Freedom
From , To , Of , For and With
and the Complementarities
Freedom Specified
We may conceive of freedom as freedom from, freedom to,
freedom of, freedom for and freedom with.
Freedom from may require inhibition, constraints, limits,
obstructions or boundaries.
Freedom to, freedom of, freedom for and freedom with,
may require the removal of those same inhibitions, constraints,
limits, obstructions or boundaries.
Complementarity and Sense
Because freedom of the one kind displaces freedom of another kind,
the two freedoms are mutually exclusive.
The degree to which one freedom is gained and held,
the other freedom is forfeited.
This complementarity of freedoms means
that we cannot be for freedom and make any sense.
If there is any sense in which we can increase or gain freedom,
it is in the sense of being free of confrontation, conflict,
free from obstruction, because we communicate with,
coordinate with, and / or harmoniously exchange
or interact with our environment.
In this sense, freedom can be increased.
There can be a gain in freedom.
We may say that we have more freedom, if and as
we diminish conflict or obstruction.
But even in this sense, we are not free to conflict or free to obstruct,
so freedom remains a matter of complementarity.
The phrase “for freedom” sounds sensible,
but it is something that can only be said
because those two words can be arranged in that sequence,
not because it makes any sense.
It is like making a map without any territory.
It is a representation without meaning.
“Freedom“, as a term, must be used with a qualifying preposition.
It is necessary to specify: freedom from, freedom to, freedom of,
freedom for or freedom with.
Freedom from is complementary to freedom to, freedom of,
freedom for and freedom with.
Restricted, Restrained, Limited
Freedom of speech is not the freedom to say anything,
about anything or anyone, to anyone.
We are not free to lie under oath. We are not free to slander.
Fraud, involving misrepresentation, is unlawful.
Our freedom of speech is restricted, restrained, limited,
both by law and by the consequences.
One person’s freedom cannot be another person’s bondage.
Yet much of what is exercised as freedom for one
is a violation of freedom for another.
The freedom of some people and some organizations
to research, to develop, to produce and to distribute
or to use products, without testing
and without an awareness of the consequences,
sometimes threatening all life, impinges
upon the freedoms or rights of others
to be free from those consequences.
The presence of pesticides detected in every living creature on earth,
made possible to be detected by the work
of Martin and Lovelock in gas chromatography
and reported by Rachel Carson in the book Silent Spring
is such a violation of freedom.
The production of pollutants of all kinds are such an example.
While some are free to use inorganic nitrogen fertilizers on their fields,
their lawns, their meadows or pastures,
others lose the freedom to have healthy water supplies
or a stable atmosphere and climate.
Exemplification
If I am to be free from the discomfort,
perhaps even the pain or threat of cold,
if I am going to be free from the dangers of extreme cold,
I may require shelter, shield: apparel or blankets.
I may require warmth or heat.
I will require oxygen and food to metabolize.
If I am to be free from the inhibitions
of apparel, blankets, shelter, etcetera, I will need to live
in a climate, an environment, a latitude,
which supports that freedom.
If I am to be free to travel, I may require a passport,
a vehicle, roads, fuel, services, money, and so forth.
If my travel is to be free from the problems of language barriers,
I will need interpreters, or many language skills.
If I want to be free of the invasion of privacy,
of having interpreters as constant companions,
I will need language skills.
If I want to be free from the effort to learn language
and perhaps the effects of acquiring language skills,
I will need to diminish, if not eliminate social exchange.
If, on the other hand, I want to be free to communicate,
free to learn, free to coordinate, I cannot be free
from the task and the implications of learning language
or learning to communicate without language.
In General
In general, all freedoms have modifiers, prepositions,
which specify relationships, relationships with boundaries,
barriers, limits, constraints, obstructions, inhibitions
or their absence.
If I want to be free from rules, I will experience
certain disorder or even chaos,
unless I have governing principles, accepted guidelines,
moral compunctions, etcetera.
There is no absolute freedom.
Absolute freedom would mean amoral behaviour,
irresponsible behaviour or total egocentricity.
Even then, there would be a residue of restraint
with respect to the ego’s continuity.
We are dependent upon other life forms for the essentials of life.
