Power and Freedom examines how influence—like Sean Penn’s decades-long activism versus Kim Kardashian’s fleeting fame—differs from physical strength, revealing power’s reliance on shaping others’ choices. Freedom, defined by uninfluenced decision-making, thrives alongside cooperation, as seen in democratic societies enabling progress (e.g., factory farms, building codes) while oppressive regimes like North Korea or Hitler’s Germany collapse under resource scarcity and brain drain. Autocracy’s etymology ("self-rule") ironically mirrors anarchy, exposing its paradoxical grip on both leader freedom and societal stagnation. [Automatically generated summary]
Due to circumstances beyond my control, Jeff's sound is of lower quality this week.
I apologize for this and please know that future podcasts will not have the same problem.
Enjoy.
And we're back.
Welcome to Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
Before we start today, I just want to let everyone know again that we do have an email address, truthunrestricted at gmail.com, for any feedback, any thoughts on the show, anything we say here you think we're dead wrong about.
Especially want to hear about that.
Please disagree with him.
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If you disagree strenuously enough and with enough verbal fortitude, maybe I'll even want to do a podcast with you, if that's your desire.
Today, we're going to talk about power and freedom.
And before we start that, I just want my physicist friends to know that I know that power is some amount of work or energy that is exerted over a specified length of time.
And that what we talk about on this podcast is social power.
But to make the podcast less clunky, we're just going to call it power.
And if we need to refer to actual power, we'll call it physical power, just because I'm a nerd.
Power and freedom.
First, we'll start with power.
What is power?
When we talk about a person being powerful, what do we mean when we say that?
What do you think?
Power is typically measured in power over others.
I define it officially in the dictionary of Spencer as the ability to influence the decisions of other people.
So we typically think of the rich people among us as being powerful.
It's not necessarily true.
Famous people are probably, in some cases, more powerful than rich people.
They influence a lot of decisions, but they have to try to influence them.
Sean Penn, as a famous person, has tried very hard to influence a great many decisions of individual people in the past 20 years, whereas Kim Kardashian hasn't really worked to change the minds of a lot of many people on a lot of stuff.
Maybe a couple of things here and there, but not all that many things.
And she's arguably more popular, actually, than Sean Penn.
So it's not a cut and dry thing.
You're more famous, you're more powerful.
It's not a cut and dry thing.
You're more rich, you're more powerful.
It's just influencing the decisions of others.
If you really do that, then you're powerful.
And of course, your relationship to the people involved, that's a big deal.
Most people are, they hope, influencing the decisions of their children.
They're probably less so influencing the decisions of other people's children.
Obviously, your relationship to your children puts you in a position of power that just being old doesn't give you as power over other people's children.
That should be very obvious.
Like sometimes I say things and I go, why do I even bother saying that?
Everyone already knows that, except that we want to talk about it.
And it's a segue to a conversation where we put the whole thing in context.
Yeah.
So I think that's enough about power.
I think we need to really get in the full spiral here of what is freedom.
It's probably a little more interesting.
What do you think?
What is freedom to you, Jeff?
The ability to do whatever the hell you want.
That's a very good definition.
It does really cover everything.
In my more official language that I come up with, it's two things, but they slur beautifully into what you said.
The ability to make a decision for yourself without the influence of other people.
And also, there's an aspect of having a greater range of decisions available to you increases your freedom as well.
So, for example, we very naturally have a greater range of decisions available to us than anyone in ancient Rome did because we have computers, we have video games, we can become doctors.
The wide variety of things available to us is just immense compared to the things that were available to ancient Romans, even though we always compare ourselves to ancient Romans in the end.
Our society is just more advanced.
It's more rich.
We have a greater number of decisions available.
And in our society, some of us have more decisions available to us than others.
Some of us feel as we're growing up, we feel like we're not going to be able to become doctors.
And whether that's a sad thing or a thing that some of us need to just realize so we move on to more useful stuff, that's up to each individual user.
But that's how it is.
Not everyone feels like they could become a doctor.
How that comes to be can be all kinds of reasons why that could be, but it definitely is.
To me, the interesting part is that we have two social forces that are opposing each other very naturally.
To have a person be powerful, they need to influence decisions of others.
To have a person be free, they have to be able to decide without that other person.
What do you think of this idea that we have two halves of this thing?
Well, yeah, I think it would be better to say like two complementary rather than opposing forces, because working with the base philosophical definitions that you've laid out for power and freedom, someone who has more power de facto also has more freedom.
