Notes on Freedom—Positive and Negative
Before we address the what’s, why’s, and how’s of rebooting the American political system, it is critical that we spend a few moments contemplating the subject of freedom—the human condition of liberty.
Freedom has a duality that must be recognized—much like a two-sided coin, freedom has counterbalancing forces in the human sphere of life. I may refer to these as negative freedom and positive freedom, or “freedom from” and “freedom to.” The duality plays out politically, economically, socially, and psychologically.
Some philosophers have given us clues to what it means to be human.
For Aristotle, who spoke of democracy tied to a city (or polis), the power to communicate was key:
…the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, or just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.1
German philosopher Immanuel Kant considered that the human being was “an animal endowed with the capacity of reason.” The ability to reason is fundamental to our human experience, but also consider that humans have the capacity to worry about things that aren’t real. Is that rational or irrational? Humans have the capacity for creation and imagination beyond the natural world.
The exceptional twentieth-century writer, James Baldwin, captured “fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures” with much of his writing.2 Regarding the human experience he wrote, “Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”3 Echoing the age-old phrase, carpe diem, Mr. Baldwin makes his point on freedom pretty clear.
“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.”
— James Baldwin
Beyond philosophy, we could look to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and religious tradition to teach us about humanness. Those topics move beyond the scope of this pitchbook. With language, reason, and consciousness, humans are naturally presented with choices that represent freedom and individuation.
The biblical story of creation positions mankind in a search for a contextual understanding of freedom. Erich Fromm, in his book “Escape From Freedom”, looks at what may be learned from the biblical story of creation. He is attempting to find sociological meaning in myth.
The myth identifies the beginning of human history with an act of choice, but it puts all emphasis on the sinfulness of this first act of freedom and the suffering resulting from it…. Acting against the command of authority, committing a sin, is in its positive human aspect the first act of freedom, that is, the first human act. In the myth the sin in its formal aspect is the eating of the tree of knowledge. The act of disobedience as an act of freedom is the beginning of reason. The myth speaks of other consequences of the first act of freedom. The original harmony between man and nature is broken. God proclaims war between man and woman, and war between nature and man. Man has become separate from nature, he has taken the first step toward becoming human by becoming an “individual”. He has committed the first act of freedom. The myth emphasizes the suffering resulting from this act. To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid. The newly won freedom appears as a curse; he is free from the sweet bondage of paradise, but he is not free to govern himself, to realize his individuality.4
Humans moved through primitive society while adapting to nature and growing in capacity for individuation and organized forms of political life. Man experiences “freedom from”—or negative freedom—as a break from certain constraints, but also as a loss of security from a structure that provides constraints in exchange for belonging, place, identity, and self-preservation. Breaking “free from” brings the individual to confront loneliness, powerlessness, and personal insignificance. Perhaps Paradise wasn’t so bad!
“Freedom to” is a different matter bringing positive freedom into view. The ability to create, to work, to love, to be, and to experience, unbounded by constraint, is wildly appealing. “Freedom to” is often celebrated and romanticized, as well as offering a means of personal growth and fulfillment. “Freedom to” often takes shape in the form of wants, desires, and rights. When we think of the founding declaration associated with our nation, we speak in terms of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These are some of the unalienable rights. Again, a duality of freedom occurs as we talk about “freedom from” and “freedom to.” The founders of the nation wanted freedom from tyranny and freedom to live life on independent terms with representative government on home soil.
As each individual is forced to confront the desired combination of factors that maximize individual happiness according to “freedom from” and “freedom to”, we find that the summation of all such states of happiness does not yield a utopia or a Zion. The attempt to maximize societal happiness in terms of “freedom from” and “freedom to” variables yields at least two potential results: one is citizenship and the other is tribalism, with a necessary acceptance of the hard truth that some individuals will exist at the extreme margins.
Citizenship & Tribalism
Citizens belong to a structure of government that offers protection. In the United States, citizenship affords constitutional protection of rights and due process. Access to basic survival goods and services and opportunities for ownership of property are also basic inputs into the benefits of citizenship. The societal structure promotes law and order.
Tribes provide alternate power structures for survival, belonging, and protection—connection amid chaos. We can think of gangs, mafias, and other organized criminal networks as examples of tribes that operate with goals absent the individual protections enforced by the broader network of society. Tribes can also take on positive qualities to establish a culture and build a nexus of support for human activity. Tribalism falls short of citizenship in offering the broadest recognition of human rights because a consistent legal code is not applicable or enforceable.
