I'm a multicultural person. Dual US/EU citizen. I've spent years living in each of the US, South America, the Caribbean and Europe.

Since the mid-2010s, I've been acutely aware of different societal pressures to conform, and I've been "cancelled" by various groups of aquaintences over having opinions or failing to have opinions that the group demanded. Thankfully, I've got a few loyal friends, and a strong sense of self that have allowed me to recover and thrive.

Through it all, one thing I've learned very well is that people in the world have very diverse views and opinions. It's a beautiful thing, and I will never make someone my enemy over their views. I have one moral standard to which I hold myself and others: do no harm. Beyond that, there is room for tolerance and disagreement.

Right, but who determines what's "harmful"? Is it more harmful to punish a child or to not punish him? Is a cartoon of Jesus harmful? Muhammad? Are "micro-agressions" actually traumatic?

Furthermore, what does it mean to "do" something? Is "meat-eating" a default state, or are you actively "doing" harm every day you continue to not be a vegan? Are you "doing" harm if you purchase some sneakers without knowing whether they were produced in a polluting or exploitative manner?

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I'm personally not a moral relativist; I think there are better and worse answers to most of the issues above. But I've just found that short commandments like "do no evil" or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" don't really offer any real guidance when tested against challenging real-world ethical problems.

Well, it's certainly not determined by some objective standard, or a god. Every culture, and even every individual has different moral views. When I say "do no harm" that's a relative statement, relative to the context and parties involved. What's morally apporiate changes depending on the moral contract between parties. I can call my drinking buddy a "fucking idiot" for making a mistake, and there's no harm done. But if I call my grandmother a "fucking idiot", it would harm her a great deal. What's harmful in one context may be fine in another. Morality is like an instinct that humans have evolved to allow us to detect when something may be considered harmful to ourselves, our partners, our community and our planet. It's not always an infallible sense, but it's often pretty good and useful to pay attention to.

Back to your question: who determines what's harmful? Our innate sense of morality has evolved to show us what's harmful and what's not. The more each of us focuses on listening to and improving our own sense of morality and harm, the better we'll be at making decisions that avoid harm as a society and as a species. Ultimately, I'm a humanist, and one of my favorite quotes about morality is GK Chesterton's response when asked to write an article answering the question, "What's wrong with the world?". His response, "Dear sir, I am."

One reason I don't concern myself too much with the morality of others, is that the only person's morality I am responsible for determining is my own.

Who is this "our" and "us" you're referring to if everyone has a different sense of morally? Are you talking about the evolution of a "culture" or of "every individual." If these are all different, why would their "evolutions" have the same goal?

This all seems very empty. What's the difference between what you've said here and "all people have different moral frameworks, and they all follow those" (which I don't think is possible to dispute)?

If you sit around developing elaborate ethical systems as to how to act in every situation, but fail to live that system, then it's ultimately a pointless waste of time. It's better to a decent guy all the time than a hypothetical saint acting like a practical asshole.

Lost a job? Lost housing? Lost income? Were you "cancelled" or did various groups of acquaintances simply decide they didn't enjoy your company and that feeling led to a gradual (or maybe not so gradual) falling away of contact and interaction?

I'm not for one moment suggesting that you should have different opinions. But in general people have both:

   1. opinions
   2. preferences on how and when opinions are expressed
   3. preferences for the company of people who don't violate (2)

I have friends with whom I do not agree on a number of things, but they tend to be things that we don't need to talk about much, if ever. If either of us ever pushed their point in these domains, I suspect we would fairly quickly cease to be friends.

I have some other friends (and even a few family members) where we don't agree, but we do agree about how to disagree, how to debate, how to argue, what kinds of evidential levels for our opinions are required if we are going to disagree, and how we will end discussion. In these cases, (1) is not shared but (2) is, and so these are people whose company I can still actively enjoy.

I don't want to hang out much with people who see the world very differently from me, and more importantly, people whose timing and methods of expressing their opinions are quite different than what I find appropriate. If I'm not friends with these people, I haven't "cancelled" them, we've just followed an entirely natural path towards finding groups of people we can enjoy being with.

That sounds like a perfect way to become a closed-minded bigot, using the original definition of the word.

I have friends and family that see the world quite differently than me. And I still take time to visit them, listen to them, and care for them.

When I was cancelled, I was actively attacked, sometimes literally having my life threatened, lost some jobs and memberships in different organizations. Mostly for failing to be offended by things the group told me I was required to be offended by.

What I choose to read or watch is really completely orthogonal with who I choose to spend time with. I enjoy spending a significant amount of time investigating contrary points of view, and find it very valuable.

That does not mean I wish to spend the time I spend with others hanging out with people who actively hold contrary positions particularly if we do not agree on the terms of discussion. I can be respectful of those people [0], and listen to them, without making the choice to spend (optional) time with them.

If your cancelling really involved those things, then I am sorry that you had to experience this, and am glad that you've found some peace in the aftermath. An awful lot of what is called "cancelling" at the present time does not amount to the things you've described.

[0] EDIT: actually, this is dishonest. If someone does not agree with the same terms of discussion, I find it very hard to actually respect them, even if I can "be respectful" in person.

Let's take a recent article linked on HN, on astral codex by Scott Alexander regarding Ivermectin. If I was to engage in a discussion with someone about Ivermectin, I would more or less insist that we both read this article as a starting point, since it already gathers, critiques and synthesizes almost every study that has been done. If someone wishes to defend the use of Ivermectin in connection with COVID19, then I'd have to insist that they answer the evidence presented in that article that strongly suggests that there is no reason to use it in parts of the world that do not have significant levels of parasitic worm infestation.

Now, perhaps they have some similar "reference" article that they'd insist we also read, and also had some similar basic evidence that they feel I should respond to. That's fine.

But we have to agree that our discussion is going to be evidence based, and that when I bring up evidence that contradicts their stated claims, they need to respond to the evidence by doing more than saying "I don't believe that'. Same in reverse, obviously.

If they can't do that, then sure, I can't respect them. If they can do that, then regardless of where we end up, I'm going to have respect for their position, even if I don't agree with it.

Much of the noise about cancel culture looks a lot like DARVO.

Larry is effectively holding up a mirror to the type of people you describe, and yeah what you say is true about people who complain about cancel culture, too. I try to engage anyone worried about losing a job due to something like that. I'll ask, why don't you organize with your co-workers and collectively bargain for labor protections, or consider voting in politicians who are for stronger labor laws, and all of a sudden they remember that their corporatist leanings are stronger than any feelings they may have about the "cancel culture" boogeyman.

