Human Freedom is Not Natural

Many of us live in countries where the national anthem and other frequent propaganda tell us we are “free” and we enjoy “freedoms” in our particular “free country.” These nation states singing about freedom include such places as Cuba, Liberia, and Malawi which all have miserable prison cells waiting for people who don’t support and contribute to their glorious local system of freedom.

It’s an easy linguistic trick to tell people they are free when an exact, measurable, falsifiable definition is never provided to them throughout their lifetimes, irrespective of how many advanced degrees they accumulate. Patriotism and jingoism are expected to be blind and uncritical.

So here’s the exact, measurable, falsifiable definition I will use when I discuss this critically important concept:

“Freedom is the condition of every individual having complete control of his or her own life and property.”

Exact: ‘Every individual’ means everyone in the group in question, whether the group is a village, a nation state, or the entire western hemisphere. So erstwhile free people who have slaves among them, or men who can own land while the women among them can not, would not be living in freedom under this definition. ‘Complete’ control means one hundred percent. A society is “free” when everyone in the society has complete control of their property.

Measurable: Most property can be exactly quantified. Money is an easy example to understand. If a person has one thousand dollars that is his own, it’s not completely under his control if a thug with a knife takes any of if from him. Or if a politician tells him he must surrender 43 percent of it or be put in prison because his neighbors voted that they want that money to be spent on something that benefits themselves or their friends.

Falsifiable: Vague definitions of freedom involving “rights,” “charters” and “constitutions” as preexisting frameworks created by long-dead people, whose opinions are said to be worth more than yours, are open to vast interpretations and lawyering to the point that almost any condition can be argued to be ‘living in a free country.’ But when three women want to marry two men so the five of them can raise a family in peace on their cannabis farm and keep one hundred percent of their income, they discover that the local ‘freedom’ doesn’t cover that kind of personal choice and property control. They are invited at gunpoint to live in prison cells inside their free country. Whereas the freedom definition given above can be shown with mathematical precision to be either true or false without the aid of or need for constitutional lawyers.

Human Freedom Has Never Existed

By the above definition it’s clear to all but the most determined quibblers that freedom has never existed for humanity. (“Hey man, there was an obscure remote island in the Bronze Age that had an autonomous tribal collective and they all lived in real freedom! Yeah. Right up until the Iron Age. Then boom.”)

Freedom is a giant, interconnected property protection mechanism. Freedom is a technology that simultaneously protects the lives and property of all people. Yes, violations can still occur, but those violations would not be profitable in the long run. A freedom technology acts to restore property and make restitution at the sole expense of the people who acted against that property. A freedom technology removes the incentive to use coercion by always making it unprofitable. Particularly the coercion that all nation states rely upon for their money and power.

The more complex our society and economy becomes, the more complex the technologies of property protection need to be. Clearly, our current nation states with their trillions of confiscated dollars, and their hundreds of wars and ubiquitous espionage do not meet the definition above, nor can they, since they all require massive coercion and astronomical property interference to function.

You Are Owned

You and I are owned from birth. There is no property over which we have complete control. We are a financial asset to undisclosed parties and our lifetime value and net present value were calculated before we were born. We are the reason our country can borrow billions or trillions of dollars because we have no escape from paying that money back on behalf of our owners. We are told we each owe “our fair share” of the public debt on a mandatory basis when we are born, yet we know that debt will be even higher when we die. There is no escape from it because all nation states operate on the same principle of non-freedom and the explicit, deliberate, legal ownership of citizens by the state — and all states cooperate to ensure there is no place for true freedom.

This mandatory condition is why it is so important to constantly tell people they are free and that they are so fortunate to live in a ‘free country.’ It’s why British schoolchildren are told to sing to implore god to save their King, and why American schoolchildren are told to place their hand on their heart and pledge their daily allegiance to their almighty republic. We must be taught to believe that someone else has dominion and agency over us and it’s not our place to see ourselves as above the King, State, or the Dear Leader, depending where you happen to live.

Freedom is Not Natural

An impala is not naturally free from lions. Humans are not naturally free from other humans who are more cunning, ruthless, or physically stronger. A woman is not naturally free from assaults by men. These conditions do not occur in nature and never have. There is no reason to believe nature will ever provide comprehensive, integrated property protection.

The simultaneous protection of eight billion human lives and all of their property is a very high technology. It requires creative and sophisticated engineering that is on the level of medical science or the exploration of space. It won’t happen by accident. It won’t spontaneously appear one day. It’s a more complex technology than a nuclear reactor and achieving it will require intent.

Freedom is Achievable

The challenge of protecting all forms of property, however large, is finite. If there is a way for two people to interact only by mutual consent and not using coercion, then there is a way for four, eight, sixteen and eventually billions of them to do the same.

Freedom is anti-war, anti-theft, anti-assault, anti-subjugation, and anti-taxation, among other things. Freedom is pro-humanity, pro-peace, pro-dignity, pro-health, pro-individual, pro-privacy and pro-harmony, among other things.

Freedom is a massive, volitional, interconnected life and property protection system and we need to build it while we still have time.