Government structures can consolidate ruling power or disperse it for the benefit of curbing the abuses of power.
Allowing selfish or corrupt forces to wield power under a unified government will necessarily result in the persecution of the marginalized, or the occasional tyranny of the masses toward a failed ruling class during times of revolution and regime change. Only with virtuous principles—principles that adhere to selflessness, self-restraint, seeking for the personal and collective good, and seeking for truth—can a representative body form that will establish governing principles acceptable to the majority of citizens/tribes and accommodate to some agreeable measure of equity and fairness the needs of the most marginalized groups.
Freedom & Fairness
But remember that birth isn’t fair. In the medieval world, birth in a time and place determined nearly everything that would define the course and opportunity set of one’s life. Capitalism and democracy created mobility—and freedom flourished. However, in our world today, structural forces are hollowing out the middle class and moving its members toward a powerless sense of being back in the medieval world—not as a serf or indentured servant, but rather as a cog in the economic machine with unsupportable student loans and unaffordable housing and health care.
Today, birth within a nation-state remains unfair by virtually any number of measures across a wide range of variables: GDP per capita, air quality, trading access, food security, gender equality, ethnic and race relations, private property distribution, education, and religious liberty. Still, the political and moral philosophy of liberalism has brought about enormous advances for humanity over the course of three hundred years.
Comparing the state of inequality within each nation-state is just a single indicator. It may be useful for measuring the degree to which society will suffer from a greed/envy condition, but inequality has always been a human norm. A better judge of the nation-state performance might be comparing poor-to-worst conditions of marginalized and non-marginalized groups across nations and time. This assessment speaks most to human societal achievement. On this score, the world has done quite well for the past couple of centuries.5 However, potential signs of reversal appear as threats on the horizon.
Freedom is both a blessing and a curse. It is a liberating breath of fresh air and a claustrophobic burden of isolation, powerlessness, and personal insignificance. Duality, paradox, irony—this is the human condition. And don’t forget suffering—there is no escape from human suffering regardless of the commendable progress made in uplifting the human condition. However, we can mitigate and alleviate suffering in countless ways if we allow virtue and freedom the space to perform their combined works in society. Attempting to regulate an end to all suffering stifles freedom. Overcompensating for risk through excessive regulation may at first be paternalistic, but may ultimately end as intellectual tyranny.
Duality, Paradox, and Irony
Back to duality, paradox, and irony—let’s consider the spectrum of these human conditions:
The happy and sad.
The free and enslaved.
The rational and irrational.
The conscious and subconscious.
The rich and poor.
The generous and stingy.
The selfless and selfish.
The forgiving and begrudging.
I believe the human condition will always manifest these descriptive terms; humanity will never exist without these. Said another way, these conditions are inherent in life and society. They are an axiomatic part of the definition of human living.
Note that forgiving and begrudging are not a true pair but illustrative of more complex psychological issues—forgiving: willing to let go of intentional and unintentional harm caused by others, which equals a liberating grace [often on both sides], in comparison to begrudging: the reluctance to grant or allow something typically out of envy or resentment [often viewed as a bad grace]. Free and enslaved can occur both in reference to external forces as well as psychological states and physical dependencies. The rational and irrational are both present in each individual within society and manifest among society in the wisdom of crowds and the foolishness of manias & panics. Some panics are rational, though!
Jumping to paradox—the author of the Curiosity Chronicle newsletter, Sahil Bloom, posted a wonderful Twitter thread on November 21, 2021, which began: “The most powerful paradoxes of life.” Mr. Bloom then listed more than 20 paradox lessons to be learned from life. I will quote five of my favorites from his thread:
The Persuasion Paradox
Have you noticed that the most argumentative people rarely persuade anyone? The most persuasive people don’t argue—they observe, listen, and ask questions. Argue less, persuade more. Persuasion is an art that requires a paintbrush, not a sledgehammer.
The Icarus Paradox
Icarus crafted wings—but flew too close to the sun, so they melted and he fell to his death. What makes you successful can lead to your downfall. An incumbent achieves success with one thing, but overconfidence blinds them to coming disruption. Beware!
The Hamlet Paradox
"I must be cruel only to be kind." — Hamlet
In Hamlet, the protagonist is forced to take a seemingly cruel action in order to prevent a much larger harm. Life is so complex. The long-term righteous course may be the one that appears short-term anything but.
The Shrinking Paradox
In order to grow, sometimes you need to shrink. Growth is never linear. Shedding deadweight may feel like a step back, but it is a necessity for long-term growth. One step back, two steps forward is a recipe for consistent, long-term success.