It's plain to see that too much of the discourse about free speech or cancel culture doesn't come from a place of good faith...

It is possible to disagree with your proposed solutions as well as cancel culture. The problem with cancel culture is not in the fact that people are free to (dis)associate with others as they choose, so your suggestions to force association do nothing to fix the core issue. You may be allowed to keep your job, under duress, but you've still been "cancelled". The problem is that some people resort to disassociation rather than practicing tolerance; this is a subtle social problem and requires a more nuanced solution.

If labor laws or a labor contract prevent you from losing your job for tweeting "COVID19 is no worse than having your left foot amputated", then when you do in fact tweet this, and do not lose your job, surely you have neither lost your job, nor been "cancelled".

Maybe I just don't understand what you mean.

In any case—I don't care for cancel culture myself, but I wouldn't risk the far more fundamental freedom of association over it. Social ostracism ("cancelling") is sometimes necessary, but only as a last resort. People need to be shown that there are better ways to resolve disagreements and react to objectionable behavior, past or present, which don't involve rejecting the entire person and all the good things that they've done.

The alternative appears to be "people know what you said, but ignore it." Is that somehow supposed to be better in some way than "people actually have opinions about good and bad, and act on them" ?

This just reminds me of what was supposed to be a funny (if sad) joke by Asheigh Brilliant:

   please don't judge me by what I do, or say, or who I really am.

Implicit in this is the claim that people don't already do this. Implicit in this is the idea that people cannot possibly be already performing this calculus and saying "well, yep, even though Tonya from accounting has done a lot of great things here and has been great to work with, her attitudes and language about <X> overrides all that, and we need to make that clear".

Yes, it's a problem when it's to the point of completely disassociating from you given the opportunity to do so, and the comment was made outside of work, in a completely different forum, and not to them or about them. They're not willing to engage with you and try to change your mind, or even just to continue working with you (without being forced). They're jumping straight to outright ostracism, or as close to it as they can manage. And anyone who doesn't do the same is next in line—guilt by association is a big part of cancel culture. Often it's not about what you did but rather about your failure to publicly condemn and "cancel" someone else for what they did (or perhaps only have been accused of doing).

I'm not saying they should just ignore whatever specific thing it was that gave offense, though sometimes that is the right approach in a professional context. Choosing to working together while ignoring irreconcilable differences is sub-optimal but better than not associating at all. That, however, is something that people should choose for themselves, not something they should be forced into.

> Implicit in this is the claim that people don't already do this.

I'm sure some people do, and if they don't feel that they can continue to associate with someone based on what they've personally done then I support their choice. In the vast majority of cases, however, a more measured response is warranted which doesn't involve burning all bridges and driving the offending party into the outer fringes of society where they are likely to encounter others who were similarly exiled and become ever more entrenched in their positions.

Try to have a debate with them first, if you are met with hostility they aren't your friends, they don't know how to convey their supposed thoughts or even control their emotions. Politely tell them to fuck off and find a better group of more accepting people.

This is just a nice-sounding platitude. What is or isn't harmful is not written in stone. On the contrary, is a hugely polarizing topic that informs the legal system. People get to live or die because of views and opinions.

I disagree that my (largely uninformed) opinions really carry that much weight. If I were a doctor and patients were asking my medical opinion, then it would be extremely immoral to give them a harmful opinion. My opinioms about which politician said something racist or taboo are likely inconsequential. And of course if I did find that my opinion were having harmful consequences, I would change it, because I'm a moral person.

How do you define "harm"? What if one's view(s) prompt them to vote in favor of things (or support policies - take your pick) that bring harm to others?

It's a sort of purely individual definition of freedom in which a free society is one of permanent dissent. Dissent not as a tool to come to consensus but as a way of life and it is fundamentally anti-governmental, it sounds nice but does not work. If everyone assumed this position, the end result is permanent dysfunction.

I can't remember who said it might have been Zizek but he proposed that the proper understanding of democratic freedom is something akin to: "Say your opinion, say it freely, come to a consensus, but then shut up and obey.". That is to say, in any group that wants to function, diversity or dissent is not a permanent state of affairs, at some point when one needs to act options need to be closed off. Abstract freedom is always embedded within social order. You can only freely walk the street because you rely on the fact that everyone else conforms to the rules of traffic.

"Do no harm" sounds nice but it's not sufficient, it may even be wrong because harm cannot be entirely avoided. You cannot navigate the world and act in the world as a group without actively making concrete choices, sometimes to the detriment of individuals. People like Snowden or Ai Weiwei celebrate resistance because permanent resistance is their job. Rebelling is their profession. It's very sympathetic on the surface but it does not address how people ought to organize society.

Where I find a lot of serious conflict and resentment is when it comes to expanding on 'do no harm'. For example, I'm in favor of democratizing corporations, on the German model perhaps, and I view investment capitalism as a decrepit dead-end system, and the financialization of the economy as an unmitigated disaster.

Now, a lot of people I've talked to view these views as 'harmful' indeed. Investment capitalism, they believe, is the greatest engine of economic and social development in human history and any attempt to role it back would destroy the economy and bring mass ruin, poverty, desperation, North Korean dystopia etc.

I usually respond by saying, well, the employees of a corporation should have just as much power over major corporate decisions as the shareholders in the corporation, and capital flows should not be entirely controlled by a few billionaires and their pet political puppets. If the general public believes capital should go to say, renewable energy corporations rather than fossil fuel corporations, there should be a democratic process, well, why not?

So, we then need people to explicitly describe their own personal views on what 'do no harm' means before we can have a discussion in which participants do not view each other as threats to their own survival...

I disagree with you on every single point, but I would still support your right to believe these things and not consider it "harm".

Where we might run into problems lies in how you decide to go about implementing your proposed solution. To me the standard political approach of imposing rules backed up by fines, prison sentences, and capital punishment (beyond the usual proportional, reciprocal responses to others' actions) is harm in and of itself regardless of the intended outcome or "democratic process" and this point is non-negotiable. But if you want to collect together a group of like-minded individuals and create a society to your liking through entirely voluntary arrangements, be my guest.

Also, doesn't it just make sense that the employees of a corporation, the ones doing the work, might have at least as good of, if not a much better idea of, the direction the company should take on certain issues, as compared to the shareholders?