The Extension of The Principle
In the same way, if I say I want free trade,
I am attentive to the freedom from obstructions,
the freedom from customs, the freedom from tariffs,
the freedom from rules and regulations
regarding the transport and exchange of products and services.
With that freedom, comes the loss of the complementary freedoms.
Freedom from competition with producers
without the costs of the moral restraints
of accountability to the environment or social programmes,
producers who only seek a profit, at any cost
to the lives of those who produce,
producers who claim to live in a free society.
Producers only accountable to the demand for dividends
by shareholders and the demand for low costs by customers.
There are producers who claim to have a free society.
Their advertisements make possible supposedly free entertainment.
These advertisements are intended to influence, to arouse,
to generate wanting or desire.
They generate discontent and the level of wants
or desires are so great, sometimes,
that people are willing to hurt others
to have what they must have.
Such a society is not free from the social problems of crime,
the social disbalance of poverty and the social injustices,
which require legislation and law to enforce equality of rights
for minorities, for women, etcetera.
To claim to have a free society, means, in this case,
freedom from many social responsibilities
and the costs of those responsibilities.
To claim a free economy, means free from concern for the environment,
free from resource conservation,
free from protection from indiscriminate production of waste,
free from moral accountability for residues of production
or hazardous products or processes.
Necessary Challenge
We must challenge phrases like a free society
or a free economy as empty and fictitious claims of people
who either are so out of range
of the conscious implications of their advocacy,
or the ethical constraints of truthful representation,
they are manipulating symbols without meaning
or with a meaning which is tragic, dangerous and immoral.
Free trade is a freedom from some constraints,
but free trade means to be subject to ruthless “bottom line” economics,
which exempts itself from any accounting of the costs
of social concerns, environmental concerns, moral concerns.
It produces stressed and compulsive executives and staff,
who reject social issues as costs
from which they would excuse themselves.
In the name of creating jobs and wealth,
we create poverty, ill health, stress, social unrest,
frustration and even death and disruption
due to environmental damage.
Economic Gains, Economic Power
versus Health Gains and Social Order
There should be no political party with such a platform as free trade.
The empty phrases: “free society”, “free economy” or “free trade”
are words without meaning or words with a dangerous
or deceptive meaning.
To be free to pursue economic gains
at the cost of social well-being, to pursue economic power
at the cost of social order, to pursue economic power,
at the cost of poverty for any, to pursue economic goals
at the cost of health and death for many,
is the pinnacle of self service, self interest, selfishness,
egocentrism and the cult of individualism,
at the cost of violence
in the name of enforcing laws
to perpetuate the property rights
of those without moral conscience.
Power – Restricted, Checked, Controlled, and Moderated
The political and economic power of such people
must be restricted, checked, controlled, and moderated,
and in some cases simply taken away.
There is no such a thing as a free society, a free economy or free trade.
Morality costs something.
If government has a reason to exist,
it is to administer that morality,
not to enforce disbalanced advantages
used without responsibility for social order or environmental quality.
Materialism, Codified as Economics
To put ownership of production processes
and urban planning principles in the hands of the people,
in the name of representational methods which are equally as ruthless,
is to betray the highest ideals.
To offer a vote which is a highly intermittent expression,
from a very small number of alternatives is not democracy.
People need a voice not a vote.
Materialism, codified as economics,
is a rampant neglect and disregard
for moral, social and environmental concerns.
Government of the people, by the people,
and for the people
must mean all of the people, all of the time.
Government of the people, by the people and for the people
must value the dependencies of people upon one another
in moral and social patterns
and the dependency of human life upon other life forms
in the environmental and ecological patterns.
All freedoms are complementary.
Openness, Connection, Interdependence
The openness of any system, the perception of the system as open,
allows an awareness of connection
and the acknowledging being and doing of interdependent existence.
Everything in the universe is what it is
because everything else in the universe is what it is.
Everything in the universe does what it does
because everything else in the universe does what it does.
Present day developments in cosmology are coming
to suggest rather insistently
that everyday conditions could not persist,
but for the distant parts of the universe,
that all our ideas of space and geometry would be invalid
if the distant parts of the universe were taken away.”
