The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'witches dancing around a fire in the forest.'
I write a lot about freedom. Freedom is our natural state and society impinges upon this natural state in far too many ways. But freedom on its own is abstract and meaningless. For it to mean something, it must have purpose.
From my perspective, the purpose of freedom is that it allows us to meet our obligations. Every one of us exists within a vast web of obligations that can only be effectively navigated when we're free to make choices about how we use our energy. These obligations are personal, familial, social, professional, civic, environmental, and for some religious. The total network of these obligations is the glue that holds society together.
Not everyone can meet their obligations on all of these different levels all of the time. Sometimes the reason for the failure is out of a person's hands, like illness. Other times, the reason for the failure is more of a choice, like a bad attitude. There are even those who view freedom itself as freedom from obligations. These people make everything worse and are rarely held accountable for their actions.
Our control regime has arranged our legal and economic systems in such a way as to shield powerful bad actors from accountability. And most of our informal accountability structures have disappeared as society has become more diverse and we've become more atomized. Many sense that the absence of these structures is problematic. I suspect that this sense motivates cancel culture, which attempts to reintroduce personal accountability into society in a variety of misguided and harmful ways.
Imagine a society where everyone was both perfectly free and entirely accountable. That's where I start when I try to picture a better future. The great challenge of this, of course, is that large swaths of our population barely understand their obligations to themselves, and can't even conceive of the other areas where they're obliged to behave in a responsible way.
Society's main strategy for dealing with these people has been to impose increasingly authoritarian controls on all of us. Living under these authoritarian controls has programmed most people to lose their innate sense of freedom and to consider their obligations burdensome, if they consider them at all. It's a sad state of affairs.
Sad, but not hopeless. Deprogramming the masses might be unrealistic, but this is an area where individual actions can make a big difference. Anyone can get clear about their obligations and then take reasonable steps to meet them. Anyone can be unrepentantly free within whatever constraints society has imposed upon them.
Every person who does these things provides an example for others to follow. An example of functional freedom. Of freedom with purpose. Once enough people are living in purposeful freedom, it'll become much easier to begin talking about accountability in more than a punitive sense.
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