The employees may be "the ones doing the work" but capital investment is key to allowing them to do that work productively. The shareholders provide that capital, which (formally or informally—they're not obligated to provide it in the first place if they don't like the terms) means that they get to decide how it's used. The board is their agent in making these decisions. If they're smart they'll pay attention to what the employees recommend within their area of expertise—but then again "individual contributors" are often more or less ignorant of, or at least less focused on, certain aspects of running a profitable business which are nonetheless essential to remaining in business. To pick one obvious example: If your engineers create something very impressive from a technical point of view, but there isn't a large enough market willing to pay what it would cost to manufacture, then the product will fail. If that happens, the engineers are salaried employees and have already been paid for the work they put in designing the product. They may be looking for new jobs if the company goes under, but the shareholders who fronted the capital for that development hoping for a long-term payoff risk losing their entire investment.

If employees of a publicly traded company want representation on the board they can always buy shares, individually or e.g. via their union if they have one. However, not wanting to take that kind of risk is a big part of why people choose to work as employees of someone else's company rather than being self-employed in the first place. It's safer to take the regular paycheck and invest your savings in a diversified portfolio rather going all-in and investing heavily in your employer.

As shareholders are organized into funds, employees can organize into worker organizations and as with shareholder unions, they then get a voting board member, who could be elected by the workers to represent them on the board.

This results in a power balance between capital and labor (both of which are required for a successful business). Yes, this means higher wages and rights for labor relative to the current situation in the USA, and less dividends for shareholders, but that seems fair doesn't it?

So to become an employee you need to "buy in" to the company? Or is this your sign-on bonus? Can an employee divest themselves of their shares, or are they only a token shareholder with no ability to trade? Do new hires dilute their shares or does the company need to decide the maximum number of employees in advance?

This is an interesting structure but I don't think most employees would care for it very much, since it forces them to be invested in their employer rather than holding a safer diversified portfolio. I would certainly be opposed to requiring this structure as a matter of corporate law—I don't want to be a shareholder in my employer. I have that option already and I choose not to take it. If the company should happen to fail I don't want to lose my job and my life savings simultaneously.

> This results in a power balance between capital and labor (both of which are required for a successful business).

It would certainly change the power balance, by undermining the power of the shareholders to direct their own investments, which hardly seems "fair". I do not see this as an improvement, either as an investor or as an employee. The reason for the former is obvious, but even as an employee I want the shareholders to be free to handle their own domain, which is ensuring that my employer remains a profitable business capable of remaining in business and keeping those steady paychecks coming. People like to complain about undue focus on quarterly gains, but in practice my direct, financial interest in the company, and that of my coworkers, is very short-term; most obligations between us are settled within a few weeks, the longest (like accrued/borrowed paid time off) last a year or less. I can leave at any time and I don't have to worry about finding a willing replacement first. The shareholders, on the other hand, are invested in the long-term success of the company. Even if they don't personally hold the shares for long, they need someone else who believes that the company will be successful to buy their shares. So as an employee who prefers the certainty of a paycheck over the vagaries of investment returns, and would rather not to be looking for new employers on a frequent basis, I am happy to let the shareholders take responsibility for the company's long-term success and reap the corresponding rewards when they make the correct decisions. I do not want to interfere with their decisions, or to empower my coworkers without a shareholder's stake in the company's future to do so.

It's the complete intertwinement of the corporate and political spheres that leads to totalitarian regimes who view their own people as the greatest threat to their continued grasp on power and so institute highly repressive mass surveillance system, mass incarceration of dissidents and so on.

However, there's another aspect to this, in which 'freedom' is not just legal in nature, but economic and physical as well. What does it mean to be 'free' in a company town where the only employers are Amazon and Walmart? What does it mean to be 'free' when energy sources you need for survival are controlled by someone else? The Chinese model seems to be 'we will ensure you have access to food and water and energy and in exchange your total loyalty to the state is required'.

The American model I'm afraid is becoming 'we will ensure you have access to food and water and energy and in exchange your total loyalty to your corporate employer is required.'

The fact that america as a political ideal is not immune to the trend does seem to be a failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers_under_the...

It's public knowledge that there always was been an asterisk on "people" from the very beginning, and who it encompasses is always shifting. A lot of dismay comes from people learning that the government (any arm) of the day doesn't include them in this group[1].

1. "He's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting."

Once again, it’s something America can only be criticized for because the goal is for it to be something different.

It’s fair to criticize America for not living up to its ideals.

It’s intellectually dishonest to imply that the ideals don’t exist.

My entire point was that a lot of disappointment stems from America failing to live up to its ideals[1], and the people who thought they were (or deserve to be) in the in-group, are dismayed to find out they are in the out-group.

1. I'll hasten to add that those ideals are often retconned. "We the people" didn't mean all people (by today's standards). See Dred Scott.

You talk about it being public knowledge that there is an ‘asterisk’ by ‘we the people’, as if slavery was some secret.

Also how does Dred Scott support this innuendo?

There was nothing secret about the ideals, and nothing secret about slavery, and nobody was surprised to find that slaves weren’t considered to be citizens. This discrepancy was a source of some public disagreements.

The retconning is the idea that the ideals were somehow a fraud, rather than an extraordinary step forward at a time that was far more brutal than today, and that people had to work hard to try to establish the ideals as more than just words on paper.

This sentence is logically inconsistent. Slavery was no secret that is why it is public knowledge that people have been treated unequally from the very beginning.

I have been very explicit - no innuendo. The Dred Scott ruling cemented that people like Dred were not considered citizens.

No asterisks. Just a disagreement which was settled by a war.

This brushes over a lot history - there barely was an abolitionist movement when the constitution was written, and you missed the 3/5 compromise (and compromise means there's agreement). "We the people*" was definitely asterisked with "Slaves excluded", and updated a little later - with consent of northern states - to "slaves are 3/5ths people"

Compromise doesn’t mean people ‘agree’ on some truth. You can twist language to make the claim that everyone agreed with slavery, but that is clearly a dishonest claim.

Yes.

However, non-government economical powers are subject to laws created by the government.

Anti-trust laws and anti-monopoly laws in particular were created to address problems where non-government economical powers become too powerful. These laws fall under the Commerce Clause (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause) of the US Constitution.

The law doesn't guarantee that people will be prosperous or happy, only that they will be free from an overly tyrannical government.

If a US citizen feels that a non-government economical power is too powerful, they should work with their elected representatives to make laws to restrain those overly powerful non-government economical powers.

