Why do we need freedom is the question I was recently asked by a relative planning to run for office.
A good question, many will brush off promptly with; what other way is there to live? The question, however, given the status of the questioner, is more geared toward why we should build systems to enable freedom over the understandable pursuit of maxims of individual freedom.
In other words, why is it important for the U.S. to maximize freedom while countries that do not maximize it, say China, on the surface, appear more successful?
Foregone Freedom
Actually, the freedom we all slosh around to cover our tracks is not at all a foregone conclusion.
For one, while the U.S. Constitution references freedom, or its approximate equivalent liberty on numerous occasions, nowhere in its 240-year-old scripture does it actually define freedom. Nor does our Constitution stipulate what protects freedom while it dishes out generous rights, yet falling embarrassingly short on any obligations to freedom.
I do not know about you, but a term is meaningless unless you have a universal agreement on its definition. For example, the color green is not a very meaningful declaration unless we define and learn what visible wavelength we consider to be green from an early age.
Manacles of Freedom
In fact, none of our manmade systems today adhere to a meaningful definition of freedom, for no freedom is free unless defined by a dynamically adjusted relativity theory covering the broadest scope of ever-changing participants, for no one is free unless everyone is free.
Absolute freedom becomes stale the minute defined, unable to attract participants that may originate outside the fringe of the foregone definition of said absolutism, artificially limiting their mobility of merit.
Worse, the standard deviation of merit within such a static definition of freedom quickly begins to coagulate around the arbitrage of freedom favoring a controlling and thus narrowing and steep standard deviation of merit, as depicted in the above chart. Said freedom quickly becoming the tightening noose around the neck of freedom.
Free Freedom
So, to come back to the original question of why candidates of government must value systems of freedom can only be answered satisfactorily with the implementation of a relativity theory of freedom (akin to Einstein’s relativity theory best representing all of nature’s systems) that will offer the kind of freedom to represent the diverse and dynamic merit of ever-evolving participants accurately.
Societies that do not promote such relativity of freedom, including the U.S. today, will not evolve organically in a renewable fashion, and instead, are relegated to rely on ever-complicating legislative corrections, generally induced by post-mortem infractions of undesired exclusions and loopholes, to change the stubborn oligarchic absolutisms of freedom, downstream only.
This, my friends, is the equivalent of old-world freedom without the benefit of Einstein’s discoveries. Human freedom falling one crucial dimension – that of time – short of human capacity, ingenuity, and diversity.
Freedom’s paradox
And yet, even with a relativity theory of freedom, freedom cannot exist without rules to protect a vile maxim of personal interests from damaging humanity’s collective interest.
To use a soccer correlary, paradoxical rules, established as in soccer rules, must be established to have the players produce the gameplay the audience expects to appreciate. Paradoxical rules must also establish humanitarian needs, evolutionary speaking, over the fickle and endless consumerism individuals want.
The relativity of freedom and rules ultimately modulated and changed upon request by the consortium of players as the participants to yield the most exciting gameplay possible. A rule such as offsite in soccer implemented as the paradoxical rules to freedom to improve gameplay. No sport can exist without rules. In the same way, no system of freedom can exist without rules.
The rules of gameplay are generally implemented by governance as the theory that determines what can be discovered (Einstein), the skills of gameplay by the players being the discovery as the outcome of the system put in place.
Devil’s Advocate
Freedom may indeed appear messy, especially to those making their money from controlling less free people. To those enamored with absolutism, relativity is indeed hard to swallow. And yet, all of nature, including human evolution, is an innate relativity theory.
Yes, it is easier to enslave people who, in the words of Goethe, falsely believe they are free. In the same way, it easy to believe our planet’s position is stationary, while reality dictates our planet revolves around the sun. The latter subsequently reveals our universe is expanding at an accelerating pace, with all objects in it, including us, moving at the speed of light—those new findings leading to new evolutionary truths prone to prolong human survival. The findings establish the relativity of renewal and obliterate the false absolutisms of sustainability. Nothing in our universe is sustainable.
Absolutism cannot capture such relativity, and forged simplicity, like the ones from our absolutisms of freedom, should not come at the cheap denial of reality.
Sovereignties of Control
So, countries like China appear to be doing well as a rapidly growing country with strict confines of freedom bestowed on its people. But, as a result, it will not be able to produce self-modulating renewable strengthening of its society when the participants of said society cannot challenge and free the arbitrage that holds its ingenuity and performance hostage.
Such confinement is great for getting things off the starting block but not so great for ensuring the broadest spectrum of renewal of its people are empowered to change what their harvesting of ingenuity looks like. Simply put, China will not find a consistent supply of outliers to fundamentally change the world for the better with systems that systematically and oligarchically limit the purview of what it deems appropriate.
Unchanged, China’s people-party rule will prove to yield the same stifling patterns as our systems of absolutism do; narrow the standard deviation of preprogrammed merit until the relevancy of such monolithic merit will evaporate, induced by our dynamic equilibrium with nature and diminishing natural resources available to us.
Well-positioned
The U.S. is well-positioned to change and inspire the world for the better if, and only if, our investors and legislators change its systems of freedom from stale absolutisms to dynamic relativity theories of freedom. We already have the participants’ culture, free and unafraid to challenge the systems that hold their ingenuity hostage.
We do not need a scorched earth approach. Instead, we can change one system at a time and instantly reap the rewards of real freedom.
We must begin to unleash the operating systems for humanity from their manmade shackles of absolutism. And people ready to enter government must understand how to deploy more accurate systems of freedom to explore the full, dynamic and renewable scope of their constituency’s innate ingenuity.
We are eager to tell you exactly how.