If they have the ability to influence the decisions of others, that means their decisions are less influenced by others.
So one sort of implies the other.
If you take an individual who has a lot of power, they tend to also have a lot of freedom.
Yes.
But what about the people who are giving them power?
Let's say you have a mayor and he's more powerful than just an average person in the town.
So he's more powerful, but the person in the town might want their freedom.
Should they give any power to the mayor at all?
Why won't a person decide that they don't need a mayor?
They want their freedom back.
Typically, the public would only, at least under the governmental frameworks that we've experimented with as people, people don't really like giving up power to one individual unless it ensures a minimum level of freedom for themselves.
So your example of the mayor, the mayor has like a town mayor arguably has more power than your average citizen in said town.
But those two individuals probably have roughly the same level of freedoms in that scenario.
However, a despot or dictator has a great deal more power than the average citizen in the country that he is in control of.
And he also has far more freedom than the people that he exerts control over.
So it's almost like the two curves meet in the extreme.
So for an individual, one individual at the top, they would spiral forward to have both.
But as far as the everyday person goes, that just isn't happening.
How does it look from our point of view?
We don't like despots.
We don't like tyrants.
We don't want them.
Exactly.
When I look at this in fiction that I've read, this is often portrayed as security versus freedom.
To get a greater amount of security, you have to give up more of your freedoms to be that secure.
And in order to be more free, you have to give up some security.
To me, in these scenarios, you're gaining security only by giving someone the power to arrange it.
I think it's more valid to call it power versus freedom than security versus freedom.
Security might be the ostensible reason why you might give up some more of your freedoms to give someone more power.
But power is the more truer.
I think it's a more true measure of what you're getting.
You're getting a powerful person.
Yes.
And it also really sharpens the spear to the point where you need to see what you're really doing.
9-11 happens and we as a society agree that there's more of a little more of a danger.
We are now a little bit more okay with some of the things the government's going to do to keep us secure.
You're allowing someone to have more power.
That's really what you're doing when you're doing that.
And you're hoping that they give you security.
It's not necessarily true.
But as soon as you're giving up that freedom, you're making someone else more powerful.
That's guaranteed right out of the gate.
So here's a question.
In general, in Western society, we talk about freedom like it's the ultimate goal.
It's the number one thing that we want is to be free.
So here's a question that's worth asking.
Do we want anyone to have power?
Can we think of a society where everyone is actually equal in power and therefore everyone has as much freedom as they could possibly grasp?
Is that a useful goal?
Well, what do you mean?
Like, do we want anyone to have power?
Like, do we philosophically want to cordon off a chunk of a society or group and say, we can't let those people have power?
Is that your question?
No, I mean, let's scale it down.
Let's say we are not a nation of many millions of people.
Let's say we are a tribe of proto-humans of whatever description, Neanderthals, early human.
A million years ago, we live in caves and one of us wants to be the leader.
But in order for that one person to be the leader, we have to let that person be the leader.
And we have to agree to do what that leader wants us to do.
There's some level of freedom we would have to give up in order for that person to be in charge.
Why would we want that?
Why don't we just want to remain free just as we are and not have anyone be in charge?
Well, because a lot of the greatest luxuries and benefits that we enjoy as a society only exist through collective action, people working together, obeying a set of laws, agreeing not to steal from each other, agreeing not to murder each other to kidnap their wives and children.
All of these general rules of law that we live in as a society takes cooperation from the entire group.
You need a rule of law to get on as a people, or the strongest are just going to take what they want and the weak are going to get screwed and your power and freedom gets real simple, black and white.
So it's the selfishness of other people that will cause this.
The only reason to have rules is because we don't necessarily trust everyone to do the right thing without them.
The set of rules we'll have in any society, in any situation, when you list a set of rules, it says a lot about the things that you expect other people to do on their own or not do on their own.
But before we get to cerebral with this sidebar, circling back to your Neanderthal example, that tribe needs to function together as a group.
They need to coordinate their gathering.
They need to coordinate their hunting if they want to be successful at it.
And there will be more food and more luxury and success for them as a group if they cooperate.
It's just a fact.
How they achieve that cooperation would be through a leader, because if you are 18, you need to have one person as a captain to kind of call the plays.
How that captain or chief or leader gets chosen would be a function of the disparity of power and freedom.
One way they could take it would be by proving that they're the smartest and most effective leader in the room and the best capable of coordinating tribal efforts and everyone lives well and is well fed and fat and happy.
