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?
No. You didn’t define either word. Probably they didn’t either. They want to equivocate – switch definitions of words without saying so – and this is classic sophistry.
Anyway, freedom alone is hard to define. What happens if your freedom (to punch people) and mine (not to be punched) conflict? Who wins? … So you can’t actually have 100% general freedom. But if you have a narrower definition, maybe you can say something constructive.
And crypto is all about theft. So let’s focus in that. If I send you money accidentally, because you tricked me, BitCoin has no robust refund procedure. So … you could say it is more free than a credit card (no credit card companies or banks in the middle), but the specific freedom is “freedom for fraudsters to steal more efficiently”. Is that what you as a small-time investor want? Did the lecturer spell that out to you? … I bet they didn’t.
It’s technically true in absolutes. Absolute freedom, without giving up humanity, gives no guarantee of safety provided by anything outside of yourself. Absolute safety exists only in a providential void, where needs are seen to magically, as by a benevolent god. If you seek safety in the absolute freedom, you lose the freedom in one way or another. Walls to keep out enemies keep the builders in. Tools to provide for survival require production and maintenance, taking away your freedom to choose to do things that you enjoy. If you seek freedom in the absolute safety, you have to risk giving external forces access. Those forces always carry risk of harm, whether by malicious action or indifference. However, while it’s necessary to sacrifice one for the other in the absolute, it’s not sufficient. Nothing about the relationship says being less of one necessarily makes you more of the other. The easy example is prison. In most prisons your freedom is severely curtailed, but you certainly aren’t safe. You might even be imprisoned for the purpose of being harmed.
This blogger has previously had some interesting thoughts on the matter. For example https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/Paternalistic_Laws_Make_Very_Little_Sense but I remember some others too, though can’t easily find them now.
I don’t agree because it is too simplistic. Its not necessarily wrong, but it is misleading because reality is a whole lot more complicated.
Agreed. History is full of unintended consequences, partially because so many things were more complicated than individuals and societies realized. There are not tons of really simple tradeoffs along the lines of ‘freedom vs safety’. I don’t think people could have imagined the future world they would bring about when they started planting crops instead of just hunting and gathering, for example.
That sounds an awful lot like its the setup for some authoritarian talking point. The whole point of restricting freedom within a society is so that the total amount of freedom is increased. For instance ur freedom to murder people is being restricted because killing someone denies that person of their own freedom to live. Ur night out murdering is less units of freedom than an entire lifetime of freewill.
The only possible way to interpret the lecturers statement that is logically congruent is to claim that your freedoms are being restricted so that your safety can be increased by reducing the risk you pose to yourself. Its literally you being told that someone else will be making your decisions on your behalf because your too dumb to decide for yourself. Pure authoritarian bootlicking.
Its the same argument used by extremists to deny women’s rights to get an abortion.
If you pay attention to politics, you’ll start seeing a pattern of “we’re keeping you safe” as an excuse to rob you of your freedoms. This really ramped up in the USA after 9/11. It’s when spying on Americans by our own government became legalized. We were afraid, and we gave up some freedoms for the idea of safety.
…and now we know we’re no more safe than we were before.
So doesn’t the problem lie within regulations? Maybe they could just be better adjusted to the society? In decentralised solutions you also rely on “someone” that decides about the group, but different thing would be with distributed solutions.
they are probably using the modern interpretation of this those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety
Read my mind.
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.
It’s possible to have neither freedom nor safety
gestures around broadly
When certain people have the freedom to hurt others, no one is safe.
I don’t know. I think security today, has been awfully abused because I really don’t see for example, why the fuck Google needs my street address to “feel secure”. It’s small things like that, that really make you question.
There’s something about this lecture that doesn’t sit right with me and I think it’s because they’re bringing into irrelevant things that don’t mesh with the idea of freedom or security.
Well, the speaker said that when you have freedom then you also need to understand everything around you and be responsible for everything that’s related to you otherwise you will lose your safety. That’s why he came up with conclusion freedom OR safety
You can be free and safe with the right weapon arsenal. 🦅🇺🇸
