8 Apr 2008 @ 18:19, by FreeSociety Project
The largest facet of freedom is choice. With every action, whether the action is intended or unintended, it is the underlying choice that defines freedom within a society. A choice that is epitome to the individual, is that of location.
Where you live, your home, has a great impact on how you live, and as such should be a large and important choice. In all modern and past societies, few people actually have a choice as to their location. For the vast majority of people your home is dependent on your livelihood. In order to “make a living”, to fulfill your basic needs, within a restrictive society you must have a job. A periodic task that (at least on the surface) helps society around you, in order for that very society to afford you what is needed to fulfill your needs.
This concept is unavoidable, one man cannot run a society, he cannot fulfill his needs efficiently enough to allow him to have time to pursue knowledge or entertain himself (two things help to define the cohesion of society). It takes many people working together to achieve any sort of efficiency at all.
When people become trapped in the status quo, attached to their immediate environment, they lose much of their freedom. People become ineffectual at progressing causing a stagnation or even regression of society as a whole, furthering the already detrimental conditions.
The Free Society Project aims to define the ideals necessary to create a free society. Such a society must have a certain cohesion that allows it to exist in a harmonic state ad infinitum. Part of this cohesion depends on the people within the society, they must see both the individual and the collective, and how the collective serves only to enhance the individual. It is only through the understanding and application of this principle that such a society can truly exist.
The concept appears to be in violation of intrinsic freedom, on the surface. Freedoms are intact so long as choice is maintained; choice that is central to the self-selective nature of a ideal society.
Actions are based on gain, whether direct or indirect; a concept that has allowed us as a species to survive and grow over millions of years. It is evident that in order for a person to want to remain in a society, they would have to gain more from that society than they would somewhere else.
In order to maintain the state of self-selection that is necessary to sustain the progression of society, people must be free to chose their surroundings, they must be free to chose who they support and who in turn supports them. While this is not possible in mankind's current condition, it is something that will have to be overcome; it is something that will have to be implemented in any society that intends to offer true freedom, and choice in any matter concerning oneself.
Thusly, self-selection is an ideal that benefits the individual, and the society as a whole.
-ThePredator
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