains only to tighten the belt and earn extra money on weekends to buy something more curious than a sausage. The other has deposits in several banks, from which interest comes, and shares of Gazprom, on which dividends are paid. And who has more freedom?

Money and power in modern society sometimes mean not only freedom in the form of choosing a place of rest, place of residence, type of activity. But also freedom in the most direct, legal sense - in the form of release on bail, in the form of good lawyers, in the form of a suspended sentence instead of a real one, in the form of refusal to initiate a criminal case for a bribe.

That is, freedom in our current society is distributed among citizens in accordance with their income and position in power. This is how the liberal market model works.

And since actual freedom is provided by money and power (which is a derivative of the same money), and money is given by banks, demanding its return with interest, then the rich are gradually becoming richer and freer, and the poor are poorer and less free.

Thus, the level of actual freedom of the poorest part of the population in the market liberal system is constantly decreasing, regardless of the expansion of formal rights and freedoms.

This means that no matter what "free" laws are adopted (on the permission to carry weapons, same-sex marriage, etc.), in the capitalist market system these laws will increase one "paper" freedom for the majority.

The same applies to the possibilities of choosing the government. The expansion of electoral rights in a market system is fully compensated for by the capital's ability to form the right choice by controlling media resources, funding the right politicians, and destroying the political career of competitors.

That is, the liberal model in combination with the capitalist system makes society free only formally. And actual freedom is distributed extremely unevenly.

But how to make sure that not only formal freedom, but also actual opportunities in society are distributed, if not quite equally, then at least somewhat fairly?

The solution to this problem is reduced to the problem of resource allocation.

If all the country's resources (including public services) have a value and are converted into money and vice versa, if money is issued by banks at interest, starting from the Central Bank, if there are no restrictions on the level of income and the one whose income is higher pays less taxes - in such a system, the main resources will inevitably gather in the hands of a narrow circle of people. The rich will become richer and freer, and the poor will become poorer and less free. The rich will accumulate opportunities and resources, while the poor will have debts and obligations that will deprive them of their freedom not only in the present, but also in the future.

Freedom in modern society becomes real only when it is provided with the resources for its realization. Freedom without resources is like a suitcase without content: if there is nothing to fill it with, then there is little sense in it, only to occupy your hands.

It is the resource that makes the freedom prescribed in the laws meaningful, real, and secured. Actually, this is the formula of freedom.

For a society to be truly free, its members must have free access to the means of production, enjoy the results of their labor, have free access to medical care, education, and so on. And the expanded powers of those who exercise management functions in society and participate in the allocation of resources should be balanced by responsibility for the decisions made and the verifiability of these decisions.

However, there is one more very important point.

For a society to be truly free, it must not only provide meaningful freedom within itself, but also be able to fight off another free society, which may have a desire to become even freer at the expense of others. And to fight back - again, you need a resource, and not only in the form of tanks and aircraft, divisions and fleets. But also an information resource, since we live in an era of technological progress, when voice transmission by wire has turned from something impossible and unnecessary into a completely ordinary and sometimes urgently needed thing.

At the same time, the main resource was, is and always will be personnel. And the main information resource was, is and will be the truth.

And the resource that fills freedom with content is labor, without which neither the plane will fly, nor the car will go, nor the TV will turn on. And if your car and TV are not the products of your labor and are not provided with your labor, you will never be free, because you will inevitably be indebted to those whose labor all this was created.

And you may laugh, but a file actually has more degrees of freedom in your hands than at the wheel of a limousine, even the most expensive one.

Therefore, the most free will be the society that can best put into practice the long-known principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.