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Eventually? You mean already is happening. It has started. But that only as a side note. The "problem" is, that there is not one universal "freedom". Freedom i
by sdoering 6y ago
Eventually? You mean already is happening. It has started. But that only as a side note.
The "problem" is, that there is not one universal "freedom". Freedom is many concepts packaged into one single word.
Coming from Germany, I still remember the division by the Iron Curtain. Having lived on the western side few miles from the border and having talked to a lot of former GDR people (my father fled with his parents before the wall was build when he was still a little kid) during the years I came to understand two totally different forms of "freedom" at play in the different regimes:
A lot of people in the east got away with critizizing their bosses and sometimes even becoming physical. Up to a certain point they even got away with being somewhat critical to the system and the problems within the system.
In the west people got away with critizising the state quite well, while it became problematic to critique your bosses at your workplace. I know a lot of people in my father's generation who got fired for pointing out flaws in their workplace.
We were able to travel to a lot of places (once we were well off enough to afford it). While my parents still struggled to pay for me being able to attend sport clubs.
My while my SO's parents (she was born few years before the wall fell in the eastern part of Germany) were only ever able to travel to the east German coast, other eastern countries like Slowakia or what is now the Czech Republik, Romania or Bulgaria, Russia or Cuba (and they were by far less well off than my western German parents).
I don't imply one system was better, one was worse. Well yes I do - the GDR was worse. But what I wanted to show is, that there are different kind of "freedoms" and that is just one example. Every form of freddom comes with inherent trade-offs.
Because of preferences, personal values and said trade-offs other people tend to prefere different kinds of freedoms (while maybe not grasping that their choices impact others - like a tragedy of the commons thing). They seem to have a different hierarchy of what is important to them - and decide based on that. Be it in Germany, the US or as OP pointed out in Switzerland.
- mattm 6y agoThis is such a good comment. I was in China for a friend's wedding and his fiance's family was adding another floor to their house. I asked what kind of permission they needed. They said they didn't need anything. They just went ahead and did it. Contrast that to the US and, depending on the place, you could spend months arranging to get the proper paperwork and inspections to be able to do something like that. So while the Chinese person may not have the freedom to strongly criticize their government, in this case they did have more freedom to make an individual improvement to the quality of their immediate life. I think it's a huge issue when someone brings up "freedom". What does that even mean? In a society you're never truly free. There's always some form of constraint. You could go live as a hermit and be free but then you're constrained by the physical limitations of the environment. While walking to work (pre-covid) I'd see homeless people and wonder "Are they freer than me?" They can wake up and do whatever they want for the day. I'm the one that has to stick to a fairly regular schedule.
- Lio 6y ago> I think it's a huge issue when someone brings up "freedom". What does that even mean? Someone smarter than me once wrote “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” If you can point out that someone in authority is wrong, without fear of death or persecution, then you have freedom and from that germ everything else can be reformed eventually. Dictators know this and it's why they don't let people laugh at them even when they clearly look stupid.