Defining Freedom
I’ve always found the concept of Freedom confusing. There’s a level on which it makes sense. When William Wallace is talking about being free from the yoke of Edward Longshanks, it’s obvious what he means – the English king and his goons regularly come to town, order people around, take their stuff and beat them up. Being free of English rule means they don’t do that anymore, and William Wallace and his friends can just go around farming and living their peaceful lives without having to worry about anything worse than the soul-crushing depression of living in Scotland. On the other hand, what the heck does the word free mean in the context of “the land of the free and the home of the brave”? Is there even a reasonable definition? The original song is about being free from English rule, but it’s been two and a half centuries since Edward Longshanks and his goons were ruling America, and not-being-ruled-by-the-King isn’t really a core property of most Americans’ identities these days. I settle the first one by thinking of freedom as defined relative to a constraint. You can be free of something if you don’t have to worry about it when making decisions. This matches the common use of freedom – you’re free of having to worry about parking if you don’t have a car, free of a tyrant if you aren’t constrained by him telling you what to do, etc. This also explains why the second use seems so weird – it’s trying to use a fundamentally relative term without using it in relation to anything. So my response to the second use used to be to roll my eyes at people throw around empty deep-sounding terms. But now I think we can resolve this. We start with the mathematical definition of degrees of freedom – your total freedom level at a given time is the number of options you have available to you at that time (if you want to sound all mathy, you can call this the local dimension of your options space or something)[1]. But there’s a fundamental problem here: At the end of the da
Translating this to the mental script that works for me:
If I picture myself in the role of the astronauts on the Columbia as it was falling apart, or a football team in the last few minutes of a game where they're twenty points behind, I know the script calls for just keeping up your best effort (as you know it) until after the shuttle explodes or the buzzer sounds. So I can just do that.
Why is there an alternative script that calls to go insane? I think because there's a version that equates that with a heroic effort, that thinks that if I dramatize and just try harder (as shown by visible... (read more)