Today I was attending a lecture about blockchain and cryptocurrencies and the lecturer said that freedom and safety don’t go together. You can have more freedom by abandoning safety. Would you agree?
Yes. Freedom can be used for good or bad. I assume the lecturer was talking about crypto being used mostly in crime, which happens because it’s not controlled by an institution that can confiscate it.
The way it’s phrased here makes freedom look good, but don’t forget it actually means there’s valid arguments for limiting freedom just as much as for limiting control. You have to get into a lot more detail to really get anywhere.
It’s technically true in absolutes. Absolute freedom, without giving up humanity, gives no guarantee of safety provided by anything outside of yourself. Absolute safety exists only in a providential void, where needs are seen to magically, as by a benevolent god. If you seek safety in the absolute freedom, you lose the freedom in one way or another. Walls to keep out enemies keep the builders in. Tools to provide for survival require production and maintenance, taking away your freedom to choose to do things that you enjoy. If you seek freedom in the absolute safety, you have to risk giving external forces access. Those forces always carry risk of harm, whether by malicious action or indifference. However, while it’s necessary to sacrifice one for the other in the absolute, it’s not sufficient. Nothing about the relationship says being less of one necessarily makes you more of the other. The easy example is prison. In most prisons your freedom is severely curtailed, but you certainly aren’t safe. You might even be imprisoned for the purpose of being harmed.
If you pay attention to politics, you’ll start seeing a pattern of “we’re keeping you safe” as an excuse to rob you of your freedoms. This really ramped up in the USA after 9/11. It’s when spying on Americans by our own government became legalized. We were afraid, and we gave up some freedoms for the idea of safety.
…and now we know we’re no more safe than we were before.
they are probably using the modern interpretation of this those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
Read my mind.
It’s possible to have neither freedom nor safety
gestures around broadly
I don’t agree because it is too simplistic. Its not necessarily wrong, but it is misleading because reality is a whole lot more complicated.
Agreed. History is full of unintended consequences, partially because so many things were more complicated than individuals and societies realized. There are not tons of really simple tradeoffs along the lines of ‘freedom vs safety’. I don’t think people could have imagined the future world they would bring about when they started planting crops instead of just hunting and gathering, for example.
I would suspect the original lecture went into more detail.
I don’t know. I think security today, has been awfully abused because I really don’t see for example, why the fuck Google needs my street address to “feel secure”. It’s small things like that, that really make you question.
There’s something about this lecture that doesn’t sit right with me and I think it’s because they’re bringing into irrelevant things that don’t mesh with the idea of freedom or security.
Yes, that’s the entire basis for the idea of the social contract. That you give up a little bit of freedom in exchange for security from living in a society.
Social contract theory is statist propaganda. Even before I knew anything about politics or political theory I was so confused by this idea.
It’s just there to create an illusion of consent for state oppression. Even though there’s no realistic way to opt out, and we never even decided to opt in in the first place.
What kind of crazy contract is that?
It’s not propaganda, it’s a basic logical conclusion. If you and a group of people decide to follow a set of rules together, i.e. create a society, you are surrendering a little of your freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want in exchange for some protection from others from doing the same.
But that never happened. We never decided that. No one even asked me. Again, I never opted in and there’s no realistic way to opt out. I’m far more afraid of the state than I am from my neighbors, and if I had a real choice, I would opt out immediately.
You can mostly opt out by bugging out to the woods to homestead. Taking advantage of the many amenities of society is opting in. “The state” is just your neighbors, and their neighbors, etc, extrapolated out to the whole country. Despotic governments don’t just appear from the aether, they are established and staffed by someone’s neighbors.
