A response to a friend’s blog post on Freedom and Liberty ...
I would say that what you have defined here is not ‘freedom’ per se, but ‘personal freedom’. If we are on a determined quest for personal freedom then the destination is ultimately a place which is very lonely. It is also a place from which it is impossible to escape without giving up that desire.
Giving up the quest for personal freedom leads us to the next question which is with whom we are going to share our domain, our life, our space. Some people are free to choose their neighbours and others are not. For example in our country currently, social mobility is restricted by the state for families who have a high state dependency whereas the breadth of choice of living location is very wide for families who have either access to capital or who have strong borrowing power.
Of course some societal unpleasantries can be escaped by a change of living location, but most can’t and it is the tension between the afoermentioned diametrically opposed extremes which ultimately lead to various forms of ethnic cleansing. Either that or just tall walls.
A mild form of this can even be seen amongst religious institutions who preach ‘love thy neighbour’ but actually practice ‘choose thy neighbour’ by sending their missionaries temporarily to international neighbourhoods of their own choice, to live amongst people who are not able to leave those same neighbourhoods and - were it not for the ‘babylonian’ capitalisms within which said institutions are 'free' to practice – probably never will. Such institutions are effectively sending the free to preach among the captives instead of going to ‘set the captives free’ which is what their guru claimed to embody.
So freedom is one thing, liberty is another. My understanding of ‘liberty’ is as a kind of societal framework that exists in order to achieve a kind of ‘corporate freedom’. It allows a body of individuals to live together without allowing one man’s freedom to encroach on another’s. The supporting framework which holds this web in tension includes mechanisms such as legislation, contracts and cultural shaming. The latter of which seems more prevalent in Eastern cultures and used mostly in the West only where legislation, contracts and other social pressures are evaded.
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