Freedom is not a goal, but a direction

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there is sort-of, it's called utilitarianism. However, maths isn't a magical cure-all - the ethical dilemma is just shifted onto how you quantise your ethical problems.

Oh, let's start with a shorter snippet. Something banal and absurd, easy to relate to, that shows where these 'sedition' things tend to go:

If you cheer on the Pakistani cricket team, that's sedition.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/28/sport/india-arrest-kashmiri-m...

'On Wednesday, Uttar Pradesh Police tweeted that five people had been arrested in incidents throughout the state after "anti-national elements used disrespectful words against the Indian cricket team and made anti-India comments which disrupted peace."'

Have YOU ever read Mein Kampf? The central thesis is that Jews view non Jews as sub human servants.

I'd argue that before freedom can be a goal or a direction it's necessarily an identity first. When we think of freedom as an external thing, it's a reaction that defines itself as inferiorized to the thing one is becoming free from.

I like Snowden's thinking and think he's one of the greatest exemplars of courage alive today, and not to use his personal email newsletter as a foil, but I think he missed some key depth.

The crux I think of the culture war is whether the ideal of freedom originates from identity - or is the effect of experience. This crux is related to the tension between individual and collective good, but not defined by it. I think the line is deeper.

The peculiar aspect of viewing freedom as an identity is it necessitates - if not a belief in the divine, at least a presumption of it. If you believe freedom is an effect of circumstances, it relates you to the material world as being subject of it. If you see freedom as a state of existence or an axiom of being, it has to originate from somewhere, which implies it was made or granted - and not by humanity.

This is why the culture war isn't intellectual or about ideas or a specific "religion," but it is the exact same kind of religious conflict we've recorded for milennia, because it's over beliefs about identity. "Attacks" or subjugation of freedom isn't an attack on an ideal, they become an attack on "free people."

However, the complement or opposition to this free identity is the one where people identify as un-free, or as subjects to forces - unfortunately for us all, those forces are of the freedom-identified. Unlike freedom, this view doesn't come from divine presumption, but material physical expereince, either of real direct oppression and abuse, or via the logic of ideas in language. Their belief comes from things that mostly happened to them. It's a founding axiom of their identity, where your first words are for things that reflect your identity as a subject, slave, or oppressed. This identity requires an earthly oppressor, independent of whether it is real or mostly symbolic. For all my criticisms of it, it's a consequence of lived experience and not faith in some divine force.

Anyway, into heady territory here, but on this freedom/culture issue I think we've tried everything else. If we're doing pithy aphorisms, I'd say instead that identities are irreconcilable. We can co-exist, but we cannot fully know or understand each other, even if the greatest thing in life is the little bits we do get to know and understand about others.

I'd say that recognizing freedom as those parts of others we existentially cannot understand and treating it as unexplored opportunity for growth goes a long way to reconciling the interests of those who identify as free, and those who do not.