Judging based on the most recent incidence of mass starvation, which model do you think worked better? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

> The removal of the limits to agricultural growth and China’s industrialization came in the immediate aftermath of US President Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China. The first commercial deal signed immediately after the visit was China’s order for thirteen of the world’s largest synthetic ammonia complexes for producing nitrogen-based chemical fertilizer. China purchased additional plants in the 1970s, developed its own capacity to build chemical fertilizer plants in the 1980s, became more or less self-sufficient in the 1990s, and began exporting chemical fertilizer by the turn of the new millennium.

[1] https://chinadialogue.net/en/food/9279-modern-china-s-agricu...

Now is a rigidly authoritarian state necessary for this kind of technological development? Err... no.

But in the end we all win, for each unit of freedom we give away (or invest), we get more back (ideally).

So is equilibrium the right word? Or maybe we are talking about different things. I don't know, I'm not making a statement or counter-argument here, just thinking out loud.

There are definitely attempts in the world to restrict freedom not in the word of efficiency, but control and power. The line between the two can be blurry.

Seems like you are describing freedom from consequences, not the ability to make choices, because that's available now and to the barbarian. I'm not sure which society has no consequences.

By that logic, there is no such thing as restriction of freedom, as it assumes even someone's ability to jail you does not restrict your freedom in any way. People in jail are free as a corollary. How is this not absurd? It only makes sense if you hate freedom and want to argue against it to people low on rhetoric.

* Freedom is the limitation of choice.

My counter-argument is this:

Limitations on choice through potential consequences are ultimately self-imposed. To have any effect, they require me to refuse to consider the possibility of the alternative. To the extent they limit my action, it is through my choice, possibly implicit, to let them limit my actions. The option of making the choice never goes away no matter how grievous the potential consequence.

Since this is in a discussion around a post by Snowden, we can take him as an example. He did something that, according to this theory of freedom, is impossible. He wasn't free to do it, his choice was limited by potential punishment. Yet he did, the possibility of making the supposedly impossible choice was still there.

Consider a hypothetical man who has lived isolated indoors all life playing video games, never gone to school, never watched TV, nobody told him about any consequences. One day at the age of 25 he finally discovers a door to the outside and goes through and thinks "oh man, this is like GTA!" and goes around punching the elderly, stealing things, breaking all manner of laws as he has been taught is how you get points. Eventually the strange man is caught and sent to prison, but until that point, was he more free than we are? He was subject to the same laws and social consequences as we are, but they weren't able to limit his choices because of his ignorance. Clearly it can't be the laws themselves that limit choices if this is the case.

It appears to me there is something strange about the given definition of freedom. It lends itself to producing paradoxes, where people who aren't free are capable of being simultaneously free, and the same sources of limitation successfully limit some people but not others based on what attitude they have toward them. This type of contradiction usually means a definition is incomplete.

Assuming you meant the literal opposite, I can agree there's a bit of nuance but it's true in the "spirit of the law" sense. I really don't understand why you're still trying to take it so literally.

>This type of contradiction usually means a definition is incomplete

Words aren't perfect nor immutable, no definition is complete, but it's relatively easy to see what it's trying to say. It does not follow an absolute implication that punishment is not a restriction of freedom. There are less ambiguous definitions but this one is acceptable and beautifully simple.

If it were code it'd be a single-liner that works for 99.9% of users. But the "best" implementation works for 99.91%, is slow, 200 lines, no one understands and inexplicably broke for someone.

I don't think the poetic appeal of the definition is useful if the definition itself lends itself to contradictions.

Okay so I am in prison. Am I still totally free in that moment?

The question isn't whether we are free under all circumstances, but whether we are free now.

I think it more often means "permissible" or "practical".

Not really that different to today, except that it's a circle of elders and their lead is codified in laws.

But breaking these laws will still get you "banished" aka deported if you are not a citizen, and if you are citizen you will face consequences for your noncompliance, which in some places can still reach all the way up to the death sentence.

So in a way it's still all just barbaric societies, but with extra steps.

You've got it. Proper civilization and a free society are still a long way off. Laws and democracy limit the variance (good and bad) but don't automatically create a better outcome. We still need people to make the right decisions. And these systems of law and democracy which serve mainly to promote stability introduce their own problems by encouraging people to confuse "legal" or "popular" with "right", and "illegal" or "unpopular" with "wrong".

Would appreciate your thoughts

EDIT: in any case, beyond a fairly low minimum, freedom is usually not so much about raw number of choices as it is about relative number of choices, comparing what options others have access to and what options do we have access to. So I think we should focus and work more towards "healthy freedom ranges" and freedom equality and coverage (not leaving some people out) than pretending that any single change increases or reduces our freedom in a dramatic fixed amount. To me, the freedom scale is clearly not linear. (Now I'm not even so sure "freedom" is the right word to focus on. It's more about "unobstructed human potential" than about "possibilities" to me.)

As surveillance gets easier, we need to choose having crime for the sake of privacy. As the manufacture of dangerous materials and weapons gets easier, we need to choose between living in a more dangerous world, or slowing human progress.

Not every culture has the same risk tolerance. Not every time period has the same risks.

I'm not saying decentralizing more is gonna give you more freedom, more like a different take. I think your point is still valid, there has to be an equilibrium and I just don't know where it lays.

The idea that we would have to revert to independent bands of hunter-gatherers to achieve freedom acts as a mental block. This is not to say that this movement away from freedom is completely ahistorical but that cultural attitudes about power have been much more dynamic, flexible, and even seasonal than the kind of linear movement toward inevitable constraints that might fit into the theory. By examining the many different types of arrengements people have instituted, we might learn new ways of organizing ourselves. There are plenty of opportunities to do so in the world today.

A lot of canals and turnpikes were also built by the government--the Erie Canal and the National Road being preeminent examples. Contemporary railroads, such as the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad were usually private. Land grants for railroads were largely limited to the western railroads and for a surprisingly short period of time--only about 1850-1871 were major land grants being used for railroads.

Overall, railroads got roughly the same amount of government support as did canals and roads, maybe even somewhat less. Although this should generally be understood as all infrastructure more or less requiring generous amounts of government support.

What are you talking about? Snowden is talking about the Freedom of the mind.

There's also an important difference between negative and positive rights/freedoms.

I notice that this discussion nests inside moral philosophy. We need to grapple with the tools and constructs in that discipline when thinking about freedom.

