Rico Penguin

  It is often the belief by people that freedom is the greatest of all life’s gifts. An inalienable right that all men (well humans) are born with, or something deep and inspirational like that. I’m here to argue however that it is relatively weak on the value scale in life.

  The inspiration for this article comes from a short story today begins as many bad jokes do:

“Mother Theresa walks into the White House to speak with Ronald Reagan. When they meet she scolds him greatly pointing out the fact that the US is the richest country in the world and yet it has poor people. To this Reagan responds that “They may be poor but they are free.” to which Theresa (apparently) responded “That is bullshit. The free that are hungry desire food, not freedom. The homeless that are hungry desire housing, not freedom. The poor that are free desire aid, not freedom. Freedom is only important to those that have all that the less fortunate do not.”

  Now I’m sure I embellished a bit but the basic point is the same. When you ask a starving man on the street what he wants most of all, you are more than likely not to hear “freedom”. Which comes back to a term that was introduced to me in the “Theory of Justice” course at Western Washington. Based on a book by a man named “John Rawls”, he introduces the concept of “Primary Goods”.

  There are certain goods that no person should be without, those things are called “Primary Goods”. I don’t recall what his were but by personal opinion mine would be, food, health, education, and shelter. Now you might think that at least one of these things are superfluous but allow me to explain.

  All humans (in fact all living organisms) require food (I include any nourishing material under the tag of food) to survive. Few things that are readily and consistently available will kill you faster than being without food.

  The next important factor is Health, now you can easily place shelter under the blanket of Health and I would be willing to accept that. Without a proper and universal healthcare system you aid in the spread of disease and birth defects. Neither of which is a positive addition to any living thing. Likewise over a billion dollars a year is lost in reduced man hours because of injury and illness. In most studies that I’ve seen the introduction of a diverse and available healthcare system results in a net gain of revenue for the country involved.

  Education comes in third but it is hardly unimportant. A good education is critical to the furthering of a species…period. If we do not work very hard to create a proper, comprehensive, and efficient education system we essentially are preparing our own demise. Let me drop some information on you for instance in the US:

33% of people don’t know the 3 branches of government
75% of people knew at least 1 of the AI judges…
50% of the US States don’t require Civics and Government to graduate.

    Now let me reiterate the depressing information above. It’s not that 33% of US citizens do not know what the 3 branches do it is that they don’t know what they are period. Our country is actively creating less and less competent people and this is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. Even college is nothing more than job training, people in large do not go to college to educate themselves.

  The final factor in furthering humanity is shelter. Proper sheltering helps quell many diseases and it reduces overall health issues related to temperature and environment (that are not disease related like hypothermia). It’s relatively obvious so I don’t feel that it requires any further explanation feel free to comment if you disagree.

  Once you have fulfilled all of the primary goods, that is when freedom starts being the most important thing to deal with. Because until that happens, the only people who value freedom, are those that have the primary goods. Likewise the people who have lived their entire life with these goods will never appreciate them or appreciate just how horrible the life of a person who is without them is. Freedom feeds no-one, freedom heals no disease, freedom houses no people, and freedom educates no-one. What freedom does is allow these things to be freely dispersed and the problem is that freedom is not used in such a way. For that reason, Freedom is worthless.

  I can see no positive gain from ‘for-profit’ versions of any primary goods and the mere act of doing these things solely for profit is a slap in the face to all living people (regardless of whether or not they are within your domain). The moment people stop attributing an intrinsic (and dominating) value to Freedom and begin working on the truly valuable goods is the moment that I feel that the US will truly be a country to admire.

  A person can bash these sort of beliefs all they want, but considering the following information:

The top 10 "happiest" countries:
1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada

The U.S. ended up on the 23rd place, the UK on 41, China is 82, Japan 90, and India an unhappy 125.

   These sort of studies are done all the time, and you can almost always correlate the ease of acquiring the primary goods in the nations with their ranking on the happiness scale. There are always special exceptions, however the overall pattern is difficult to overlook. Well…apparently not all that difficult considering the garbage I’ve been reading and witnessing on the topic of healthcare and education.

  A small clarification that is a common retort to this is: “What about countries under Tyranny they want freedom.” I would point people back to the paragraph just above the list of countries. When people desire freedom, they want it for the things it is supposed to aid and enhance. You’ll also find that some of the most unhappy places in the world not only do not have any freedoms, they have no primary goods as well.

  I’ve been thinking about the glaring flaws in my original Freedometer and the fact that it didn’t express my point correctly. So without further adieu this is the new and approved Freedometer:

The Freedometer 2.0

  The way this works is that you have a binary situation, there are only two likely outcomes to be had. Now I understand that this is an unlikely situation and possibly impossible, but this diagram was made to explain the simplest situation so as to help people understand more complex ones. You would have a bar on top of this circle the length of its diameter and pinned at the center so that it can spin. Ideally you would turn it clockwise, the left hand side of the bar would show you the % likelihood that option 1 (or A what have you) would be chosen and the right hand side of the bar would instantly show you the % likelihood that option 2 (or B) would be chosen.

