Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

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> You think personal liberties are at a low point?

They are again under attack, as is free speech, mostly out of outwardly good intentions such as preserving justice, public safety, or even, ironically, inclusion.

This is a perpetual conflict, though.

> Everything that is marketed to us, that enters our political discourse, ... "You do your way", "how you want it, when you want it", etc

...as long as it's politically correct, and there's no vocal minority which is opposed to your doing that — again, out of some best intentions. Liberty inherently creates conflicts like that, because people are not going to want the same thing. Liberty is when you are allowed to do something that others might not like, and reciprocally must tolerate other people doing something you don't like. A lot of people are uncomfortable with this.

> JSM was writing in an age where tyranny

A tyranny of majority is a thing :( Consider all the minorities who were disenfranchised not by dictators but by majority of local voters back in the day.

> I shudder to think how your head would not explode in a real authoritarian country.

I was born in the USSR. I can compare. I see the vast difference. I also see certain disconcerting similarities.

I think you both have a point.

By and large, supernova is correct I think in that the emphasis is on personal liberty, especially expressions which are not-normative ... more than ever before.

Communitarian ideals of 'duty' (ie 'Ask not what your Country can do for you, but what you can do for your Country') feel almost archaic these days. Like an old country song. We do not compel our children towards the community, rather to whatever expression excites them.

The push towards expression I think is mostly rooted in undoing some suppression in things like sexuality, but it extends to everything and as hinted in the OP the underpinning really is consumerism. 'Christmas' is actually a less important holiday than 'Easter' - but you'd never know it ... industry loves Christmas, or at least the parts that are non-controversial, and it wants to suppress everything else. This is the power of commerce. I work in Marketing and it's essentially a golden rule these days that nobody promotes a product based on features, it's promoted based on the basis of aspiration. Car commercials don't generally boast features, they take you on an journey of what driving XYZ car is like. (Think the Saab car, driving across the desert, with the Saab jet flying by, the driver portrayed as 'fighter pilot' - every little boy's dream job).

But nike also has a point - in that where there are sensitivities around minority groups (race, religion), it seems that almost any opinion can be construed as a 'transgression'.

Absent social rules to provide a basis for behaviour (some might say this is 'conformist') then humans I think will just do whatever suits them. We like to think of this in intellectual terms like 'having ideas' or 'avant garde art' - but for the most part it's just 'playing video games and Tweeting'. The 'PC' forces I believe are ideologically bent on a very specific kind of 'equalisation' wherein there's a kind of instinct to see any 'difference' as 'inequality' and therefore 'immoral'.

So I think those are the primary forces: lack of social agreement supported by commercial interest pulling us towards aspiration, and ideological forces promoting their specific version of 'moral equality'.

Googled origin of "Ask not what your Country can do for you, but what you can do for your Country". It is from John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address 1961.

We are talking about deeply divided country back then in the middle of civil rights movement. Which happened when large parts of population were not free to speak their minds without very real threat to their safety. It is not change from people free to speak their minds to here. It is change from one group risks lynching, beating and economic consequences to another group risks economic consequences.

It was not only thing that was going on, obviously and it is not that everything is changing for the better. But the way we idealize the communitarian ideals of the past and their impact is mostly nostalgia - remembering good while ignoring bad. We are talking about good days of free speech of the past and then talk about suppression of sexual or racial minorities as if it would be unrelated. Or for that matter free speech of whites who pushed for equality - the consequences for them were could be quite high too.

And I think the push back or just not taking these liberty arguments all that much seriously has something to do with those arguments not being really serious about past either.

I would have assumed that anyone would recognise that quote without having to look it up. It's an interesting generational demarkation I think.

"But the way we idealize the communitarian ideals of the past and their impact is mostly nostalgia "

Not true.

Or rather ... of course we always make the past into 'nostalgia' but there's absolutely decrease in civic participation by almost all measures.

- Participation in local community groups is way down. - Voting participation is way down. - Direct political participation and Union memberships are way down. - Millenials are the first generation in modern times to not consider 'hard work' (which is a kind of contribution) as top 5 'important value' (Greatest, Silent, Baby Boomer, Gen X - all had this as a top 5 value).

Now - we can definitely argue the value of 'community groups, classical political causes and definitely 'self described virtues' ... but it's definitely directional.

At very least it's a function of opportunity: people just have so many choices, young people can literally do anything. Three generations ago one's scope of choice was extremely limited.

People can now chose to participate in a 'political meme' on Twitter instead of joining the local cause. There are obviously many advantages to this, but disadvantages as well, as there is generally less materiality to Twitter wars. That said, when 1/2 nation Tweets, things can change.

