Freedom and Equality – a problem of definition

The words equality and freedom have been massively misunderstood. Yet they are simple, and profound.

I will deal with equality first for people have a great problem with this word, they think it means we are all the same. It does not. It means no-one is born with power over another’s life and no-one is born to serve another’s life. That is all. It was born as the antithesis to hereditary rule where you were born into your status of ruler or server. To be equal meant that you both now had power over your own life. Your choices mattered but your influence must be garnered freely from others. It does not and will never mean people have equal ability, equal looks, equal intelligence these are just the bastardisations of the word by a scientific and mathematical society invading the human world. Equality is not being ruled, and not being burdened with responsibility for the lives of others.

We are never completely free. We must eat to survive so we must kill or take the fruit and seeds of other living things to live. We are fragile. The world around supports us but also puts us under stress, the cold, the heat, the rain, the wind all manipulate our decisions. We have spent millennia working to remove these manipulations and sanctions to free us. But in the process we have modelled our society on that world we wished to escape from. Survival of the fittest, competition and constant work to survive are the tenets of our society. We have replaced natural sanction with man-made sanction. We created the technology to free ourselves but instead we built a prison.

To be free is to be in an environment that is conducive to life not to hot not to cold, Goldilocks as it is called, but also not worried about what people think of you, not having to do many things to survive, like work, clean, make dinner, email 50 people etc. To be free is to wonder and wander and with this we can chose to cook dinner for many, chose to build a house, chose to make a hydrogen car from scratch and have access (money) to all the resources needed to do so. Freedom is not a devils bargain – do this and be rewarded don’t and be punished – but the leisure to imagine. Not only imagine though but the access make those dreams reality.

Put freedom and equality together and you have the culmination of all human desire and endeavour. A fluid society.

David J Campbell