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Michael J | 3 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Oh, gotcha!

My one quibble, then, is that I don't think even subsidiary societies are entirely voluntary.  We can't choose where we are born, or to whom, or in what socioeconomic conditions, yet those have a dramatic influence on our development and our relationships within society.

Subsidiarity helps people choose what is best for them in matters of shared concern, but I don't think we can escape the fact that there *are* always matters of shared concern.  No man is an island.
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mleku | 3 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 humans, and many other species of all kinds, down to the smallest, exploit the principle of vires in numeris

freedom is not an absolute, it really is literally "axes of freedom" as in engineering

freedom is on a scale from completely involuntary, to completely unpredictable and unhinged

the very expression "unhinged" itself hints at the semantics of the word freedom, in that something that is without any bindings is dangerous

the central problem with this and one that makes intelligence also a liability in broader society is that the less degrees of freedom you can comprehend, the more likely you are to support a politician campaigning to reduce the degrees of freedom in the society

this plays a part in the discussions of things like drug and sexual subject matter as well, in fact, you can almost say that "left" and "right" are defined by their standpoints on this, but that polarity can be easily flipped around to support the current thing and the established authority

that's why the political leanings graph is important and why the mainstream doesn't want it to become widely acknowledged - they depend on being able to flip everything around at that boundary