TO: Jonathan, Marco and Nemo
Why are the following freedoms so important to successful, healthy
societies?
freedom to influence one's governance,
freedom of speech, assembly and belief,
freedom to question authority,
freedom to pursue one's interests,
freedom to reap the fruits of one's efforts and creativity,
freedom to learn,
freedom to disagree,
freedom to establish one's values
My thoughts are that these freedoms allow a society to be more
adaptive. A
social organization is a complex adaptive system, one with differing
roles
and responsibilities and relationships, and with the necessary
distribution
and command of power. One major threat to a social system is individuals
(or
factions) protecting themselves at the expense of other individuals or
of the
society as a whole. From one perspective, the evolution of modern
societies
can be summarized as the successive abilities of various cultures to
learn
how to maximize the freedom and health of society and to minimize this
exploitative and destructive tendencies of individuals.
Even a casual glance through history shows that the greatest threats to
exploitation come from the very leaders of society. The leaders (kings,
emperors, tsars, lords, politicians, politburo members) that are so
necessary
to direct and police society invariably try to use their power to
distort
their focus from the benefit of society to the benefit of themselves.
The
freedoms of democracy and free enterprise and the pursuit of knowledge
all
work to limit the potential for exploitation by leaders and other strong
factions of power within society. They remove certain powers from
leaders,
and they offset other powers with distributed checks and balances. Just
as
importantly, they empower non-leaders and give everyone the chance to
influence their own leadership. (Note that leaders always had these
freedoms.
The breakthrough was forming a social contract to extend these freedoms
as
widely as possible.)
No society has a model even close to perfect. However, I think
successful
modern cultures have all tackled these basic issues and found the need
to
provide these individual freedoms. And social failures have invariably
disregarded them.
Thoughts?
Rog
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:32 BST