And so that person stays in charge because everyone's happy.
But in that scenario, everyone else in the group still has power because they collectively have the power to say, ah, you're not providing that well for us anymore.
You're fired.
We're going to follow this person down.
That's an example of democratic power.
The other way for the one person to take power would be to just be the biggest, baddest mother effer on the block and beat the second most powerful person to death and then threaten to do that again to anyone else who crosses them and demand what they want from the rest of the group.
In that example, the individual has far more power and also far more freedom than the rest of the group.
And the rest of the group has no power or freedom at all.
Well, they would still have to accept that person as leader.
Any individual has to sleep sometime.
Fair counterpoint.
When I defined freedom, I said there was two components.
One being that you're able to make your decisions without anyone else influencing them.
And then the second one was that you have a greater availability of decisions in front of you that are possible because of these two together.
If it was just the first, you would probably forego ever letting anyone be in charge.
Because I think what you're saying is that when we allow someone to be in charge such that they can properly coordinate us as a group, we get a greater number of resources and therefore have a greater selection of decisions in front of us because of those resources.
And that's a thing that will increase our overall freedom, even if we have to give up some of our freedom to an individual and do as they please in order to accomplish the larger goals.
Yes, usually in the bulk of examples, human cooperation yields compounding returns.
When we scale up as a species, everybody does better than if we were all on our own.
That's a simple mathematical fact.
Yeah, generally, it's true.
Now, whether or not those resources are fairly distributed to everyone participating in the system is another point entirely.
There's the apocalypse scenario to consider when you get too numerous for your region that your region can't support you anymore.
So I guess there's a caveat to the idea.
On paper, it works really good, but there's some warnings involved.
Perhaps there might be an interesting paralleled mathematical curve in that tipping point of the benefits of scaling up sharply falling away, much the same as the relationship of power and freedom, both sharply peaking at top levels.
See if maybe the two curves were parallel.
I have no idea.
I don't have the brain to transcribe that kind of thing.
So the next question I have, since we worked this out, we have freedom and we have power.
We asked the question about power.
We should ask the same question about freedom, shouldn't we?
Do we want anyone to have freedom?
Is it useful to try to live like we're some kind of hive mind or like bees?
Bees don't really have much of lives.
They just work, work, work.
The queen makes more eggs and they die at the end of the season.
It's a good life, right?
Nope.
Not for humans?
You don't think that's good?
No, for humans, freedom's the reward, a full belly and a good night's sleep and no work to do.
That's freedom.
But what about the reward of being part of a great accomplishment?
We might get there, perhaps, as a species someday, but our natural biological imperatives of the need to eat, sleep, and fornicate makes us sort of inherently biologically selfish.
And so I think the level of complete selflessness that would be required by the sort of hive mind, idealist freedom commune, I don't think we're capable of, not for the next couple of generations anyway.
They're going to take a hard philosophical turn as a society.
So it was the selfishness of the other people in our fictional caveman community that required us to have things like rules and needing to work together and have some kind of leader to make sure we all have the rules enforced properly and all that.
But it's also selfishness that leads us to covet our own personal freedom and be sure that we're not being subject to a tyrannical ruler.
My thoughts on it when I think about that pair of questions is that most especially in our current age, we have long surpassed the age where a single very smart human can move the ball up the field, if you will.
A couple hundred years ago, we could do that.
We had Isaac Newton.
We had individuals who could see with brilliance the pattern and write it down and communicate it to the others.
And so they all got it.
I think probably the last human that as a single human made such a big leap like that was probably Albert Einstein.
And he actually did it in like 1898, I think.
And all the work he did after that and all the work since then all needed the cooperation of large groups of people to do.
And increasingly so.
All science now, we give the Nobel Prize to people in sciences, but all of them are leading a team of researchers to do these things.
This is how it is.
And I don't even think that very powerful computers are going to allow this to go back to a single human.
I think that we're going to always have this now.
And all of our technological achievements, it's not one guy that's making these cell phones that we're using every day.
Well, no, the low-hanging fruit has all been picked.
The stuff that's left takes a lot of brain power.
Right.
And it's very complicated.
It's very complicated.
Anyone who's tried to learn it has learned.
It's very complicated.
So if we want to make any progress at this point, we would need to have the ability to cooperate in these larger groups.
And the other reason why you have to have someone having power is, again, that security concern.
If we all got together and tried to live as the hilariously put autonomous collective from Monty Python, some other group that's outside of us would put themselves together and cooperate.
