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Comment by drostie | Hacker News Reader

One of the nice facts about history is that you will never see any group trash "liberty" and "freedom." Just about every dictatorial, authoritarian, or megalomaniacal political movement thinks it's pro-freedom. Communists? "The bourgeois have enslaved the proletariat, and we lock them up in the name of liberating the people." Nazis? "The actions of the Jewish Conspiracy at the end of the Great War have enslaved the German people." The U.S. Civil War stands as one of the most explicit examples: one side rallied behind the idea that slavery must be abolished; the other side rallied behind the idea that the federal government has no right to tell its member states what to do. It was a war where the liberty of the lowest class was pitted against the liberty of the state.

It's as if Mother Liberty was the Goddess herself: for whenever two nations come into a fight, people in both are always saying that "God is on our side"...

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This is because of the nature of freedom. Freedom is to constraints as silence is to sound. Constraints are the things that positively exist, freedom only exists as the negative space.

This is also why the concept of free will is so problematic: how free does will have to be to be called free will? Does it have to be free from the laws of physics? Does it have to be free from coercion?

I think there are more concepts where we have it the wrong way around like this.

Freedom is indeed absence of coercion by others. What's wrong with that?

Edit: thanks for the clarification, koningrobot,

Nothing, the problem is not with reality (of course :-). The problem is that most people seem to think about freedom as something positive. You can only create freedom for Joe by coercing Jane to not violate it. This enables the kind of scenario that the parent to my original comment describes.

I think your first sentence is really interesting & insightful, kind of treating "true" freedom as a sort of absolute zero -- that is, a never-actually-reachable ideal.

I feel like free will doesn't have much to do with the kind of freedom we're talking about, though. If some other human being (or group) has the ability to make you do something you don't want to do, that's a problem of freedom, not free will. (After all, you could decide not to do that thing and suffer the consequences).

Free will is much more about things that you have no ability whatsoever to actually make that decision in the first place, whether because of the manipulative hand of some supernatural force, or via some radical rationalist explanation of decision making.

I see at least two implications of what I said, one being that freedom is an absolute zero, the other being that shifting freedom around is a zero-sum game. Maybe these two are related in some game-theoretic way, I'm not sure. The only fundamentally productive way of obtaining freedom is by getting more control over our environment, i.e., technological progress.

I understand the distinction you're making between freedom and free will; I mentioned it because the compatibilist notion of free will is what you're calling freedom here. But yeah, it's probably not too relevant to the original discussion.

This goes back a _very_ long way; politicians used similar rhetoric in the Roman Republic (which was a slavery-based state which granted a meaningful franchise only to a wealthy elite).

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