The Difference(s) Between Freedom, Rights, and Entitlement
As you may have noticed, a lot of my content is thoughts & explorations that come up because of things in my own life. This is post another example of that sequence of events playing out.
Earlier this week, you may have seen me re-steem (share) a post, wherein I was called "Orwellian," "tyrannical," "anti-freedom," a "dictator," and finally the short post literally ended with a picture of Adolf Hitler.
Now, you may be wondering why I re-steemed such a clearly libelous attack on my character.
If you know me personally, or have followed my content & activism for any length of time, then you are probably wondering how anyone could [unironically] make those statements about me.
The answer to that first question is pretty simple. I know myself, I am comfortable and quite sure of who I am, how I live, and there are more than enough people around the world who know me, and none of those words can be honestly applied to me. Rather than down-vote this post, ignore it, or bash the person who wrote it to tarnish their reputation, I wanted to face it directly & calmly, challenge every point made, and put the whole conversation out there for everyone to see.
The answer to the second question is something I obviously can't know for sure, because it's impossible to truly know someone else's thoughts & intentions. That said, I can certainly make my own guesses, and since posts like this (though neither of the others was anywhere near as blusterous, dramatic, or dishonest) have been made twice before, both when someone was removed from @TribeSteemUp's voter... It seems likely that they have something in common.
Without any more introduction, let's talk about the differences between freedom & rights, and what people often mistake for one of those things: entitlement.
Freedom
The idea of freedom can be simply put as "without being the recipient of force or coercion." If someone is holding a gun to your head, telling you to do something: your freedom is greatly reduced in that situation. If you live within the boundaries claimed by one of the many corporations calling themselves "government," with the threat of force hanging over you at all times due to the many statutes, ordinances, and codes they've created to control your actions: your freedom is being greatly reduced.
Personally, I often think of freedom in two different ways: the above, generally accepted sense of freedom from violation, and what I have often referred to as internal freedom, but which can basically be used interchangeably with the word responsibility. I am the creator of my experience; I am responsible for my actions, my thoughts (which ones I choose to focus on at least), my words, the situations I find myself in, how I react to those situations, and ultimately the whole of my experience.
When something comes up in my life, I have the option of being grateful for it, whatever it is, and finding the lessons and opportunities for growth & joy in it, or seeing it as a negative. The way in which I handle these things, especially the long-term patterns around this, decide whether my life is one of joy & freedom, or one of limitation and feeling like a victim. Are you acting as though life happens to you, or as though you are the one making the decisions?
I believe that freedom (both the internal responsibility kind, and the external freedom from kind) is the key to bettering the world in any way, ending the cycles of violence and control that have trapped humanity for at least the last couple thousand years. Because of that belief, I am an anarchist, I can see no place in a moral community/society/species for rulers (the literal translation of anarchy is without rulers).
Rights
Rights are, generally speaking, a categorization of the ways in which the "government" claiming rulership over a society/location has agreed to respect the freedom of individuals. The idea of the right to free speech simply means that the "government" is saying that they will not use force or coercion against you for things that you say. The right to bear arms simply means that the "government" is saying that they will not use force or coercion against you for owning/carrying a firearm. Now, obviously every "government," no matter how many "rights" they have laid out in their documents, is going to slowly encroach on those freedoms, because the nature of force & coercion is to expand.
Outside the context of statism, the idea of rights are pretty unnecessary. We each are inherently free to live our lives, in any way that we please, as long as we are not initiating violence, threatening violence, or committing fraud against others. Basically, the size of government is a measure of the level to which the freedoms of the individual are being violated by the force & coercion of "government" (just people, with fancy papers, badges, and titles)
Entitlement
The place where things start to get strange, especially in American society, is when people start to get a sense of entitlement, either just in their mind, or because "government" has told them they are entitled to something. The word entitled has two basic definitions:
- "a right to benefits specified especially by law or contract"
- "belief that one is deserving of or entitled to certain privileges"
So, let's break this down. The first definition is basically just that if you have a contract with someone, saying they will do/give something, then you are entitled to that. This definition of the word has spiraled out in some crazy ways over the last century, as corporations like the United States, Inc. have realized that a great way to keep the masses pacified, if not actively supportive, is to give them "free" stuff (stolen from others or paid for with money stolen from others.)
The most obvious example of this is this idea that people have the right to healthcare, or the right to education. Since what is being talked about is someone else giving you their time, energy, and other resources, these things cannot possibly be rights.
"Right" to "Healthcare"
You have the right to health meaning that no one has the right to poison you (by, say, putting hydrofluorosilicic acid in your water or spraying heavy metals in the air), injure you, or otherwise damage your body. Just because nobody has the right to damage your health, doesn't mean that you're just going to magically be healthy.
Being healthy is all about responsibility; what are you eating? Drinking? Are you exercising? There's a lot of work that goes into being healthy. When it comes to "healthcare," we all know that most of what people mean by that is simply pharmaceuticals, because allopathic medicine is an industry designed to make money off people being unwell.
For conversation's sake, let's assume someone is a true healer, and you are in a position where the services of someone like that are needed... that doesn't just mean you get to force that person to help you, or force someone else to pay for them to help you. Of course, a decent person wants to help those that they can, and in a psychologically healthy society, "healthcare" would be something that everyone has access to, "intellectual property" wouldn't drive prices sky-high, and there wouldn't be poison in the food and water.
"Right" to "Education"
We each have the right to seek education, the right to learn, the right to expand (because these are all things that don't involve violating another.) We don't, however, have the right to force someone else to "teach" us, or the right to force someone else to pay for us to be "educated."
This is, of course, once again a situation where "government" is telling people they have the right to education, but what they actually mean is that everyone should be forced to pay for the "government" to indoctrinate all the children born within their territory for 12+ years, turning them into obedient, mindless, drones, following the Prussian Education Model.
The great thing about education is that in the current era, we've literally hit a point where anyone with an internet connection can learn anything, for free. When was the last time you needed to learn how to do something, and there wasn't a video on YouTube explaining it? A decade or two ago, we didn't have alternative systems like Khan Academy & edx or the "open learning/open courseware" programs at schools like Harvard, Colorado State, and many others.
Bringing it All Together
So, at this point you may or may not have picked up on how all of this ties back in to the experience I just recently had with being called a dictator. Throughout that post, and the LONG comments section below, the author repeatedly said that I was anti-freedom, and the entire post was framed as though I had somehow violated his freedom.
I'm going to lay out the most basic form of what happened here, and in the 2 previous cases as well, leaving out the specifics, looking at the general pattern.
- I add someone to the @TribeSteemUp autovoter (which I created almost 3 years ago, here's a video breaking down a lot of the history of the project), because I decided their content was worth having upvoted, do to an alignment of values, and high enough quality. I ask for nothing from them, require nothing from them.
- At some point later (between 6 months and 2 years for the three folks in question) I decide to remove them from the auto-voter (different reasons for each of the three.) No flagging, no post bashing them, simply withdrawing support.
Obviously there are much bigger, more in-depth stories to go along with each of these three situations, but the most fundamental facts are exactly the same. In every situation, there was a post made immediately afterward demonizing me (to quite varying degrees), in this most recent case literally comparing me to Hitler.
Let's look at this in a much simpler example, because the functions of the STEEM blockchain are quite complicated, and many people don't understand how it all works.
- I see someone on the street
- I give that person $5, no agreements made
- I walk by and give that person $5, once a day for a month
- A month later, I stop giving that person $5 every day
- Have I violated this person in some way?
Image Sources
If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy some of these highlights of my blog:
"Greatest Hits/Table of Contents" of my first 2 years on Steemit