And however they picked a leader, whether it was one large bully or they democratically elected them, if they were cooperating, they would have an advantage over us and they would either overwhelm us by force or they would just out-compete us for resources.
That's the two ways that it happens in the wild.
And it's the same thing among different groups of humans that make any kind of contact with each other.
But I think that also makes a point to what you were talking about before.
The sharpened need for cooperation as a society, as a people, as a species, isn't just limited to the realm of science and scientific theory.
Because our population density has gotten as high as it is, we require a certain level of framework of law and order to establish cooperation, or it's really easy for the scales to get tipped dangerously out of whack.
A small example would be the new trade that I'm in now as a fire technician.
I'm learning about building code and fire code and like simple things like the width of egress corridors and the fact that stairs in an apartment tower, even if the framework is allowed to be made of wood, the stairs still need to be made of concrete because you can't have your escape route burning up.
It needs to be fireproof so everybody can get out.
Thought is put to this.
And many people are consulted on the making of these laws.
And there's just so goddamn many of them that need to be written and codified and enforced by a seemingly burgeoning class of bureaucrats and officers.
But it's all there simply because we're so densely packed.
The exit corridor in your house, there doesn't need to be a rule about that because there's only six of you that live there, tops.
But when you pack 300 people into a tower with one exit route, you need laws and rules.
Cooperation and exercise of technology and scaling up for our food production.
There's no way that our society could live if it weren't for the factory farms that everybody loves to denigrate.
But that speaks to a level of necessary cooperation in a society that leads to a great deal of freedom for the rest of us, being able to buy like a $12 bag of potatoes at the store that we couldn't hope to grow on our own that will feed our family for a week.
So I have another question here.
Do you think it's possible that when you are a leader of a group and the people of that group have a high amount of freedom, high degree of freedom available to them, that you would tend to have more power than a leader of a similarly sized group, but they didn't have a lot of freedoms.
Like they were just a despot who was bullying everyone into following them.
Is it better to be a democracy or dictatorship question?
Well, generally, yes.
But strictly from the standpoint of does the person in charge have more power under a group where the individuals have more freedoms versus a group where the individuals don't.
Yeah.
Does the person in charge have more power in group A versus group B is your question?
Yes.
Would they be a more powerful person if they were leading a group of people that had a larger number of freedoms available to them?
No, I don't think so.
You don't think so?
Well, by your definition of power, the freedom to make decisions outside of the influence of others, if you have a stranglehold dictatorship and everybody that you rule is your serf, you don't have to think about anybody other than yourself.
No, I think you're confusing the two.
Sorry, if I could interrupt, the tyrant would have a great amount of freedom because no one would ever restrict the tyrant's decisions.
And he also has a great deal of power because of his ability to dictatorially influence the decisions of his populace.
Right, but the populace itself has fewer decisions available to them.
So you would have a smaller number of decisions by proxy that you could make.
If they were all serfs and there were no doctors or lawyers, you have a whole different scenario than you have when you have every variety of person, including all the doctors and lawyers.
Okay.
To me, it's analogous directly to taxes.
If you build an economy where you have a strong, let's say it's a strong middle class, where there's a large number of people that have a reasonable amount of money, you're going to tend to get a larger amount in taxes because of it, versus if you build an economy where everyone is fairly poor, there's just a maximum number of taxes you could ever get from that, and it's never going to be that large.
But I think, again, what you're talking about there is resources.
Like we did bust those off and quantify them as a separate entity when we were talking about the relationship of power and freedom.
The product of work and the product of cooperation is resources.
If you can influence the decisions of people who themselves have a large number of freedoms, are you perhaps more powerful than a person who greatly influences the decisions of people, but they have fewer decisions to make?
Well, again, I think your measurement of power is based on your ability to influence the decisions of others.
The range of decisions that those people have in front of them doesn't mathematically factor into that power level.
I think it definitely does.
It's just your ability to get other people to do things for you.
Yeah, but the things they could do for you is much greater if they have.
And that is the product of work, also known as the means of production, also known as the resource product that we were discussing, which is a separate entity from power and freedom.
I mean, I understand the point that you're driving for, that philosophically we tend to do better when we live in a society where there's a certain minimum threshold of freedom for everyone, and the power that is afforded to the one person to steer the ship is strictly monitored and kept in check by the power held onto by the rest of the populace.
When you have a strong middle class, everybody does better, feeds more in society.
