Ordered🗽Freedom

You want to be free, I want to be free, everyone wants to be free. But what does that even mean? What does freedom mean?

You've probably met people who self-proclaim that freedom is one of their "core" values. They might even be commonly seen supporting cultural movements that champion the freedom of this or that group. But in my experience, chances are, if you ever start questioning them on their understanding of freedom, you'll find out pretty quickly that it's surprisingly shallow.

You see, the concept of freedom is actually not very obvious. If, like most people, you've never really thought about it before, then you'd probably have some vague sense that it's something desirable and worth fighting for, but usually, the thought ends there.

In this article, I'm going to try to continue that thought. If you think that seems like something worth investigating, then come along for the ride.

OK. So far, a good way I've found of teaching a big-picture understanding of freedom is to take a look at the 3 ideals of freedom along with what each model looks like when embodied in the real world at both the level of the individual and the group. Micro and macro.

So let's do it. The 3 ideals of freedom are

1) freedom for freedom's sake, 2) no freedom, period, and 3) ordered freedom.

My specific choice of these 3 ideals, and the order in which I will tackle them, is deliberate, because seeing the bad options first will help generate a clear source of comparison when we get to the good option.

See, when it comes to "freedom", ideals surrounding it are really just beliefs and attitudes that people have, which then find expression in reality as the same people proceed to act them out in accordance to its design. Beliefs and attitudes can be conscious (explicit) or unconscious (implicit). The default for the majority of people is that it is unconscious, but that sure as hell doesn't stop them from producing real tangible behaviours that lead to real consequences¹. While we won't be focusing much on the causes of the beliefs and attitudes in this article, we will be looking at their consequences.

First, we have: Freedom for Freedom's Sake. In other words,

unconditional freedom².

The pursuit of freedom for freedom's sake is intellectually and practically equivalent to an eternal revolution, whose only logical outcome (if permitted to run its course) is endless chaos and universal annihilation. The basic reason that an eternal revolution is practically impossible is because the moment you "successfully" complete a revolution, that instantly becomes the new status-quo and you would need another revolution to topple that, and so on, ad infinitum. This is true on both the individual level, and the collective level. Just like how the rebel engaged in his eternal revolution will never find solace or relief,

the freedom fighter who fights only for the sake of freedom, will never cease finding new things to become freed from³; maybe even from freedom itself if only he could conceptualize it.

This is a tragic but real occurrence among rebels who, losing themselves in the fight, forget what it was that they were fighting for in the first place. In consequence, they become a kind of mindless drone, possessed by the quest for the ever-elusive freedom at any and all costs, death-spiraling into an abyss that they gazed too long into.

In terms of biology, unconstrained freedom is perhaps best represented by tumors and cancers that unwittingly destroy the host organism in their incessant quest to multiply. While psychologically, unconstrained freedom destabilizes one's sense of identity and relationship with reality, leading to irresponsible and hedonistic whim worship⁴. "Agency" is then reduced to the freedom to do whatever you feel like doing at any given moment, regardless of the legitimacy or ethicality of its causes and consequences. Practically,

this paints the picture of the irrational man, possessed by a call to an ever-elusive freedom corrupted by unconditionality.

From a wider perspective, a society where power rests with those who embrace the ideal of unconditional freedom is best represented by a pure tyranny⁵. Customs and rules are destroyed without the provision of better alternatives, and society degenerates and regresses into a savage state of all-against-all. Here, resistance members are hunted by those in power, while loyalist revolutionaries are indiscriminately devoured by the very system they helped create. Through the destruction of morality, nature, justice, and reason, virtues and vices cease to have distinguishable and rational causes, and so all are found to be equally guilty and are condemned at the whims of those who temporarily find themselves in power. Oppressive forms of thought-control are commonplace, although it too is continuously changed, often in direct contradiction to its predecessors, making strict adherence to it impossible, as per its design.

The ideal of unconditional freedom produces a society of slaves lost entirely to whim, ruled by an ever-changing roster of short-lived tyrants.

I think you get the point. In terms of attitudes, it's a pretty dysfunctional one. Now, note that just as any society in pursuit of freedom for freedom's sake puts itself in an unsustainable state, the exact same is true for the state of any individual possessed by the same ideal and attitude. It's a bad idea.

Let's now turn to the second alternative, which is: No Freedom, Period.

