Thoughts about Freedom
I am nearing the end of editing my 45 minute introductory DG video for the first North American sociocracy conference ‘The River Flows Both Ways - A New Era of Organizational Governance’ June 14-15, 2010 at Yukon College in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. At this point in my editing I am often waiting for the computer to render and to save clips as Quicktime files. So, during some of that time I am writing about some things that the video has brought up for me including the idea of ‘freedom.’
We tend to think of freedom as being free from being constricted, chained, and jailed, etc. We look at it as being able to do what we want, but there is a completely different way to look at freedom. Perhaps freedom should be thought of as how much influence do I have to affect the world around me? Whereas, in the old paradigm, we might say that my freedom to swing my arms ends at your nose. We probably wouldn’t say having an influence in the world around you should end at some limit. If others like your ideas and you strive to be a leader, then there might be no limit to your influence. Freedom, then, isn’t a question of limiting the negative aspects of others and increasing our own.
We also have to differentiate between power and freedom. Power is fairly clear. DG shows us that we can have an equivalent amount of power reserved for each participant in a system. When we use it we start seeing that all other systems don’t do that and we see how we give up power. For instance, when we consent to using majority vote, we are consenting to allow ourselves to be ignored if we are in the minority. When we agree to work somewhere, we are consenting to do what we are told, even if we don’t think it is the best course of action. Freedom is a little more murky, but related. Being free to do whatever I want, would be, to some extent, having power over the people around me. Instead, I want to be free to have influence over the important aspects of my life. I can do that with other people. I don’t need to have power over them.
I think the old way of looking at freedom comes from thinking of people as individuals instead of as groups. We can’t survive without each other so why only look at freedom in terms of only how it affects the individual? The old way also looks at actions as being negative and destructive, or ,at least, potentially so: swinging the arms for instance. If we are limited by DG’s ‘consent decision-making’ in what we do, we already have restricted our doings to those which no one objects to, which we can consider to be morally acceptable. How limited should our moral, positive behavior then be? It doesn’t make sense to think about it in this way.
If we have equal power reserved for us in the systems we use, then we will have the maximum amount of freedom possible. Our influence will only be limited by our own creativity and work ethic.