All of those people who want to be doctors, who have the natural intellectual capacity for it, don't have stupid economic hurdles in front of them that are barring them from access to that trade that they would excel at because it's within their talent set.
But I think all of those benefits are all felt by the group as a whole.
I don't think that the leader in power personally necessarily benefits any better or worse, depending on what system they're in charge of.
The group as a whole benefits far better from one where they hang on to a decent amount of power and freedom for the masses.
Right.
But if you were going to pit these two fictional nations against each other in a pitched war, which would you bet on?
I think that premise is flawed because any major conflict we've ever had as a people, not any, that's not fair, but there are plenty of examples, both world wars coming right to the forefront of the mind, where we have war between different nations, different powers that have our example of democratic versus despotic rulership.
And yet the products of civilization being technology levels and access to weaponry and science was sort of on par between both nations.
Your premise, which I philosophically agree with, that intellect and the greater bounty of human cooperation flourishes better under a democratic system versus a despotic one.
Despotic systems can crop up in the middle of a democratic one and basically co-opt all of the fruits that we had from that cozy society and then have all of that power and still all of those freedoms.
So if I were to pit, would I pit North Vietnam against, say, the United States of America?
Your average North Vietnamese citizen has very little freedom, very little power, and Kim Jong-un has all of it.
So you're confusing something.
Kim Jong-un is a North Korean leader, actually.
Yeah, that's what I said, North Korea.
Oh, he said North Vietnam.
Oh, sorry, North Korea.
My mistake.
Yeah.
The average North Korean citizen has very little freedom and next to no power.
Kim Jong-un has all the power and enjoys a remarkable level of freedom because of it.
His society is stagnating because anybody with a brain is fleeing if they can.
Most of his technology is borrowed, stolen, or researched at the point of the gun, and nobody works well under those circumstances.
Up against any major Western democratic power, yeah, for sure.
But then look at Hitler's Germany in World War II.
The Germans got jets before the rest of us did.
Well, there were several points through that war where there were very real chances of Germany proving victorious over the rest of the Western world.
I think that the example of North Korea is much more apt to the question because they've been under a despotic ruler for several generations now versus Germany that was a fully enlightened nation, potentially the nation with the greatest level of education in the world at that point, arguably, but possibly actually true.
And then they got co-opted as a tyrannical despotic thing.
And it didn't have that much time between it being an enlightened nation and being despotic.
But in North Korea, you have a situation where you have a despot who's been in charge for a very long time now, or him and his family have been in charge for a very long time.
And I think it's a very apt scenario.
If you took away the nuclear question in the conflict with North Korea, and then you just had them as North Korea versus South Korea, because you have in South Korea, you have a nation that is a much greater degree of freedom.
I'm not sure how you would pick that.
It's an interesting question.
It's one that tickles my brain.
We look at Kim Jong-un as the more powerful leader, I think, but we don't ever hear about the leader of South Korea.
They're not consequential in our lives.
We're not opposed to South Korea.
We're not potentially worried about military conflict with South Korea.
It's a friendly nation to us.
They probably also don't know who the Canadian prime minister is.
Canada is probably just as consequential to South Korea as South Korea is to Canada.
We only hear about Kim Jong-un because of the negatives, because he's a guy that's making all this noise.
He's rattling the chain right now.
In my mind, he's only a powerful person because he has nuclear weapons.
If he didn't have those, all the saber rattling in the world wouldn't matter at that point.
Maybe it's a choice made more from optimism, but I personally think that when a person is free and you try to take that freedom from them, they will fight much harder than a person who is under a tyrant and then they go to war.
And even if they lose, they'll just be under another tyrant.
Their heart just isn't going to be in it.
And I think that's a huge edge in these things.
But yeah, I think that when you try to take freedom away from a people who feel a high degree of freedom, that's when they really rise up.
And I think that isn't true with people who are subjugated.
Yeah.
Before we end this, as I was kind of doing some reading on the subject, I ran across this strange word.
It's not a strange word in that we never use it.
But to me, when I really looked at it, it's a strange word.
It's the word autocracy.
Now, our current definition of autocracy is rule by a single individual.
It would be like a tyrant or a despot.
That would be an autocracy.
But the actual etymological definition is self-rule.
When you break the word down to its Latin roots, that's what it really means.
Auto is self.
Self.
Self-rule.
We translate it as soul rule.
So what we see as autocracy is really anarchy?
Freedom, oddly.
So it's this odd word that's had its meaning almost completely flipped just because we use it differently.