Three levels of freedom (revisited)

A group of people having some common identity feels oppressed by or insufficiently involved in the power structures that govern it, e.g. national sovereignty vs the EU, the suffragette movement, the abolition of slavery. Sometimes, as in the last two examples, there is significant support from outsiders in their struggle.

This debate is generally about fairness. Factually, it will be argued that this group suffers more, or benefits less, than another, in terms of personal income and wealth, longevity, health etc. Morally, it will be said that the others enjoy unearned privilege because of luck, or by seizing and maintaining it with the exercise of power and influence

A counter-argument is that the privileged compensate for the differential by protecting and succouring their inferiors (e.g. treating servants kindly, providing for them in sickness or age, educating their children, giving to charity, leaving bequests in wills, administering justice in peacetime, leading in time of war). Another compensation is to accept additional restraints on their personal conduct, or voluntarily to risk misfortune, suffering and death in war, exploration etc. In some cases, there is an appeal to false identification: the privileged allow the less fortunate to live through them in imagination.

The riposte is that the difference is never quite paid for in full.

Should the oppressed group (or its leaders) win, it tends to consolidate its position by limiting the freedom of communication and action of its opponents.

2. Individual freedom

Some individuals may want more personal licence (e.g. completely free speech, easy divorce, casual sex, illicit drugs.)

The attempted justification here is that the desired additional liberties are relatively harmless.

Opponents will refer to the physical, emotional and financial effects on others: family, neighbours, the public at large, and various community expenses. There are also potential negative consequences for their children’s development and future lives.

Some will wonder whether society should bother trying to do more than prevent or mitigate immediate and significant harm to third parties. Is it worth the expense of police, courts, social workers, rehab etc? Let the libertine destroy himself.

Others may appeal to social or religious norms, saying that the individual must accept certain behavioural restrictions for the sake of societal cohesion. Stress will be laid on setting a good personal example, or not setting a bad one (this has implications for e.g. teachers, entertainers and sportspeople.) Certain behaviours are felt to have provocative potential or the power to lead others astray, and so measures are instituted to limit them (e.g. sumptuary laws, rules on what may be said and done in public – or even in private.)

The individualist may dispute the facts, and also maintain that others must take sole responsibility for their own responses. Norms will be represented as arbitrary and unnecessary for human happiness; it will be claimed that society will hold together without them.

To set oneself against others is to make oneself vulnerable, so the individualist will attempt to form (often uneasy) alliances, and so raise the debate or struggle to the level of a collective-freedom issue.

Alternatively, the individualist may simply scorn society’s permission. Firstly, changing its rules is an uncertain and long-term project; secondly, to ask permission is to cede one’s personal power to others.

At the extreme, a sociopath may turn his dislike of others’ power over him, into a mission to get power over others; Mao, Stalin etc. On a lesser scale, we get what is said to be the statistical over-representation of psychopaths in senior positions in politics and business.

3. Psychological (or spiritual) freedom

This is about conflict within the individual. Our desires are often contradictory; and sometimes there are demons hiding in one’s background. Many of us are a mass of scores trying to be settled; patterns/scripts trying to complete themselves whatever the cost to ourselves or others; the expectations of family, friends or society; or aspirations to a kind of secular redemption, ideal life-moments that end the story with credits and closing music.

On the other hand, the fractured individual is afraid to be healed. Change is a kind of death; identity trumps our happiness.

Who is this ‘I’ and why does it want this thing? If the ‘I’ is enigmatic, self-contradictory, untrustworthy and potentially destructive to self and others, by what shall we regulate our lives?

So we could get to another contradiction: voluntary submission of the will. Prisoners used to tell ‘Theodore Dalrymple’ that they preferred being ‘inside’, where they didn’t have to make decisions. To whom, or what, must we surrender?

Round and round we go, like the worm Ouroboros; but surely, here is where we begin.