Here's literally Google's 'ngram' viewer for the word 'duty' [1]

I don't need external evidence for this because in my own family I have very extended generations and I knew my grandparents generation very well: they were very coherent at the local level. My grandmother knew everyone on the street and must have helped or attended with literally over 100 weddings as it was the 'local ladies groups' that usually catered weddings -> for free (!) back in the day. Among other things. And yes, it was 'ladies' who made sanwiches, never the men.

The clubs my parents belong to are having a hard time attracting members's children into memberships which they have done for generations.

I would go so far as to say the level of local, social cohesion and the hyper local social networks were so strong and specific, that we can't read someone like Mill without understanding it.

The comparison between my grandparents youth, and suburbian 'placelessness' today wherein there aren't really any cultural demarcation points or locally established 'social rules' Mill references ... is really shocking, and that's only across several decades.

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=duty&year_star...

First half of your comment has zero to do with free speech and even less with freedom in general.

> it was the 'local ladies groups' that usually catered weddings -> for free (!) back in the day

And in between, women ability to earn money and social status by working went way up. We are less economically dependent on knowing everyone on the street, less dependent on hoping people will reciprocate the effort. We also socialize at work more, so we are not so lonely unless we form these organizations. Stay at home women who don't go out of their way to meet others are incredibly isolated and lonely, with all negative consequences, but todays women are dealing with this problem much less.

This has less to do with consumerism and more to do with pragmatical choices. All the socializing and networking that is necessary for all this was looked down at anyway. Despite completely necessary for sanity.

Men were not making sandwitches, because they were the ones who went to work.

> people just have so many choices, young people can literally do anything

Young people do things, they did not ceased to exist. They are even, all in all not that badly behaved - they are less violent, they take less drugs, teenage pregnancies are down.

> The clubs my parents belong to are having a hard time attracting the kids as members which they have done for generations.

Why would club membership was seen as good or bad or had anything to do with freedom or consumerism? It is either leisure activity or business networking activity, both of which moved elsewhere.

> A tyranny of majority is a thing :(

It's a meme for sure. Whether it's a "thing" in the reality of modern American discourse is sort of an open question.

The fact that the people most enthused with the idea of being suppressed by the tyrannical majority are members of the ruling party, dominant gender and most affluent racial demographics sorta makes the logical construction a bit complicated.

Do you think that racial segregation regulations, anti-gay regulations, long-gone anti-Jewish regulations and fresh anti-immigrant regulations were created against the will of the majority? Often the majority directly voted for them, like city-wide sundown laws.

It takes a rather hard conscious effort to remember that other people freedoms need preserving if you value your own, because you are not always guaranteed be on the side of the majority.

I don't disagree that it's happened as an issue of historical fact. I'm pointing out that the argument is most often deployed in defense of very much unsuppressed voices. And I'm implying strongly that it's being deployed in bad faith.

I'm curious how you're squaring unsuppressed with the "cancel culture" thing whose very purpose appears to be the suppression of those views.

You're also ignoring survivorship bias. It's no surprise that the victims of majoritarian tyranny you hear from are not the weakest in society, because the weakest in society don't have enough power to command the spotlight. That doesn't mean tyranny of the majority doesn't exist or that they are not its victims, only that you won't hear it from them, because you don't hear anything from them, because they don't have enough power to be heard.

> the "cancel culture" thing whose very purpose appears to be the suppression of those views

Because the "cancel culture" thing doesn't work? The whole concept is nearly a complete fabrication. It's about 20% anecdotes of college kids saying dumb things mixed with 80% paranoia fueled by the conservative media. No one actually gets cancelled, certainly not the white republican men we're talking about constantly yelling (loudly, in a rather, let's say "unsuppressed" manner) about their Free Speech rights.

A tyranny of the majority is most certainly a thing. You defining that majority based on race and drawing conclusions is your call, not everyone's.

Coming from an Islamic country, minorities such as gay people or non-religious people cannot seek legal action without a strong sense of a chilling effect.

In the US, you have the electoral college as an attempt to amplify small state's voices to not have states with massive populations dictate who's president (at least in spirit, as I understand the implementation is far from perfect) which is understandable, since states are _first-class citizens_. The other thing, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that you have the house and the senate. The senate adheres to that first-class citizenship of states, while the house is a direct representation of citizens (blocks of them), which makes a tyranny of a majority (e.g. one-size-fits-all bill that suits people of California but wouldn't go well with the people of Wyoming) impossible.

So, if you don't feel like there is a tyranny of a majority in the US, you perhaps have to thank your legislative process for that. That sadly, does not map to private entities.

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