The Fear Paradox
The thing we fear the most is often the thing we most need to do. Fears—when avoided—become limiters on our growth and life. Make a habit of getting closer to your fears. Then take the leap (metaphorically!)—you may just find growth on the other side.6
The contradictions presented through paradox can give us lessons that fill our cup of life to overflowing. We try too hard; we get too close; we try to avoid pain, setbacks, or failure; one way or another, we let ourselves get in the way of good living. Only by embracing paradox can we bring individual freedom to fulfillment again and again.
Love, Perfection, Choices, and Problems
To what end do humans face this construct of society under the conditions of life on earth? Thousands of years of recorded history among different tribes in different places and times point in a singular direction of duality—that you might experience love—the freedom to love, the ability to pursue your deepest affections! The love-hatred spectrum coupled with the associated peace-violence spectrum appears to offer the measuring stick for those societies engaged in the highest thinking and the highest achievement among human civilization (while never pretending to approach human perfection for all).
Perfection has no duality—it resides in the godly sphere of human conception (with a specific exception among the ancient Greeks and Romans who embraced gods with wondrous and wild failings in character traits—perhaps it’s for this reason we don’t have local churches where we can light a candle to connect with Zeus and Apollo). Both religion and some elements of philosophy point humans toward ideals, toward perfections, that draw humanity to a love of that which is good and that which is true.
“Freedom from” and “freedom to” manifest in public policy choices:
Taxes—How much, paid by whom?
National debt—How much, how much annual deficit… and how allocated?
Social policies—What is a right?
Regulations—To what end?
Economic interference—What forms of corporate and individual welfare does society support?
Safety & Fairness—How should we handle criminal justice? What about social justice? Does striving for one turn a blind eye to the other?
Progress always brings problems…due to the duality of man. Only perfection eliminates problems, but we are not “The GOD” meaning “the perfection”, so from birth to death, we will wrestle with ourselves and each other, sometimes more sometimes less. A technocratic future will not facilitate the perfection of humankind, so there is no panacea in making digital technological progress our only new “new thing.” Technological progress is a choice—balanced by political considerations and driven by “freedom to” and “freedom from” variables. Additionally, technocracy, which can be defined as the government control of society by an elite of technical experts, poses an alluring argument about what is best for human management.
Just as trying to regulate an end to all suffering stifles human freedom, technocracy is a more sophisticated power trap that places some cadre of individuals as overseers and overlords of the rules of life. If those elite experts who govern are duly elected from the voice of the people or properly appointed by their representatives, then we are functioning according to the grand design of this nation. If experts are unelected and unaccountable, our national situation starts to resemble a democratic republic “for show” operating under the strict direction of shrewd (or hapless) puppet masters.
Noble & Degenerating Freedom
In addition to the positive and negative aspects of freedom comes another duality, which we might refer to as noble freedom and degenerating freedom. Noble freedom includes love for higher-order principles and for the wellness of humanity as a whole. Degenerating freedom subscribes to lower-order principles and is characterized by extreme love for self and using others unjustly to obtain self-satisfaction. Noble freedom and degenerating freedom are natural extensions of human character expression.
It might be fair to say that all freedom is a matter of love or affection because whatever we love, we do freely. If freedom is pursued as a matter of love, it becomes the life of every individual. Nothing would seem to be part of us unless it comes from freedom. Noble freedom comes from loving what is good and true, which taken in reference to society generally means conducting choices in a way that does not intend personal harm to others. We need to embrace freedom in order to experience the full human condition. Noble freedoms tend to lift, inspire, increase self-confidence/self-determination, promote self-control and self-restraint, positively reinforce rational behaviors, and benefit others.
It might also be fair to say that nothing is united to us that happens under compulsion. Compulsion in matters of human affairs is destructive. If we could be forcibly educated, everyone would be brilliant to some maximum personal standard. Criminal justice reformation cannot succeed by compulsion, but only by means of enticing individuals to see what is good and true and embrace a form of life filled with such attributes.7
We are allowed to act within the freedom we have as rational beings, so that good may be experienced and shared. We also have the freedom of thinking and intending evil, and even of doing it to the extent that the laws do not prevent it. Not everything that harms people can or should be regulated or illegal. That’s not to position a libertarian view, but just to assert that freedom under law disappears as the volume of law swells to protect us from every imaginable offense. The human experience is most meaningful when it is broad enough experientially to allow for growth from both successful choices and unsuccessful choices. To compel oneself necessarily stems from freedom. We can become more solidly free in those circumstances in which we struggle against something offering short-term allure, but rationally offering long-term failure or destruction, because then we are inwardly compelling ourselves to resist based on an appeal to our highest opportunity for goodness.