I think it’s more to do with how interconnected we all are now. A few centuries ago the ripple effects of your decision might impact a hundred people. Now it might reach thousands. Or more.

What does this mean? As in your freedom to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose? Or something else?

The mistake people make when acknowledging that a freedom/collectivism equilibrium exists is to assume that freedom/collectivism changes are also in some sort of balance.

The reality is that collectivism is like the dark side of the Force. It's powerful. Seductive. Once you go down the path of embracing collectivism, it's extraordinarily difficult to turn back. Sounds dramatic, I know. But collective state action is a slippery slope. It's really easy to say, "everyone should do X" and in a democratic society, all you need is a slim majority to make X a law. But X isn't always enacted properly. The unforeseen consequences of X are often really unpleasant. But rolling back X is always harder than putting it in place.

You have to remember that every time you hand over a problem X to people in government, X gives them more power. Power is almost never relinquished willingly by the powerful.

When I was young, I felt every bite at my freedom deeply. Having a job, a schedule, responsibilities. Each one was deleterious to my freedom in a way that, as a young man, I was unequipped to handle.

I've learned at some point in the last few years that we trade in our freedoms every day of our lives. If you have a driver's license or pasteurized milk in your refrigerator, you have traded in some way in your freedom.

What I see today is a contingent of people who don't value their freedom at all. They have no spiritual relationship with their existence as an individual - their identity is predicated on their characteristics and not their innate uniqueness.

Down that road is every manner of tyranny.

> What I see today is a contingent of people who don't value their freedom at all. They have no spiritual relationship with their existence as an individual - their identity is predicated on their characteristics and not their innate uniqueness.

Is it possible there is some "hierarchy of needs" for freedom and that "characteristic freedom" must be achieved before "uniqueness freedom" can be achieved? Said another way, maybe these people actually can't feel innately free until they feel their characteristics are accepted as part of free society.

I think that our anxiety is normal, it is biological, and it is inevitable. We are not that much more evolved than we were 20,000 years ago, but the things we worried about then are almost trivial now, and the ways in which we managed those anxieties are ineffective against the anxieties of the day. You can't run away from global warming, the surveillance state, or our increasingly rewarding but terrifying relationship with our world.

We need a new spirituality to combat this anxiety - it wont go away on its own. We need mnemonics that placate the animalistic parts of our brain that are appropriate for our times, and we need to be able to identify when our anxieties are being preyed on by others.

Freedom exists in the mind. Even the most oppressed enslaved people can still be free in their own head.

On the other hand, I use some proprietary non-free software, so I've traded my freedom to use certain technology, but other than that, I consider myself as always being free no matter what the circumstances. All the old sages have said something similar: 'You are enslaved the moment you think you are'

- The first person lives in a prosperous and authoritarian state. They have high positive freedoms (access to resources, healthcare, etc, thanks to the bounties of their society) but low negative freedoms (no freedom of speech/thought, low freedom of movement, surveillance, etc).

- The second person is a survivalist nomad. They have access to very little resources, but otherwise have no external authority that is constraining them in a negative sense.

So I think there's orthogonal variables here, and each of them could rightly be considered to be "freedom" as it's often defined by different people.

Sometimes, I think that western people are so constrained by some limits in their heads. Like "freedom" is a freedom to choose Pepsi or Cola. I want neither. Or I want tea. Or the drink that is traditional for my culture.

But most of the time I communicate with americans, for example, I becoming convinced that freedom for them is more like: "Everybody drinks Cola and can freely visit Disneyland".

They're so immersed in their heads with the notion that they're in some kind God-chosen people, that they refuse the right of any nation to live by their own rules.

It's hard to convey this thought to me, especially in English. It would be too hard for americans to get it (if someone thinks our american junk food, junk Cola and junk democracy isn't good, they must be madmen and/or China/Russia/Iran spies!).

One tiny example of this. Several years ago while I was still reading reddit, in /r/Cambodia there was a post from american that said something like:

"I came to Cambodia several days ago and I'm impressed that you have neutral attitude to gays. But I don't understand why you don't promote LGBT everywhere. You should have LGBT parades and LGBT signs everywhere!"

I don't remember exact words, nor am I willing to find this exact post on the overloaded site of reddit. It was a shock to me that he arrived just a few days ago and already suggests that people that belong to a culture that is several times older than his, that they should live by his own weird rules.

And it's only one tiny example. Everyone should have McDonalds, even on Mt. Everest. Everyone must drink Coca Cola even in the remote Chinese village. Everyone must have not have their own opinion, but conform to the opinion of the "God-chosen nation".

The things you mention people valuing are very counterproductive, and I think that most people in the USA have become aware of that, even if we live in a culture that's full of advertising. I think that in every country, there's an accepted level of surface-level deception that's tolerated publicly but privately criticized. Of course, these days people often publish their private criticisms, so the lines between public and private behavior are blurring.

This is a needless point - there is nothing in OP that would extend to whatever choice you have. You aren't supposed to fixate on the particulars of an example or metaphor, but abstract from it the point being made - which is the suitable abstract "change in a system" - any system, any change.

It feels like you taken this particular choice of example to dunk on Americans in particular.

> that they should live by his own weird rules

What "weird" rules? Parades and signs in particular, or the promotion of LGBT?

If the latter, why is this weird? It's hardly the same as your strawman-examples of promoting junk food and sugary beverages.

> Everyone should have McDonalds, even on Mt. Everest. Everyone must drink Coca Cola

says who?

It’s on YouTube somewhere.

1) Your degree of freedom is strictly a relationship between you and those who are able to legitimately use violence against you. Legitimate here meaning you have no means of recourse besides violence of your own.

2) How free you are is then expressed as a graph of all possible actions you may take which are not prohibited by the threat of legitimate violence (often expressed as "law").

3) Then a "free and equal society" is one the total size of the graph is optimized for. This mandates laws which delegitimize violence except where strictly necessary to enforce said delegitimization.

4) The only addition that is typically made in large, agrarian societies is the legitimization of the private ownership and transfer of property. Thus we have "free, equal and orderly" societies.

These lead us to the usual functions of the military (to protect from external violence), the police (to protect from domestic violence), and the courts (to resolve disputes, usually over property, which would otherwise turn violent). From there, any encroachment of the state (such as mandating participation in various insurance schemes) into the graph of its citizens would be strictly perceived as a curtailing of freedom.

It's important to note that these terms necessarily exclude material circumstance from their definition. They also define violence in the strict sense of physical force. You are not less free because you may be sick or poor, since these are not interactions with people who may use legitimate violence.

