On Liberty and Social Growth

[Scholar]

As a response to Leo's blog post about the potential harms of liberty -

 

The reason for why liberty and freedom can cause harm is always lack of development/consciousness in any given individual or society. The less developed and conscious an individual is, the more harm he will cause when given freedom. This is because with liberty necessarily comes responsibility, as a result of the wider range of actions that can be taken. Responsibility is the ability and willingness to make the decisions necessary to navigate any given free space.

In another sense, we can describe this as liberty being the degree of freedom within a society, and laws being the degree of restrictions. Absolute freedom would lead to absolute chaos, unless there is absolute intelligence/wisdom.

Evolution is the growth of intelligence and wisdom through a combination of restriction and freedom. This applies to evolution in nature, evolution in society and evolution in individuals. Both are essential aspects: Freedom is necessary to evolve forward through exploration of the unknown, to inform and expand consciousness, and restriction is necessary to maintain the order required to not dissolve into entropy.

Now, in regards to human liberty and societal evolution, freedom will necessarily lead to mistakes that cause harm. This harm is necessary to guide us into a higher levels of complexity/consciousness. Openness to mistakes and errors is necessary for evolution to be able to take place.

 

Examples where this applies:

DNA and evolution. Evolution through DNA funtions primarily through random mutations. Random mutations are freedom, but too much random mutation at a time would lead to the disorganization of the given organism. Harmful mutations are a necessary consequence of freedom, because freedom means exploration, and exploration leads to errors, because you cannot predict that which is unknown.

Child growth. The way children grow into more sophisticated beings is through a balance of degrees of freedom and restriction at any given point of their evolution. If we restrict the child too much, such that it cannot make any mistake, and therefore not be harmed, we necessarily stunt it's growth because it is unable to explore reality in such a way as to learn and grow from it. We must give the child an appropriate degree of freedom for it's stage of development, such that it can make mistakes without them becoming fatal or unproductive for growth.

 

 

In regards to societal evolution this means that at any given point of our human development we must consider that any degree of liberty will require from us an equivalent degree of responsibility. For societal progress to take place we require, at any given point, just a little more liberty than we are responsible enough to handle. This is because, by the nature of what progress is, it's consequences are fundamentally unknown. We can attempt to make predictions, but these predictions are not enough to navigate through potentially infinite space. In the end, we will have to navigate through space by setting our foot into the unknown and risking harm to ourselves. As we harm ourselves, we learn and we grow.

This occurs at a societal scale. This is why harm-reduction principles, as an absolute, are counterproductive and naive. Society must allow a certain degree of harm for progress to be possible. On the other hand, given too much freedom in the context of too little development, and growth can be stunted.

 

We give adults, for example, more liberty than children, because children are not capable of adopting as much responsibility as adults. They have not made enough decisions in their lifetimes, and experienced their consequences, to be able to navigate the degrees of freedom that we experience as adults.

 

A simple example, as Leo provided, are drugs. Give drugs to a developed human being, and he will benefit from them. Give them to an undeveloped human being and he will ruin his life with it. The fact that drugs are being legalized is one of the indications of the growth of the given society. Now, of course, there are more and less developed individuals in society, so the less developed individuals in society will suffer from the new degree of freedom they are exposed to.

In the end, we must balance the suffering caused by freedom with our respect for individual autonomy and the necessary degree of freedom for social evolution. Each expansion of freedom will cause a spike in suffering, as people explore the new, unexplored landscapes. This is why technology causes so much suffering and harm, the more powerful it is. This is, simply, because it allows us new freedoms that we did not have access to before. We make mistakes, we suffer and we learn, without hopefully, destroying ourselves.

 

Another example for this is incest.

Given an irresponsible and underdeveloped society, incest, despite it not being inherently harmful or negative, will lead to harm, because individuals are not developed enough to navigate the potential risks that are present in those interactions. We can see this in the middle ages or contemporary middle eastern countries, in which incestious marriages are not necessary prohibited. There, multigenerational inbreeding, especially fueled by arranged marriages, leads to a higher frequency of negative genetic outcomes among the society.

Apply the same standard to a developed nation, and the effects can be reversed. A lifting of penalization and stigmatization of such acts can lead to people getting better help in the context of abuse, while also respecting individual autonomy. This can happen because, by and large, individuals in such societies are more aware of the potential negative consequences of incest.

Like with the drug example, in one context it makes sense to restrict the autonomy of individuals using stigmatization and criminalization, and in another context this type of approach ceases to be necessary, effective or appropriate.

 

Systems of restrictions exist specifically because of lack of intelligence and wisdom. Given ultimate intelligence and wisdom, you can give an individual complete freedom and autonomy, and they will navigate it without causing unnecessary friction.

And, in the most fundamental sense, all of reality is precisely this. It is completely frictionless motion, informed through ultimate intelligence and wisdom, and totally free. That is what reality is, ultimately, which is why it works so well.

 

In a very real sense, the criminal mindset plays a necessary and important role in societal evolution. Criminality, to some degree, will always be necessary for growth, because we fundamentally cannot know how our laws and morals are limited. There must exist minds that are willing to break the norms to explore the future. And this, in reality, will express itself in both dysfunctional contexts as well as benefitial ones, much like the mutations in DNA. We cannot simply weed out the unhealthy mindsets from the healthy mindsets, because we cannot ever know if what we consider to be an unhealthy mindset, might not be actually a healthy mindset. To us, they will appear equivalent, and therefore, an attempt to eradicate one side of the coin completely, will lead to the eradication of progress.

You can have no mutations, but that will simply mean that you will never change. The tricky thing, as always, is to find the balance.

[Ajay0]

Great thread. 

Yes, rights should be complemented by duties.

Full-fledged individuality is bound to result in anarchy and chaos unless it is balanced with a heightened sense of morality. 

It is the sense of morality that determines obedience to just laws as well as disobedience to unjust laws, and which is the true condition for growth, not criminality.

[Scholar]

8 hours ago, Ajay0 said:

Great thread. 

Yes, rights should be complemented by duties.

Full-fledged individuality is bound to result in anarchy and chaos unless it is balanced with a heightened sense of morality. 

It is the sense of morality that determines obedience to just laws as well as disobedience to unjust laws, and which is the true condition for growth, not criminality.

I would say a heightened sense of morality is a byproduct of being a more developed human being.

The condition for growth is freedom. A sense of morality is always bound by the restrictions and limitations of the perspectives of any given point on the growth of a system/individual. This means, you cannot just presupposed morality and assume that it will lead to growth.

 

Freedom is what allows us to develop and refine our sense of morality, through increases in sophistication. The problem with focusing on the sense of morality is that it can simply lead to self-righteousness and the holding onto contemporary moral norms. You can observe this in progressive movements well, whom themselves fairly quickly crystalize into dogmatism and attempt to establish a new ruleset by restricting individuality rather than by encouraging growth.

The pitfall of this is that you limit the growth of human beings, because you do not give them the opportunity to learn, but rather attempt to instill into them a blind following of what you perceive as an essential norm.

Edited April 9 by Scholar