In The Constraints on Freedom, I had brought up the impact of the loss of three basic freedoms at a personal level. The freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements. A big lesson from the book I got it from is that even at a civilisational level, ‘the map is not the terrain’ i.e. the granular trade-offs, impacts, and daily wins and losses of different societies don’t get covered in broad strokes. At an individual level, therefore, mapping one’s worldview and practices purely according to popular discourse and aping lessons from ‘experts’ blindly is probably not a great idea. This post is a start to framing my own can-need-want list and specific actions I would like to take to give myself (and hopefully some others around me) more basic freedom, and a bit more. I am framing this around three aspects.
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