Freedom and safety
Freedom and safety
Today I was attending a lecture about blockchain and cryptocurrencies and the lecturer said that freedom and safety don't go together. You can have more freedom by abandoning safety. Would you agree?
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Yes, that's the entire basis for the idea of the social contract. That you give up a little bit of freedom in exchange for security from living in a society.
You're talking about trade offs and maximization.
That's not reality yet. In reality, we have less freedom AND less safety than we could. There's plenty of room to increase both.
Once we get to a maximized state, then tradeoffs are necessary. But we're very far from that at the moment.
They're not mutually exclusive. Some issues would increase one of those factors without decreasing the other, while other issues result in a slight lessening of one in exchange for an increase in the other. Different agencies and parts of society handle different issues, and it's not reasonable to expect optimal progression, much as it would be appreciated.
Oh, definitely not optimal progression. But there's some basic things we could easily do that improve both safety and freedom.
Getting rid of racist cops, for example. Increased safety and freedom for black people. Costs us literally nothing.
Social contract theory is statist propaganda. Even before I knew anything about politics or political theory I was so confused by this idea.
It’s just there to create an illusion of consent for state oppression. Even though there’s no realistic way to opt out, and we never even decided to opt in in the first place.
What kind of crazy contract is that?
It's not propaganda, it's a basic logical conclusion. If you and a group of people decide to follow a set of rules together, i.e. create a society, you are surrendering a little of your freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want in exchange for some protection from others from doing the same.
But that never happened. We never decided that. No one even asked me. Again, I never opted in and there’s no realistic way to opt out. I’m far more afraid of the state than I am from my neighbors, and if I had a real choice, I would opt out immediately.