Do you prefer order or freedom?

[honk friend 1,978]

Order if I'm going for a science victory or domination victory, freedom if I'm going for a culture victory. 

Autocracy is situationally decent for domination, as the Prora and gunboat diplomacy tenet make it easier to maintain happiness and third alternative gives you plenty of strategic resources, but Iron Curtain is simply too strong in most situations, and Order gives you better bonuses to science which is infinitely more useful in domination than culture.

Spoiler

Actual answer: This is a really loaded question that boils down a lot of philosophy and political theory down to to a 2 answer poll. To give an appropriately vague and short answer: order.

 

[Monsoon 1,662]

I prefer freedom because it would feel less dystopian then a world where total order is the norm. In a free society you can still have order but in a world of total order you can't have freedom. 

[Luna the Great of all the Russias 2,986]

I do not see how freedom and order necessarily conflict one another. But this depends on how freedom and order is defined.

Freedom is the state in which an individual is not coerced by any other individual or entity. Freedom is not the ability to do whatever one wishes by coercing others.

Order can be attained from individuals associating with whomever they wish who also voluntarily chooses to associate with those individuals. But individuals are also to be free to disassociate from whomever they wish no matter how arbitrary that reasoning may be. Then there will be communities composed of people who wish to associate with one another, instead of being composed of people who are forced to associate with one another, nor being composed of people who are forced to disassociate from one another.

In this sense, I am absolutely for both freedom and order.

However, if order is defined as a third party who has the territorial monopoly of compulsion, expropriating from people and forcing them to behave in ways against their wishes, then I am fully for freedom and against "order".

 

On 2014-05-03 at 7:54 PM, Adachi said:

On one hand, in a perfectly orderly world, there are no crimes, and everyone is provided for. But there are strict rules, and many rights that we take for granted might not be allowed.

Assuming order is imposed by an entity with a territorial monopoly of compulsion, there will be crime as it would be committed by that coercive entity.

 

On 2014-05-03 at 7:54 PM, Adachi said:

On the other hand, in a perfectly free world, we would have full liberty, but the strong could control the weak, since there are no laws.

But the strong controlling the weak already occurs in the above situation. There will always be a minority of the population who will be among elites of society. The question is whether this is a natural elite, who rose to the top by their extraordinary ability to cooperate with others and disproportionately benefited society, or whether this is an elite of parasites who rose to the top by their extraordinary ability to manipulate others.

Laws would emerge in purely voluntary societies: these would arise from contracts and social norms.

Edited November 3, 2021 by Luna the Great of all the Russias

[Sunset Rose 254]

I personally don't see these things as mutually exclusive, so I'll say conceptually I find order to be a more useful concept overall than freedom.

[Fluttershutter 2,491]

22 hours ago, Sunset Rose said:

I personally don't see these things as mutually exclusive, so I'll say conceptually I find order to be a more useful concept overall than freedom.

Emergent systems are a form of order.

The question might better be "control or freedom".

[Sunset Rose 254]

1 hour ago, Fluttershutter said:

Emergent systems are a form of order.

The question might better be "control or freedom".

I suppose that depends on how nebulously you want to define those terms, or probably more relevantly, it would depend on the situation they're used in.

The word control sort of implies situations where the two elements are people and people, and that word is more designed for people and things they use. In the context of OP's post, I'd say they're referring to systems of government in which case it can either be contracted to indefinite concepts that again differ case-by-case/person-by-person or expanded to encompass age old debates of capitalism vs communism. Or theology vs philosophy. Pineapple on pizza or no pineapple on pizza.

Personally it feels fashionable these days for people to ignore order for the more exciting chaotic options. But I've come to wonder if that's just me getting older and more cynical/not being able to see good qualities in people. So... psychologically speaking I guess that means I put more value in the concept of control and order over freedom and chaos. (There can be some mutual exclusivity to those concepts, but by and large tend to be antonymous imo.)

 

 

[Fluttershutter 2,491]

From what I've seen the trend seems to be people wanting more control and less freedom for supposed safety and security.

[Luna the Great of all the Russias 2,986]

On 2021-11-05 at 11:48 AM, Fluttershutter said:

From what I've seen the trend seems to be people wanting more control and less freedom for supposed safety and security.

This has been the general trend for over a century. These are the general series of events that occur:

• A real or fabricated crisis is widely reported.
• The population is significantly made more submissive temporarily for as it relies on the state for protection and care. The ability to reason and any ability to organize resistance decrease.
• The population's demand for the state to expand its role in interfering in their lives justifies the state's expansion of power.
• As the initial scare of the crisis wanes, the population slowly sheds their submissiveness and become increasingly intolerant towards the newly granted powers to the state.
• The state may possibly reduce the amount of power it was recently granted, but it never quite returns to the pre-crisis period. There are at least a few reasons for this:
  • The new state of affairs has now become normalized to an extent: the Overton Window has shifted. While the population may become more resistant to the increased state power, they have become more permanently submissive to at least a small extent. This is from the increased reliance on the state during the crisis era and propaganda which convinces the population that the change in the state of affairs is better than what preceded the crisis.
  • Special interests how have benefited from the crisis, monetarily, politically, etc. are now interested in prolonging the crisis. They may, for example, speak of "measures to prevent a crisis like this from happening again in the future".
  • Every succeeding generation of the population will not have as a point of reference from the pre-crisis era: they will be taught that past eras were worse and that the current era is better.
• Repeat the process in future crises.

This has occurred numerous times with economic panics and wars (both World Wars and the Great Depression in particular) being significant crisis periods.

Edited November 7, 2021 by Luna the Great of all the Russias