I strongly disagree with this. "Strictly?" Oh my, no. There's so much more that goes into one's practical ability to exercise freedom. It's why a rich person—even if they were treated identically by the state—is far freer than a poor person. It's why removing hypothetical but mostly useless freedoms (say, the "freedom" to choose my health insurer) can in some cases truly increase how free I actually am (no longer have to spend all that time screwing around with health insurers; no longer as dependent on employment for healthcare, et c).

> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights

One of us should in good faith acquiesce from the term, to avoid overloading it, no? I propose that the existing definition remain, and the practical ability to do stuff be given a new one, say "capability". In other words, the incapable are just as free as the capable.

This moves the conversation forward, because the next question is how do we know your vision of good is the right one, worthy of the requisite sacrifice of our liberty? Is it really worthwhile to enslave the competent and the fortunate in order to maintain the incapable and unfortunate?

You are not the arbiter of this, however much you insist on it, and all four relevant definitions in Webster's 1913—a great source if you're looking for conservative and time-tested definitions of US English usage—disagree with you, if we're really going to quibble over that. "Liberty" is, as in your quoted translation from the French, much closer, but you are still insisting on a much narrower interpretation than is common. You're also reading your source as an exclusive definition, when it doesn't, per se, claim anything of the sort. You're using it in a jargony sense from a particular political philosophy—the promoters of which find their job much easier when they get to define words in particular, not-quite-normal ways, then use those convenient definitions as a sandy foundation for various shaky logical towers—which does not mean the general definition must conform to yours.

> This moves the conversation forward, because the next question is how do we know your vision of good is the right one, worthy of the requisite sacrifice to our liberty? Is it really worthwhile to enslave the competent and the fortunate in order to maintain the incapable and unfortunate?

It's tough and messy and absolutely ends up being largely arbitrary, because moral and political philosophy aren't math and never will be. We don't "know". We can't. Trying to "know" will quickly send you into "not even wrong" territory.

> (ie. enslave us)

> Is it really worthwhile to enslave the competent and the fortunate in order to maintain the incapable and unfortunate?

LOL, OK. I've glanced at your post history. This ain't going anywhere productive. Hope you find your way out of this some day. Doesn't look like any previous posters have done any good no matter how gentle (or harsh) they've been, so I'll leave off there.

This is precisely why no one has the right to force their vision of the good on others. Doing so is indistinguishable from tyranny.

If you can tell my why people are owed the cooperation of others I'm glad to change my mind. But kindly don't patronize me.

Also, you relegate "private ownership and transfer of property" to a minor and seemingly optional footnote while this is a necessary aspect of the definition of "violence". (Is theft not violence? If your answer is "no", how about starving someone by stealing all their food, or the land and capital equipment they need to grow it? Or the barter goods or money they needed to purchase it? Etc., etc.)

The problems with "the usual functions" (and the key difference between minarchists and anarchists such as myself) are: (a) These things can be, and have been at various times, provided privately without initiating violence, so it is not necessary to curtail freedom for them. (b) It's not enough to say "a military is necessary to reduce violence, and this falls under the heading of 'military', and thus is allowed". To justify it on the basis of minimizing overall violence this military must never employ more violence than necessary, or more than it demonstrably curtails elsewhere, including in its funding process or in enforcing any rules it imposes. The same goes for the police and the courts. The courts have the easiest path; they're not that far removed from private arbitration. The military is the hardest to justify, particularly a standing army in a country like the U.S. with only two neighbors sharing land borders or even on the same continent—both of whom are considered allies.

> How free you are is then expressed as a graph of all possible actions you may take which are not prohibited by the threat of legitimate violence

It's a good point to think in terms of possible actions you may take. But violence isn't the only thing that can prune that graph.

Say I come across an orchard surrounded by an [unclimbable] fence. I want to eat some fruit in the orchard, but cannot because of the fence. There is no violence I face that prevents my action, and no violence I can level to take the action. Yet my action is prohibited by another, and thus my freedom limited.

Who erected the barrier is not relevant here. What if the barrier was a circumstance of nature? An orchard on a plateau surrounded by unclimbable cliffs?

- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

An orchard atop a cliff presents an equal challenge to all. Some might have the ability and desire to scale it, some not.

What is the difference between a fence around an orchard and a threat of insurmountable violence if you enter the orchard? Either way it is someone else restricting your freedom, while they retain that same freedom for themselves.

The three major questions are, what do you mean by "violence" (which you have answered), and what do you mean by "legitimate", and what do you mean by "freedom"?

What if, say, your employer in cooperation with others were to blackball you so that the only employment you could get were as an unskilled laborer? That clearly wouldn't be violence. Would it restrict your freedom? Apparently not?

How about if a group of people arrange to ensure that you can only live in a certain area, purely by economic means? No violence, right? Legitimate? Are you less free? No?

Suppose you live in a society that makes collective decisions by voting. But, you are not allowed to participate in those votes, by virtue of material circumstance, say. Still no violence. Still no less free, right?

What about violence? Can I burn down your house if you don't do what I want? If I make sure no one is injured? Material circumstances are excluded, right?

Now, what makes violence legitimate versus illegitimate? If a group of people kill one of your neighbors for violating some extra-legal rule, that would clearly be a crime, right? But what if the people doing it cannot be identified? Or, if identified, arrested, and prosecuted, they are found to be not guilty. Repeatedly. Clearly, you would feel some pressure to follow said rule although that would not be a restriction on your freedom, right?

Is chattel slavery an imposition on the freedom of the slave, if physical violence is not used?

I suggest that your definition of "freedom" is very far off from the normal, colloquial definition ("the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint" according to the Goog')---there are plenty of restraints on your power to act and speak that do not involve violence. (Thinking? We're working on that.)

You mention insurance schemes, which is always a fun topic because I'm old and can remember when requiring liability insurance for drivers was controversial. Is it legitimate for anyone, especially the state, to force you to be financially responsible for your actions? Would that be a restriction on your freedom? Absolutely! Would it be a legitimate (oooh, there's that word) restriction?

So yes, if your entire town decides to blackball you, that is an exercise of their freedom. If people decide not to sell you their property, that is likewise their choice. You are just as free as you have always been, no one is using force against you. They are simply refusing to cooperate with you.

In what world does forcing a person to employ another not an impingement of their freedom? Anyone who can use the threat of violence to compel participation is a master, and free people have no masters.