  Now this is grossly oversimplified and I believe it is easily argued that my ‘red zone’ is too large. However again this is for the concept and not necessarily precise. Lets look at example one for a little bit of guidance.

Example 1 (Option 1 20%/Option 2 80%)

  What this example shows is the bar moved so that you have an 80% likelihood of choosing outcome 2 and you have only a 20% likelihood of choosing outcome one. If I was good with gradients I’d have a third zone “yellow” that would probably span 89% to 71% and 11% to 29% respectively as a “zone for debate” or “possibly free choice”. The general idea being that once you get into the extremes of one choice being chosen 9 out of 10 times you have entered a region of positive gain to negative punishment that is far too large to be considered an earnest free choice. Likewise when you get really far, say 99/1 chance that you’ve entered an ‘ultimatum’ or some sort of extreme non-free choice.

  So by the loose definition of the 2.0 Freedometer (who’ll see a facelift once I learn gradients) the above example is a situation where you do not have a free choice, you are given a choice where option 1 is exceptionally poor and option 2 is exceptionally great. Say someone offering you cold unflavored coffee (option 1) or offering you cold filtered water (option 2) after you’ve just competed in a triathlon.

Example 2 (Option 1 27%/Option 2 73%)

  This would be a situation of free choice, it’s in that yellow zone that may be added at a later date but for now its a situation of free choice. While one option is nicer than the other neither puts the organism in a place of great disadvantage. I suppose this would be something akin to going to see a bad movie or a good movie, neither will destroy your day and while you do have a higher likelihood of choosing the good movie you may end up last minute entering to see the bad one to give it the benefit of the doubt.

  It would be unfortunate but not exactly life ending. Now this last example is what I envision when I look at situations where someone says something like “You can either give me your wallet or die.”

Example 3 (Option 1 100%/Option 2 0%)

  These are highly popular abuses of the free choice concept. You are given the choice of say “believing in a deity” or being punished to an eternity of unpleasantness. Neither option accurately relates to the consequences of its choice and likewise the grandiose nature of the aversive to the mediocre nature of the appetitive is (likely) infinitely large. Because of this you have a choice between a seemingly infinitely large positive outcome on one end and a seemingly infinitely large negative outcome on the other end. This is not a free choice at the utmost, it even looks weird on the Freedometer 2.0, it makes him very unhappy.

  So of course this is a work in progress. I think ideally I’m just trying to create a visual diagram (with the wonders of geometry) that can help provide visual aid for a very serious problem. Far too much of the world’s population abuses the concept of freedom or free choice. It seems to me anytime the options are vastly different in a negative correlation that they are directives masked behind choice.

  There appears to me to be a great bit of confusion when looking into the term of freedom. Something I feel that should be addressed for future discussion. There will be certainly some subjectivity however I hope that it will be treated as objective as it can be . I will certainly try my best to keep it as objective as I can (which in itself is somewhat impossible given the conversation).

   This is a good visual example of what I’m about to explain. Think of the above image as describing the freedom of choice between two options given their outcome (assuming you know it). In particular while I’m not a fan of digging into religious discussions (mainly because it tends to get bitter even if you don’t want it to) but I feel a particular ‘choice’ is very useful for illustrating my point.

  For a choice to be free it must not, in the case of a fully and properly functional organism, contradict the very nature of self preservation. A praying mantis male may sacrifice its own being but it does so in an act to feed it female and to press on the likelihood that it’s seed/genes (and in essence its very being) will pass on. In many cases the actions an organism does that appear to contradict it’s natural inclination for survival are indeed actions that are required for such. Drinking from a stream that has a predator in them is a necessity where the danger of the predator does not outweigh the danger of dying of thirst.

  This is where the image comes into play. It works in a negative correlation (or sorts), the further you move in either direction (to the left towards option A or to the right for option B) the less likely the opposing option becomes. If you enter the red range of the Freedometer you have essentially left the realm of freedom. It’s not necessarily that once you pass 50% you are no longer free in all cases, I’m using the simplest example to help explain my point with the least amount of thought (so you can use your extra resources to expand the concept).

  In essence if you place a gazelle in the situation where it must drink or it will die, the odds of dying while drinking are outweighed, if they were not outweighed it would not do what it does. This is why some animals do indeed starve or dehydrate (I imagine there is a better term) to death, the odds of them being eaten far exceed the odds of them dying at the current moment. It’s a sad state of affairs.

  If you are presented with a ’simple choice’ one with two outcomes. You either believe in a single an entity, or you spend the eternity damned to a torturous nothingness. You are no longer provided a free choice, you are given an ultimatum. It is a choice only in the most literal of terms, but it is not free. In the case of an ultimatum you are placed in the extreme red zones, a point in which no properly thinking and functioning beings would choose the other option. Whenever you are placed in a position in which one of the options is not an option that the organism would choose it is no longer a choice and the illusion of freedom is the only freedom that is truly present.

  I am not sure if this has made anything more clear, but at the very least I’d hope that the next time someone reads about a ‘free choice’ that they remember the Freedometer and remember that at a certain point even a choice is not a choice.