The Search for a Fair Society: What’s wrong with the Neoliberal View on Freedoms?

September 20. You’re welcome here. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society.

There are plans. And then there are migraines. So, the discussion that I promised you for yesterday about the importance the school of thought associated with John Locke and the modern liberal tradition allots to certain freedoms happens here now with a day delay.

Basically, this school of thought is the antipole to the school of thought associated with Jean Jacque Rousseau. Where Rousseau said political and democratic freedoms are the most important while personal freedoms are, at best, instrumentally important when they help to promote a healthy democratic culture, Locke considers personal freedoms the most important while political and democratic freedoms, according to him, are only means to securing personal freedoms and economic prosperity more widely. This school of thought sees no intrinsic value in political and democratic freedoms. They want to state to be removed from the lives of the people.

Okay, let’s translate this into the language of the idea that society is a dataset that allows people to align their self-generated models of the world to the degree necessary to be able to cooperate with each other at the level they pursuit. It means that from all the data that goes into the individual model a certain percentage is agreed upon from all members to be shared while the rest is of the members free choosing. The school of thought associated with Locke and the modern liberal tradition now insists that cooperation is possible even when there is no shared dataset at all or a flexible one from which people can choose what parts they want to use in certain situations to the greatest benefit of themselves. Call for federal or state grants for themselves or their company because the shared dataset allows for them but go for tax avoidance even though the shared dataset puts the responsibility on them, too, because taxes cut into their personal liberties.

Sounds like a really sweet deal. But here is why it doesn’t work as a basis for free and equal society and most definitely not the basis for a fair one. And the main argument is found in the reason why we form groups – societies – and cooperate.

Looking at the animal kingdom of which humans are a part of shows that we’d be able to survive if we all simply self-generated our models of the world using whatever data we choose. We would lead lives in which we mainly exploited existing knowledge e.g. our searches for food would be planned. We’d know exactly what we are looking for and in what surrounding to the point that we started to plant the things or raise the domesticated livestock. It would make us susceptible for harvest failures and pests but overall it would deliver a steady payoff at a predictable time and place.

But does it get the material things we are made of closer to their lowest possible energy state while they are in equilibrium with the entirety of their surrounds? No. That requires exploring for new information. And the more randomized the search, the more we lean into the unknown and discover what we can there, the higher the possible payoff. But that’s risky for the individual, so risky that survival wouldn’t be guaranteed except the risk is offset by cooperation.

How do you cooperate when the models of the worlds every human lives in is totally diverse because the data going into the model is selected subjectively? You can’t. Because cooperation requires us to identify common problems, select the preferred levers to pull from those jointly detected, and set collective goals. You need a common basis to start from to do all this. You only get to a common basis when all parties partaking in the cooperation agree to use a common dataset in their individual world generation process, and agree to do so constantly without fail. Especially when it comes to the part where the individual shares their success of the randomized search they’d engaged in because their risk had been offset by the support the other partners had promised in the cooperation agreement because this was the only reason every member ever entered the agreement in the first place. The successes enable all members to continue. Once the successes are not shared anymore, some will be forced back into the exploiting lifestyle they had before the cooperation ever started, only that now the contract tells them to share the low payoff they can generate from that with those who kept all of their success. So, they too will want to give up on the contract. It totally makes no sense anymore for them to continue it. But it makes sense for those who kept their high payoff to themselves so they use just enough of their high payoff to force the others to continue to use the once agreed upon dataset and provide them with a predictable income while they can supplement it with profits from random searches they can engage in.

And this are the distinctly undemocratic conclusions of the school of thought associated with Locke and neoliberalism that insists that only personal freedoms are important while democratic freedoms play a supporting role at best.

Hence, the basic liberties principle states that political and personal freedoms are equally important and neither has an automatic priority over the other. The common source of this principle is an underlying ideal of citizens as both free and equal. Free citizens must be able to choose how they want to live, and equal citizens must have the same power to shape the laws as everyone else. Both types of freedoms protect in the end one another.

Do you have any thoughts to this as you should because we all live today in societies based on shared datasets? Tell me.

To watch this post as a video, go here.

#science #history #reality #society #philosophy #WorldGeneration #fairness #information #Rawls #OriginalPosition #BasicLiberties #neoliberalism #mind #self #brain #thinking #exploring