Timothy Snyder in his latest book On Freedom asserts that freedom must start with being free to do and not with freedom from. He describes the former as positive freedom and the latter as negative freedom.
We can identify who’s who by this simple shibboleth. Those who come at us with freedom from regulation, for instance, have got the challenge wrong. Why? Because they are not taking into account how boundaries and limits prevent one person’s behavior from curtailing other people’s freedom or harming others.
Freedom from limitations is a veil, a fig leaf hiding the belief that power is the only thing that matters, which is blatantly untrue.
Our social relations range from multiple hierarchies in public, as on the job, to those in our personal lives, as in a book club or bird-watching group; and we find in the family we are all communists in the sense of from each according to ability, to each according to need.
We would need to be pretty warped to walk around seeing everywhere in every interaction a power struggle at every moment.
Snyder has an interesting passage: “Whatever our freedom is, it must begin from what kinds of creatures we are, involve how we differ from the world beyond, and suggest how we make contact with that world and change it.”
He has inadvertently hit on the Free Energy Principle with its four states and boundaries (Markov Blankets) between: internal, perceptual, external, and action.
His observation shows how the science of particle movement, of evolution and biology more broadly has essential relevance to discussions of social relations, politics and economics.
Which also means there is a way to express these things mathematically, using differential equations of the Free Energy Principle.
As a side note, consider the fundamental idiocy of trying to separate economic relations from social relations of other kinds. As David Graeber points out in Debt, there is a charming utopian naïveté about how modern European economists starting with Adam Smith separate the potential for sex and for violence from human exchange.
The scenarios in economics texts have this bizarre lack of realistic human character among the townsfolk who are bartering shoes for potatoes. They don’t seem to have any human traits at all or histories with each other.
We see this in how economics function in our lives, as something apart from our humanity and care for ourselves and others. In economic terms, we are encouraged to see others and even our own bodies as separable economically from our feelings, something estranged and alienated.
Snyder cites Edith Stein’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Stein use of the word Leib for body as opposed to Körper. The former is a living thing, and the latter is like the word corpse in English, something divorced from our persons and personalities.
As further connection with Graeber’s analysis of the origins of debt and property laws, consider how private property is defined as a relation between a person and a thing.
An inanimate object cannot have a relationship with a person. Even a chef who uses a knife skillfully or athletes who wield a racket or bat or ball with precision, as if it were an extension of their beings, cannot really be said to have a relationship with the object.
Things do not give back or have feelings for us. The revelation comes from Orlando Patterson, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_Patterson whom Graeber cites as the most convincing explanation – that the notion of private property comes from slave law, in which one human being is transformed by slavery into a thing.
Looping Leib and Körper back into this, we can see how slavery as a kind of social death turns a human into a corpse, a commodity, and removes it from the social context of having relationships outside usus, fructus, and abusus.
Let’s add that modern slavery differs from Roman slavery in that the concept of racism and hierarchy of groups have become more codified.
A Roman slave owner could freely acknowledge his slave might actually be superior in knowledge or skills. Ancient Greeks were well aware they could through a turn of events become enslaved, that is, through debt, war, or piracy.
There was no attempt among the ancients to justify slavery on the basis of group superiority. The relations between master and slave were not a matter of one person being by nature inferior. No one deserved to be or not to be a slave by birthright or status.
Slavery was itself defined explicitly as relations between persons contrary to natural law.
I Dwell In Possibility 