> Suppose you live in a society that makes collective decisions by voting

As long as these decisions cannot be enforced with physical violence then you are no less free by being excluded. Say I run a supper club which votes on where to eat next, are you less free by not being invited?

> If a group of people kill one of your neighbors for violating some extra-legal rule...

This entire paragraph describes corruption, which is inevitable, and does impact your freedom. No human process is immune.

> Is chattel slavery an imposition on the freedom of the slave, if physical violence is not used?

Chattel slavery is defined by the use of violence to confine the slave literally in chains. If the slave can just leave he's not very enslaved is he?

> there are plenty of restraints on your power to act and speak that do not involve violence

Most of these take the form of the threat of withholding cooperation. This is a perfectly legitimate threat to make in a free society, and one I contend has no bearing on your liberty. Living in a free society is merely agreeing to coexist peacefully, not that everyone must cooperate, or be the same team, or be immune from the consequences of failure. In fact, my reading of the article is that it means exactly the opposite - that people are free to cooperate or not as they see fit.

I notice that you ignored the common definition of freedom I quoted. I find your definition of freedom...less than useful. It ignores any other sources of power than "the state" (I wonder how you would deal with the absence of a state.) It leads to irrational consequences; an individual can be perfectly free and yet unable to do anything except starve.

I do have a couple of questions about your response, though.

"> If a group of people kill one of your neighbors for violating some extra-legal rule...

"This entire paragraph describes corruption, which is inevitable, and does impact your freedom. No human process is immune."

Corruption, in this case, does not imply any violence at all---a jury is free to return a verdict of not guilty for any reason, no? How can that possibly impact your freedom?

"Chattel slavery is defined by the use of violence to confine the slave literally in chains. If the slave can just leave he's not very enslaved is he?"

(It's not really defined by violence, but I'll leave that up to you.) My plantation is located in the middle of the desert. You are free to leave at any time. You won't, because you would die, but you are free to do so. So you're really free, right?

Perhaps the grand theorem of freedom would state that freedom in the Universe is constant.

In the former, refusal to work for the masters led to beatings, torture, mutilitaion and death. In the later, refusal to work for the bosses led to homelessness and hunger and death.

Now, one could argue that the coal company town was 'more free' than the cotton plantation, I suppose.

Ultimately freedom requires the dismantling and weakening of hierarchical social power structures. Let's say the people in that coal company town were the ones who elected their bosses, rather than some remote collection of wealthy shareholders.

Wouldn't that be even more free? Democratization of corporations seems like going in the direction of freedom. Germany is ahead in this, as corporate boards in Germany include employee representatives, not just shareholder representatives.

Yes! Crucially because its residents were free to leave. Doing something unpleasant or dangerous due to economic necessity is vastly different than doing it in chains.

You're assuming the Appalachian coal company residents had no other options when clearly they did, as evidenced by the patterns of migration to and from these towns. Working in a coal mine was just their preferred choice, given the alternatives available. Many of these men took pride in their work.

Freedom is a direction, it's a good quote.

Some things can't be "solved", you constantly have to do the work. Democracy, relationships, tolerance, etc and I guess freedom, but that's similar to democracy.

There's no end goal to them. You can lose them if you don't work at preserving them.

its a fight against entropy, same as road repairs.

its not that I don't want big sweeping reforms, but I believe in gradient descent. all good progress is good progress. like the UK restricting conversion therapy. I want it gone, but this is still an improvement.

So now that Im a permanent resident in Hong Kong, joking with everyone next step is Chinese citizenship, I'm a bit at a loss when it comes to freedom. Not corruption, efficiency, representativity, predictable justice or even fairness, where clearly I cant argue against France and for China/HK. But just freedom itself, I feel it goes so much beyond the ability to vote and complain publicly. I cant define it just like you, but when I look around me in the middle of a street in Hong Kong, even now, I feel so much freer that in Paris... it's weird.

This is because people look at it from the FREEDOM TO perspective rather than the more valid FREEDOM FROM perspective.

Amen brother.

I realized that National Security is all about US Gov security & US Gov partner's security & major campaign donor security and that's about it.

Regarding Edward's article and his connection to Ai's book, I think I could understand it from memory of reading culture revolution books. They are all about human nature and individual struggles, very little is about actually political stances. It often portraits intellectuals against village fools (mob riding the revolution waves to obtain power over everyone), their realisation of life and coming of age (since protagonists are often from privileged background and aristocrat families who have leftist values, or rather, called rightists in China). The value clash between total opposite sides, tribal, village, modern, metropolitan, aspiration, destination, mundane, soul crashing... It resonates with ordinary people because it's picturing societal and individual psychologies. This is my naive take.

It seems to me we are good at identifying the negative trend but aren't actually acting on them. Or am I just missing the obvious?

FWIW, this seems to be a common thread in many countries apart from China and the US. “Sedition”, for example, has become the stick to use for any kind of dissent uttered in India over the last few years (a lot more so compared to before).

> rather, it is my belief that market forces, democratic decline, and a toxic obsession with “national security”—a euphemism for state supremacy—are drawing the US and China to meet in the middle: a common extreme. A consensus-challenging internet is perceived by both governments as a threat to central authority, and the pervasive surveillance and speech restrictions they’ve begun to mutually embrace will produce an authoritarian center of gravity that over time will compress every aspect of individual and national political differences until little distance remains.

Again, please add India to this list. It would take a lot to detail out how things are in the country. So let me share one recent set of incidents in a major city (where Google has its largest offices). Police, without the backing of any law or specific authorization, were stopping people on the streets and asking them to unlock their phones and show their WhatsApp chats so that the police could read and see if the person was involved in transacting ganja (marijuana/weed).

But such things go on without the courts batting an eye or punishing the abuse of power with serious consequences.

I’ve kinda lost faith in democracies and the claims of checks and balances with the executive, legislature and judiciary. Power corrupts all of them equally, and they all side with each other rather than with the people who they took an oath to serve.

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters." - Winston Churchill, 1947

[https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1947/nov/...]

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."'

>society moves forward freedom continues to grow

That's a big claim to say we have more freedoms now. We're encumbered by far more laws now than almost any time in history and watched by more authorities than anyone in history who have access to far more systems to know who you are, when you are, etc. Those same authorities also have more power than ever to execute those powers for "justice" and more power than ever to catch you. But hey, at least you have material freedoms, now you can choose Coke or Pepsi and forget about the other freedoms closing in around you.