Like freedom for freedom's sake, this too is a deadend; as even literal slaves could choose their own attitude and response to their indentured servitude; as witnessed and documented by slaves and prisoners throughout history⁶. To be metaphysically freed of freedom is to make the choice to voluntarily go into a coma and stay there⁷. But you see, that act, being a willed action, would require an exercise of freedom, thereby affirming the very thing that is being denied. Complete determinism in humans is a non-starter. It is not only wrong (and unprovable), but also contains a confession on the part of the believer–a confession of their fantastical wish that freedom does not exist, used predominantly as a self-justification for their own pathetic failures of will. In reality, at most, we can lack specific freedoms, maybe even the most crucial ones, but never do we have zero freedom. Such a person does not exist, in the same way that a society with zero freedoms does not exist; since you would need for that an omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent totalitarian state to enforce it⁸. What you find in the world instead are two-class systems, where one group (the tyrants) enjoys greater freedoms at the expense of the other group (the slaves). Wherever freedoms are crushed under the lie that rights are not possessed by right but instead given by permission, people suffer, every standard-of-life statistic drops, and rebellion brews and rises until a successful revolution wipes the slate clean for a fresh start. It's a bad idea.

OK. So, I don't know about you, but so far, these two ideals of freedom seem pretty grim to me. Now let's see how our third ideal, Ordered Freedom, holds up in comparison.

Let's start with some biology.

As far as I know, ordered freedom in biology is well-represented within all water-based living organisms in the form of harnessed stochasticity; meaning, in layman's terms, "controlled randomness." Randomness can be thought of here as the freedom to move and mutate. Living beings, rather than being utterly left to the whims of natural selection and reduced to being mere carriers of DNA, instead take things into their own hands and utilize stochasticity purposively to create novelty in service of life⁹. Perhaps the best example of this is the way our immune system works to fight off foreign entities like viruses. First, it attempts to determine whether it already has a sequence that can latch onto the virus and destroy it, in which case it just multiples those cells. If it's an unknown new virus, then it goes into those cells' nuclei (the part that could make a new antibody) and orders a controlled stop to the passive error-correction mechanism that keeps genes identical, thereby allowing the natural breaks to occur at random. Having opened the floodgates for random variations, the system is flushed with a diversity of cells at which it hurls at new virus. It then selects, out of those, the very few that can succeed in tackling this new virus, multiplying them after turning their passive error correction mechanism back on, and voilà, problem solved.

Harnessed stochasticity is everywhere; it's what happens when bacteria resist antibiotics and when cancers resist radio- and chemotherapy. It is the purposive use of ordered freedom to generate the novelty necessary for life.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the model of ordered freedom is the default biological model. This model was built to last, and it has, by the very fact that it can be observed within every organism alive today. That's a pretty decent resume if you ask me.

From another perspective, a society in acceptance of ordered freedom must understand the necessity of a life-serving organizing principle that precisely determines the limits of individual freedoms. Here, for example, your freedoms are respected until they infringe on another's rights; the conditionality of freedom is therefore observed in service of life abundance.

OK, what about psychologically? What does ordered freedom look like in parallel there? Well, it looks like a thing called productive creativity.

Creativity is productive only when it serves life.

That's right, a productively creative mind is an ordered and grounded mind that isn't afraid to explore and try new things–it's a mind selectively open to novelty which actively seeks to learn more about reality. Productively creative individuals walk that fine line between order and chaos with the intention to serve life. Life, therefore, is their purpose and organizing principle; it conditions their freedom.

"The question 'free of what?' is thus replaced by 'free for what?' Liberty coincides with heroism."¹⁰

Quote from The Rebel (1951), by Nobel Laureate Albert Camus

Here, the "will" of each competing biological system¹¹, which we experience phenomenologically as the various emotions and drive states, is limited by the conditions determined by the purpose of life. The service to life here is understood in reference to a long-range timeframe, capable of stretching all the way to eternity.

The more ideal the ordered freedom, the longer the timeframe it references in its service to life.

Put another way, the ideal of ordered freedom introduces responsibility to freedom; the responsibility of utilizing our freedom strictly in service of life, understood in reference to the longest conceivable timeframe–eternity¹². It offers the full picture; bringing to light both sides of the same coin–freedom and responsibility¹³. To exist as each other's context.

Freedom without responsibility results in slavery to one's short-ranged hedonistic whims; it is to live the life of a brute. Responsibility without freedom results in slavery to one's depraved self-denial; it is to live the life of a fake.

And there we have it–a brief exploration of freedom. If you made it this far, props to you. Remember, the fact that the concept of freedom isn't straightforward should be pretty obvious from the history of wars fought in its name. After all, everyone fights for freedom, but as Camus pointed out, the real question is

"freedom to do what, in the service of what?"

