🧵 I continue to be amazed at #naiveliberalism, or the idea that freedom from any form of control is always the right answer.
It tends to result in people who systematically look down on all ways society tries to care for the disadvantaged, even warning labels on products.
One person for example made jokes about labels on cigarette boxes, and ”SOLVENT ABUSE CAN KILL INSTANTLY” on scent dispensers in toilets. He was bright-eyed in declaring how those make people abuse the products more.
But this type of viewpoint is actually super shallow: It delights only in unearthing ”a loophole” that seems smart on the surface, but it reveals the person has no deep understanding of #addiction, #substanceabuse as a thing that happens to actual people at all.
I did proceed to explain to them that the labels are not there to stop people from abusing solvents, but from taking that last hit that will kill them. And the cigarette labels are to make less people pick up smoking.
The naive liberalist position is often revealed to contain great ignorance. But that ignorance is not consciously known to them. It is the idealistic doctrine of freedom that shapes their observations about the world, and not the other way around.
I’m pretty damn sure the statistics show these labels saved the lives of much more junkies than they ever got anyone to start huffing.
But from the naive liberalist’s point, to get to say: ”all attempts at control are futile” is more important.
@gimulnautti i don't really see why freedom would stand in contradiction with warning labels. in a free market, providing potentially relevant information would be a cheap way to add value to your product. and businesses generally don't want their customers dead or injured.
do you think less freedom would give you more/better warning labels? if so, where is the evidence? if not, how is freedom the problem?
@gimulnautti towards your bigger point: i think most people are uncomfortable with the idea of freedom (except their own and people they trust), so they very happy to jump on arguments like that:
X might possibly be hard in a free society
assume that governments would do X better, usually ignoring additional risks and downsides
therefore the government should do X
obviously, it's not the first step that i have a problem with…
@sofia Hi. Thanks for starting a discussion! It’s great that someone cares.
No I don’t think freedom contradicts with warning labels, but I was surfacing the case as a phenomenon of a larger political corpus which the sociologist Daniel Görtz aptly called; ’naíve liberalism’
A naíve liberalist believes all freedom is always good. There are humorous side-effects like the former case, because everything tends to present itself as attempts to control, which are promptly dismissed. 🙂
@gimulnautti well, i don't know what liberals you know, and obviously there is silly people on all sides, but i don't think it's particularly common among radical liberals/libertarians and anarchists.
David Friedman's talk on market failure*, seems like a good example, and and it's good demonstration of why people may be pretty generally against government, without believing that every free choice will always be better than a forced one.
@gimulnautti i hope a 40 min talk isn't that offputting. i personally prefer well-prepared audio/video content over text, that's why this kind of stuff is my go-to reference.
@gimulnautti i also think that "avoiding restrictions/control" kinda misses the point of free cooperation. a free social arrangement/free contract is about the participants restricting themselves to do/avoid certain things in order to seek mutual benefit. i think they might ultimately enable people to have greater, more impact choices than they would have alone. but still, making a commitment means letting go of options.
@gimulnautti and of course, being forced to do a thing, does not necessarily mean that that thing is bad. it's not logically impossible to coerce people into something that is better than anything they would freely choose. but isn't it much more relevant how (un-)likely these things are?
and also what sort of habits/precedents they create. someone who gets away with coercion, will care more about maintaining their power and less about the interests of others.
@sofia I think our semiologies are not meeting when we are discussing either the topic of liberalism or freedom. It is probably my fault for starting at a term which is defined in this way only by a few researchers who are not mainstream.
Are you familiar with terms ”negative freedom” vs ”positive freedom”? Ie. ”freedom from” vs ”freedom to”. There is a very clear case that many forms of control to decrease negative freedoms can yield great positive freedoms in return.
@gimulnautti yeah we do seem to have different ideas of what freedom means. your idea seems nonsensical to me, and so i tried to describe mine, hoping they might make sense to you.
i know of the "positive" vs "negative freedom" concept, but i'm suspicious of the way it's typically used. that is: people in power "trading" our negative freedoms for positive ones.
but if you are working with people to expand some positive freedom then that's great.
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