This is why both parties are so bizarrely hostile to Section 230.

The only way to not have freedom is for others to remove it from you by force or threat of it. The threat of it is what causes us to self limit our own freedoms. (sometimes for a greater good, sometimes not)

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29247018

The way Edward Snowden weaves Ai Wei-Wei's account of his journey through the Cultural Revolution (1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246165/1000-years-o...) and his own is great:

From the time I began studying China’s quest to intermediate the information space of its domestic internet, as part of my classified work at the NSA, I’d experience an unpleasant spinal tingle whenever I came across a new report indicating that the United States government, was, piece by piece, building out a similar technological and political infrastructure, using similar the justifications of countering terrorism, misinformation, sedition, and subjective “social harms.” I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying “East” and “West” were, or are, the same; rather, it is my belief that market forces, democratic decline, and a toxic obsession with “national security”—a euphemism for state supremacy—are drawing the US and China to meet in the middle: a common extreme. A consensus-challenging internet is perceived by both governments as a threat to central authority, and the pervasive surveillance and speech restrictions they’ve begun to mutually embrace will produce an authoritarian center of gravity that over time will compress every aspect of individual and national political differences until little distance remains.

Uh-huh. I can only assume this refers to the so-called "cancel-culture" which probably doesn't exist (I am not claiming that there aren't "cancellation" incidents, but for this to exist as a "culture" or a trend, it needs to be shown that fewer people today can express and publicly disseminate fewer opinions than in the past; this is probably the very opposite of reality).

Freedom is almost self-contradictory. A person living alone in the world can be free, but two cannot. Either they have the freedom to curtail the other's freedom, or they do not. Either way, someone here is not fully free. So whenever people speak of more freedom, the question is, more freedom for whom and at the expense of whom. Like anything political, freedom is a resource that needs to be allocated among people, and there are valid debates over how. But within reasonable circumstances, there is no one direction toward freedom, but many directions, each giving more freedom to some and less to others.

I mean, even a person living alone in the world would lack the "freedom to curtail another's freedom" in that sense. Furthermore, he would still be bound to the laws of physics, for example, and would never achieve your definition of freedom. I think the freedom the author is discussing is something deeper than "capability to do x", more like the specific liberty of being heterogenous to the culture you live in (hence his lionizing of tolerance).

I think you're absolutely right that there is a scarcity of this freedom that is precipitated by a scarcity of resources, as in your example. I think history has proven that it's not a zero-sum game, however, and that certain cultures have managed to produce a higher degree of this "freedom" than others. A culture that values and protects open scientific inquiry, for example, would perhaps discover advancements that reduced the aforementioned scarcity of resources which should have the effect of increasing the freedom that was previously diminished.

Perhaps why freedom should not be regarded as a goal is because, as you have pointed out, it cannot be absolutely attained, neither by an individual or much less a plurality of them. To instead orient a culture in the direction of increased freedom seems more achievable and fruitful.

This only applies at the very boundary of freedom. I would argue we are not frequently at that boundary - often freedom is curtailed for reasons other than preserving the freedom of others.

A silly example: Suppose the government outlawed wearing red shirts. Regaining that freedom would not impede the freedom of others in any way.

A real life example: It is illegal for me to buy raw milk from my local farmer. Allowing two consenting adults to make a transaction would not affect anyone else's freedom.

You can view laws on a spectrum from "strictly exists to protect other's freedoms" on the left to "strictly exists to curtail individual freedom" on the right. I would argue that making raw milk illegal is a law on the far right side of that spectrum. It is up for debate where current political issues fall on that spectrum. Gun control advocates say that the existence of easy access to guns restricts their freedoms, and so put gun control laws on the left side of the spectrum. Gun rights advocates disagree, and put gun control on the right side of the spectrum.

Regardless, nobody would argue that all current laws are at the far left. If we wanted to maximize freedom as a society, we have some easy gains before we have to start worrying balancing the conflicting freedoms of others. The problem is that most people don't want to maximize freedom - they want just enough freedom to do what they want to do, but enough regulation to stop others from doing things they don't like.

I haven't researched raw milk and I have no idea how dangerous or safe it may be, but the motivation is to prevent sale of [dangerous thing] to people who may not be aware of the dangers of [dangerous thing]. To use another silly example, let's say there's an entrepreneur who sells a toxic mixture of chemicals as a "health drink"; you could argue about whether that should be legal or illegal, but I don't think anyone would say it's a no-brainer that a law prohibiting the sale of that health drink exists on the right, strictly-exists-to-curtail-individual-freedom side of of your spectrum.

To your point, I can think of a few laws that do belong on the right, "I just don't like it so it should be banned" side of that spectrum, and things that come primarily to mind are puritanical laws banning transactional sex, consumption of certain media, prohibition of selling alcohol on Sundays (which is a religious, not health, concern), decency laws; things like that. I don't think FDA regulations belong in this category.

If I understand your double negative correctly, then I am nobody. A law like that does strictly restrict freedom - it makes it illegal to do something which does does not itself restrict other's freedoms. It trades freedom for safety, instead of balancing the freedoms of different individuals.

Whether such a law is good or bad is besides the point - such a law would strictly reduce freedom.

You're changing the framing from "strictly exists to curtail individual freedom" to "strictly reduces freedom", which are two different things. The first means the intent of the law is to reduce freedom for the sake of reducing freedom, and the second means it's a strictly enforced law. Those aren't the same, but from what I can understand of your argument it seems like you're saying the reason for rules preventing sale of toxic chemicals is strictly to curtail individual freedom? Do I have that right?

Second, if I understand you correctly, not only would you be ok with a company selling a mixture of toxic chemicals labeled as a health drink, but you think it's a no-brainer that they should be allowed to do so? Lead-based paint, asbestos insulation, salmonella-laced produce; the company is free to make them, and the consumer is free to choose to buy them, so what's the problem? Do I have it right?

I can't get my head around that, if that is what you're saying, so I guess the no-brainer is me.

No, it does not. It just asks whether the second person has the freedom to do something that will restrict the first's freedom. Either way, the two are no longer fully free. My point is that the very nature of freedom requires allocating and restricting it in certain ways. There is no such thing as not restricting anyone's freedom.

This seems to say that the opposite of freedom is impact. That is, freedom is lost when one person impacts another. I feel restraint is a more effective antonym.

"with freedom comes responsibility" (Eleanor Roosevelt's context was different, but the phrase is important)