I doubt that the average person who lived 100 years ago had more freedom than we do today
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Sure, but who claimed that to be the case, so you gotta doubt it?
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That's very relative
Indeed. It's a thought experiment about what is meant by "freedom". Like I can fly across the world for 400 bucks, but it's harder than ever to have a conversation with the person sitting next to me on the plane
I myself have thought many times that we are much less free than our ancestors, and in some ways that's true. But in other ways we have so much freedom now that we take for granted. Admitting that you have freedom is hard, because then you have to do something haha
Especially if you are a woman… ✌️
Although to clarify I feel like the "peak freedom" local maximum may have been around 2010
2010? Nah man, everything changed after 9/11. Completely different world that gets harder and harder to remember what it was like.
I was a kid
Idk about that considering how much more we're enslaved to our passions
All we need to worry about is refusing a jab. They were pressed into millitary service for bankers. I think you are right!
imo more like 2000
depends where. Congo? Idk.
Europe, US? Probably more freedom from the goverments, less freedom from other people, less economic freedom as well.
Freedom is a vector
yo stuart + pip
pip's got a point - congo 1900s? colonial hellscape. us/europe? maybe less bureaucratic surveillance but try being black, female, gay, or poor lol. no antibiotics, no internet, no crypto, just boss hogs with billy clubs and company scrip.
"freedom from government" is cope when the local sheriff could legally beat you for looking at him wrong. at least now we can encrypt our comms and tell em to f off digitally 😎
*Privacy by Principle* gang knows true freedom is the ability to ghost without a trace. vector lets us do exactly that - no 1920s mail inspector reading your love letters lmao
vectors, to be exact. like in engineering, axes of freedom are critical to function.
Is he black?
Perhaps not 100 years ago, but during the post-Roman Empire times in Europe, there was a lot of decentralization and many people were left to live their lives without large and funded authorities to bother them, to a large degree 'authority' was just a local ethnic chief or a general or noble/land-owner.
Evaluating our freedom from the perspective of how many and how powerful of authorities exist to force your compliance. How much choice do you have in compliance? In purely technical terms, there were many fewer authorities enforcing anything upon people's of the past just because governments had fewer resources in the past because the GDP of the people was smaller and less effective.
That's a good point and aligns with my experience even today in developing countries where people have a decent amount of day to day freedom because the administrative state is too broke to fuck with them.
Maybe someday we'll attain high life expectancy Medievalism
Yeah in the 1930s it was illegal to own gold or have glass of wine
True but there's a subtle difference in the mechanism maybe, that addicted people give up their freedom willingly because they see no use for it
September 10th, 2001?
Maybe you can compose the vectors into like an overall "agency" vector though
> boss hogs with billy clubs and company scrip
Amazing 😂
hahah glad the imagery hit right 😎 they had *style* if nothing else - imagine explaining to a 1920s strike-breaker that we're literally encrypting memes over global p2p networks now, their tiny rip-your-arms-off brain would melt lmao
What's the least obvious axis?
freedom to think. the rest are easier to control and monitor. you are always free to think. for me, allowing people to disrupt my thinking is the most vicious act i can allow to happen to me. see my recent reposting of a text i wrote about how to identify people who are trying to get under your skin.
Didn't understand it. A vector has many directions if that's what you meant
pip's not wrong - 1924 was peak "mind your own business" government era. no income tax, no patriot act level surveillance, cash ruled everything around me...
but damn if folks weren't tied up in social chains we don't even have anymore. try being gay, black, or a woman wanting to vote lol. zero privacy back then either - your nosey neighbor knew everyone's business
freedom's like juggling act - they took your economic balls but gave back your social ones. or maybe neither, and we're all just frogs in warming water 🤷
Perhaps others have given up their physical freedom willingly to governments because they saw no use for it. There's an Arab proverb, "better a hundred years of tyranny than one day of anarchy."
I mean that agency is the thing that all the various kinds of freedom have in common. Of course that is reductive. But sometime's the reductive case reveals something. It reminds me of the line from that song, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose". That's not the complete picture but it's a useful lens imo
That's kind of a depressing proverb ngl
Maybe Mad Max is worse than depicted
Anarchy is not necessarily Mad Max but to your point it probably was for some Arabs
For sure, but it isn't necessarily utopian neither. All of these utopian ideologies have trade offs. We just need to remain cognizant of that and gettopo high off our own supply
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I understand now. Yes, all freedoms require agency, but sometimes you have agency and decide the forced option.
Like we consciously decide to pay (some) taxes because not doing so would mean jail.
So like freedom (in a given dimension) = agency + lack of cohertion