The Search for a Fair Society: The Pilgrims and the Flaw of their Idea of Freedom

November 28. Welcome. Grab a coffee and let’s talk about what we want society to be and what it takes to get there – from each one of us.

Since today is Thanksgiving in the USA I want to talk about the Pilgrims. Really, I want to talk about freedom. But I think there’s something important to learn by looking at the Pilgrims.

The pilgrims were English settlers who travelled to North America on the ship Mayflower and established the Plymouth Colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. Before coming to the New World they had lived for several years in exile in Holland, where they had fled to evade religious persecution. They were what was called back then Brownists or Separatists. They held many of the same Calvinist religious beliefs as Puritans, but unlike Puritans who wanted a purified established church, the Pilgrims maintained that their congregations should split from the English state church.

If you had asked a Pilgrim about their motivation to start anew far, far away they’d talked about something we would recognize today as religious freedom. They wanted to go to a place that, in their understanding, had no established rules yet, to evade the barriers their old home and even their exile maintained around them. Sounds reasonable, right?

But there’s a flaw in this definition of freedom as the absence of barriers, more than one really. And I will get to other flaws in later videos. Sticking with the Pilgrims today, the flaw in them defining freedom as the absence of barriers is that they will only recognize barriers outside and never their own lack of judgement. In the language of the mind that self-generates its model of the world, a model that needs to be aligned with the models of others to enable cooperation by the implementation of a shared replacement dataset during the world generation process by all cooperators, their problem was that everyone else in the cooperation wasn’t ready to replace all data going into their world generation with that which they used. And they didn’t have the means to force everyone else to do just that. So, they sought out a new place where they set up a new cooperation in which they had the power to force their dataset on anyone else. An act that again created unfreedom, shown perfectly in the acceptance of cattle slavery, which started not much later, born out of the idea that any barrier put on property would cut into the freedom of the owner.

In the end, the mind is a tool that the body created so that the body can interact with energies and discover its surroundings in a way that suits the body. Thus, freedom is not and cannot be seeing the dataset you use to create your model of the world reflected from everyone else in your surroundings. Freedom is a cooperation that enables every cooperator to do just that for themselves in a sustained fashion despite the necessary barriers a need to align our individual models to enable cooperation puts up. Freedom is an acknowledgement that much of the dataset that goes into our world generation fits only one person in this exact makeup and that is us. Freedom is acknowledging that the high payoff functioning cooperations produce, are produced exactly because the replacement dataset that aligns everyone’s thinking is kept as small as possible and the diversity in the models of the world leads us to the most diverse information that combined in diverse ways leads to novelty, new solutions. Freedom is sharing to enable each other do it an infinite number of ways.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Any thoughts? Tell me. Tell all. Since our models of the world change with every new information we gather and the models are only accessible to others when we communicate them, we are part of never-ending negotiations that require constant conversation and debate.

To watch this post as a video, go here.

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