>It really seems to come down to individual freedom vs. reduced freedom for the collective good. That's one way to frame it, if you want to use the word "freed

>It really seems to come down to individual freedom vs. reduced freedom for the collective good. That's one way to frame it, if you want to use the word "freedom" a lot. Another way is "cooperation vs anarchy". Our ability to pull ourselves out of the mud and position ourselves as the Rising Hope of Earth, is predicated entirely on our ability to cooperate. The philosophy of "individual freedom" is the quasi-religious conviction that we can simply sit back and let everyone do as they will, pushing and shoving and vying for money and status and power and all the rest of it, and without having to make any difficult choices, somehow it will all Just Work Out. It would be so convenient, wouldn't it? To have the moral and the pragmatic highground? But alas it's incompatible with having any opinions about what the future should look like. We need to be able to collectively decide on goals, and then collectively pursue those goals, and unfortunately that means Rules. And as surely as Newton's Laws, no matter how reasonable the rule, always there will be someone to publicly decry it, and someone else to even attack the very concept of having rules. This could very well be The Great Filter. Like yeast in a carboy of wine we will consume all available resources or poison ourselves with our own excrement, unless find a way to act as more than a collection of cells.