Degenerating freedom is being led by exclusive love for oneself and love for cravings which serve an instinctual need at the expense of others. This is toxic self-interest. This type of freedom, which may act as feeding a compulsion within one’s self, is not really freedom, but slavery or servitude. Degenerating freedoms tend to depress, deceive, induce self-loathing, harm others, harm oneself, enslave to instinct, negatively reinforce irrational behaviors, and lead to addiction. The freedom to gamble, to consume alcohol or certain addictive drugs, or to consume pornography can manifest as degenerating freedoms. Libertarians often advocate the legalization of victimless crimes, and in doing so, may be advocating full support of access to degenerating freedom where the victim is the one who makes the choice, at least until the choice owns the victim and unintended consequences reach innocent bystanders. The juxtaposition of noble freedom and degenerating freedom is merely to show that not all freedoms are created equal or are equally desirable.
Thus, freedom (liberty) and virtue mix in ways necessary to uplift the human experience and the experiment of self-government. To abandon either is a mistake and a shame—they become inseparable for reaching success by almost any measure. The English political philosopher, Edmund Burke, explained it thus:
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their [greed]; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and [arrogance]; and in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there [is] without. For it is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their [chains].8
The Freedom Table by Political Subgroup
The following table takes a simple, pragmatic approach to mapping certain values (economic, patriotic, social, etc.) along political identities that come from the Pew Research Center.9 These associations are by no means perfect. They are approximate opinions based on the simplicity of stereotypes. The table is not meant to give offense, but merely to juxtapose present issues. We are a much more ideologically complex society, but the table illustrates a few dimensions of freedom.
When “freedom from” and “freedom to” plot along the political factions of our time, we can see that “We the People” represent different American societies with different outlooks on what it means to be free, to be secure, and to belong. Maybe that’s okay as long as mobility in society allows citizens and tribes to find healthy forms of personal freedom that don’t coerce other Americans to surrender their pursuit of freedom.
This is the interesting challenge of our times. Next, we’ll look at a spiritual/philosophical framework to round out our section on mental models.
Final thought: Freedom is a two-sided coin with positive and negative aspects. “Freedom from” and “freedom to” considerations highlight the constant tug-of-war between liberty and security. We will always live in the paradox of human duality, so we should increase our appreciation of the difference between noble freedom and degenerating freedom. Associating freedom with love for that which is good for both the individual and the society will best serve our country.
Notes for new readers:
The Common Sense Papers are an offering by Common Sense 250, which proposes a method to realign the two-party system with the creation of a new political superstructure that circumvents the current dysfunctional duopoly. The goal is to heal political divisions and reboot the American political system for an effective federal government. If the movement can gain appeal, a call to crowdfund the project may occur in 2024. Subscribe for free with an email to follow along.
The tabs on the top of the Substack page can bring you to earlier essays that spell out key political issues. Common Sense Paper No. 1, No. 2, No. 4, and No. 5 can help anyone get up to speed on the project.
Common Sense 250 is exploring the launch of a podcast this fall for those who want to listen to the political strategy but don’t have time to read. Subscribe and watch for an email announcement.
Aristotle, Politics, https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/aristotle-politics-polis.asp (accessed October 10, 2023).
"James Baldwin," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin (accessed October 10, 2023).
"Excerpt from Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin," Penguin Random House Canada, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/669846/giovannis-room-by-james-baldwin/9780345806567/excerpt (accessed October 10, 2023).
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1994) pp. 33-34.
For a good read about worldwide facts and how the world is better than we think it is, I recommend the following book: Factfulness by Hans Rosling.
@SahilBloom, "The most powerful paradoxes of life:", X (formerly Twitter), https://twitter.com/SahilBloom/status/1462428192409591819 (accessed October 10, 2023).
See Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation, 2010), https://swedenborg.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/NCE_HeavenandHell_portable.pdf (accessed October 10, 2023) pp. 367-370.
Steven Rabb, The Founders' Speech to a Nation in Crisis (Atlanta: Liberty For All Publishers, 2020) 28.
"Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology," Pew Research Center, November 9, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology-2/ (accessed October 10, 2023).
I loved this one, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can all be free to live the lives we want to live (without harming others!)