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Comment by chmod600 | Hacker News Reader

Does that mean freedom is self-defeating?

It comes down to a simple formula: are people learning and appreciating freedom faster than it's being diluted by people who are ignorant or disdainful of freedom?

There's no fundamental reason one rate must remain above the other. Education, immigration trends, business, and culture all play a part.

But once the anti-freedom are greater in number than the pro-freedom, then freedom democratically self-destructs.

Non-free governments don't have this problem, because they aren't democracies.

In other words, losing freedom can be peaceful and even consistent with the principles of freedom (you're free to give up your freedom). But getting freedom requires some non-free (or at least non-democratic) things to happen.

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Jefferson said "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty". Which is probably one reason why we now have efforts to read him out of the discussion.

The drive to power and control seems to be part of human nature, and it is always finding new ways to organize and express itself. And because freedom is a matter of human choices, yeah, there is always the danger that people will choose to become unfree.

I think freedom has the enormous advantages of being more effective and more motivating. The free are better able to innovate, and to correct their mistakes. They have a better moral basis, which motivates stronger action over longer periods of time. The free can rely on the power of the individual, which mounts en masse to an enormous force, while the unfree are ultimately always awaiting direction.

The greatest risks to a free society are internal, the forces which erode freedom of speech and thought. Liberal democracies have a very strong track record against totalitarian societies. For the US, I think the decline in free speech and the growth of ideological thinking is a serious problem, and we may hit a point of lock-in where people cannot criticize the regime. Many corners of the country are already at this point, and have been for a while, and those zones are spreading. It doesn't help that resistance to this has coalesced under a cult of a crazed personality.

I think freedom will win out, but it won't be easy, and we'll have to work at it. Probably always.

Yes, it is. We all like to believe in ideals like turn the other cheek, take the high road, welcome opposing views no matter how extreme etc. Looking back through human history though, the only way to combat intolerance has been to be intolerant yourself. Freedoms need to be defended, sometimes with blood. Look at WW2 for example. Appeasement didn't go very far, direct action did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Freedom is never absolute. You can respect other people's freedom to disagree with you, but not their freedom to kill you. You can choose to only stop them from the latter, but not the former.

Waitbutwhy has a great series about this: https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html

Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over. Limiting freedom (eg you can't kill others) can mean more freedom overall as more of the population are able to exercise their (limited) freedoms.

> Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over.

Am I the only one to see an interesting parallel to "copyleft" (e.g, [L]GPL) licenses (and a refutation of the "It's evil, viral, anti-free!" objections to them) here?

But should you respect someone's freedom to vote? What if they vote against freedom? And then what if that leads to the same result as them killing you?

There's many steps between a vote and getting killed. Someone tries to kill you, you try to kill'em right back.

You have no choice but to respect that freedom. The only alternative is to establish a tyranny of your own -- that's the only way you can tell people how to vote.

Democracies can suicide. The Weimar Republic did (though notice that Hitler never actually won a popular majority vote).

This problem was exactly what the American Founders had in mind as they shaped their Constitution. They wanted to identify the ways a government could be turned against its own people, and create barriers against those attacks. The US doesn't trust majoritarian government, which is why it isn't exactly a democracy. Items like the Bill of Rights, and features like the separation of powers, are intended both to secure liberties and hamstring oppression.

(The Federalist Papers are a fascinating discussion of all this.)

But at the end of the day, constitutional features can only slow down an oppressive majority. If a majority wants to dominate a minority, eventually they are going to find a way. The only real security for freedom, over long term, is to raise up a people that think and feel and act in those ways that are consistent with freedom.

I believe the answer is 'yes' and it's also true for most 'noble' causes.

Analogous to this quote from George Bernard Shaw:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man ."

Karl Popper had quite a bit to say on this topic:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

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