So, why don't you try it out? See if you can answer this question for yourself. You might need continue the thought, but you don't have to do it alone. If you would like some support, I am happy to help.

1. As embodied by, but not exclusive to, catastrophic religious (despite outwardly appearing atheistic) ideologies like Marxism and exemplified by its aggregate historical death toll.

6. Like Viktor Frankl and his account of Nazi Germany death camps and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his accounts of Communist Soviet Union's gulags.

2. A really effective measure of someone's irrationality is to see if they believe anything about human nature is unconditional. Then, simply swap the "is" to "should be" (from "I believe X is unconditional" to "I believe X should be unconditional") and voilà, you have just witnessed a secret confession; a confession of their underlying wish that something should be unconditional. Pursue this thought and you'll find out very quickly that this wish is born of a denial of reality. For instance, someone says they believe in "unconditional love". Translation: They believe love should be unconditional, because then they wouldn't have to work to deserve it. Oof.

5. Perhaps you were surprised to learn that said society is not best represented instead by an anarchy. The first reason is that the moment you make unconditional freedom the core principle of any society, every individual's personal freedom immediately conflicts with everyone else's, as their freedom is unconditional and thereby ununited by any common good that would allow for any sort of reliable voluntary trade. This setup greatly incentivizes the "might is right" ethos, where tyranny thrives. The second reason is that anarchies may in fact be stable under the strict condition that its citizens are united by a common rational ethos that is actively transmitted within the culture, but that will depend on how you define anarchy.

10. (Camus, 1951/1991, p. 72)

Camus, A. (1991). The rebel (A. Bower, Trans.). Vintage. (Original work published 1951)

13. Very relevantly, W. J. Winslade wrote in Man's Search for Meaning that Viktor Frankl "sees freedom and responsibility as two sides of the same coin. When he spoke to American audiences, Frankl was fond of saying, 'I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.'" (Frankl, 1946/2006, p. 159)

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

3. Every type of chronic complainer fits this profile, especially the online types. Rather than making any real effort to work on the next best thing, they are only concerned about the things that they wish to be freed from, fueled by the inflational high they get from the belief that they are being perceived by others to be virtuous. What they're after is the causes of social status–that is, the character one needs to build (through effort) in order to achieve social status. They want the causes without doing the required work needed to gain the causes. They think having the effect (social recognition) magically infuses them with character. This delusional inversion of causality is fundamentally irrational.

Listen to this article instead

11. Your instinctual primary process systems run largely autonomously without conscious input. As such they can be said to each possess a "will." These wills, being autonomous, inevitably conflict with one another, requiring consciousness to resolve their differences and determine a course of action.

12. Note that the concept of eternity is not the same as that of infinity. Eternity is defined as now and forever, as able to be conceptualised by a mind, whereas infinity exists only as a mathematical potential and never in concrete reality.

7. If you pay attention, you'll find many main antagonists in books, shows, and movies pursuing this exact thing. If it isn't a collective coma they're after, they'll usually settle for sending everyone into some kind of eternal fantasyland where they believe suffering would cease to exist. Whatever form these villains take, they share the same underlying cynical and irrational wish; to put an end to freedom.

4. It leads to whim worship in individuals because whenever freedom is unconstrained by another higher organizing principle, it leaves them without an actionable purpose. An actionable purpose requires a path–an identifiable path. Unlimited freedom, on the other hand, produces unlimited paths. When faced with endless options without any organizing principle to arrange them in terms of relevance, people are left with nothing but anxiety. This is Kierkegaard's "dizziness of freedom." In the panic- and grief-filled state of anxiety, the default is to run. Run where? To anything that can temporarily relieve the pain, long-term consequences be damned. In turn, they betray their own future to escape their present. It is the tragic fate of those who live a life "endured."

8. As even in this imaginary tyranny, somebody will end up having to make the decisions. In other words, to consciously and voluntarily will specific actions. A certain degree of freedom must therefore exist for this to be possible. This fact is expressed quite well towards the end of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984.

9. For evidence, see Nobel Laureate (awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983) McClintock's research on chromosome shuffling under radiative stress and Bridges' 1997 research on Hypermutation under stress.

McClintock, B. (1951, January). Chromosome organization and genic expression. In Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology (Vol. 16, pp. 13-47). Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

Bridges, B. A. (1997). Hypermutation under stress. Nature, 387(6633), 557-558.