Fred Hoyle, Frontiers of Astronomy
“. . . the world is totally connected;
. . . there are no events anywhere in the universe
which are not tied to every other event in the universe.”
“. . . every event in the world is connected
to every other event.”
“It is . . . an essential part of the methodology of science
to divide the world for any experiment
into what we regard as relevant
and what we regard . . . as irrelevant.”
” . . . the basic assumption that I have made
about dividing the world into the relevant and the irrelevant
is in fact a lie.”
“. . . the reason why we have made such enormous changes
in our conceptual picture of the world in the last seventy years
is because we have had to push out
the boundaries of the relevant
further and further.”
Jacob Bronowski
pages 58, 59 & 60, TheOriginsofKnowledgeandImagination
Existence, being and doing are all interdependent.
Questions of Relationship
How does this relate to freedoms and the complementarity of freedoms?
Complementarity of freedoms is a systematic relevance.
Free Will
Free will is the same as any other freedom. Free will is complementary.
Free will requires the operation of a boundary, a barrier,
a constraint, a limit or obstruction.
That obstruction or boundary is space and time in the case of free will.
Space and time create the delay in consequences that permit free will.
Are we to be free from the immediate consequences of our choices?
Or are we to be free tochoose, with a delay in consequences
and have a freedom to edit, a freedom to refine,
a freedom to improve our choices?
Appendix
Creators, being Created
We are creators, being created, because we enter
into the opportunity of delayed consequences, free will.
We are creators being created because we create
with the feed-back of experience and the opportunity
to alter our choices, due to the delay in consequences,
made possible by the obstructions of space and time.
It is a game, it is a specially bounded environment,
where we have the opportunity to choose
or to exercise so called free will, with a delay in consequences.
The principle of complementarity applies to free will too.
With the freedom to choose comes the limitations,
the obstructions, the delay in consequences
that sometimes produces frustrations.
This means that this reality is constructed of the very obstructions
that both limits our power and grants free will
by means of a delay in consequences.
Discrimination and certain kinds of intelligibility
occurs by means of the obstruction
which grants the delay in consequences
which, in turn, allows free will.
When we are what we are as a result of the discrimination
of a boundary and a defining delay in consequences,
we want the power of openness, without the play of our energy,
our strength, our efforts against the obstructions
of delayed consequences, nor the limitations implied
in access to the supply of energy or pattern.
We must open. We must be moral.
We must acknowledge our dependencies, our interdependence.
We are dependent upon one another, socially.
We are dependent upon other life forms, ecologically.
The values associated with these dependencies
must be embodied in our cultures.
We have and we need constraints, designed limits,
moral and ethical responsibilities.
Our freedoms are complementary.
We must be free to live, free to breath,
free to enjoy clean water and healthy food.
We must be free to be near one another
and dependent upon one another as well as free to be apart.
Some people want to be free from the responsibility
to control their own behaviour.
They want someone else to provide that control.
That is not a freedom we can grant.
Recently, we had a session called
“Abandoning the Game while Keeping in Play”.
We discussed game theory.
We stipulated the nature of a game to be a set of rules,
limits, constraints or obstructions.
Recently, we had a session where we discussed intelligibility
as requiring distinctions.
The nature of distinction often involves boundaries.
But here we have the opportunity to see, more precisely,
the nature of intelligibility as something
other than the dependence only upon distinction.
Intelligibility involves the relationships, connections,
dependencies and exchanges, flows and flux of energy
and pattern or information.
How does this relate to game theory and the abandonment of the game?
How does this relate to intelligibility on the basis of something
other than distinction?
That exploration, that development, made possible
by a delay in consequences is cycled.
We are cycled between the constrained situation
of our present experience in this obstructed reality
and the immediacy of consequences we experience,
either upon death, or when we say, not my will, but thine be done.
We have the complementarity
of freedomfrom the immediacy of consequences
and the freedom of having the immediacy of consequences.
It is enlightenment, it is self-realization,
when we open to the immediacy of consequences.
It is creation in the medium of an unobstructed reality.
We must let go. We must relax and release the defining boundary.
© 2011, 2013, ECOhealth / Eve Revere
