Freedom

My definition of freedom is simple: exercise of free will. Of course, there are varying degrees of freedom for this definition (of mine.) It can come in all different flavors - as people living in oppressive authoritarian states still have a great degree of freedom. These "oppressed" peoples simply lack one small part of the equation to what society today has labeled as the "right" freedom: the right to vote. Unless each and every one of the citizens living in said oppressive state are tied to a ball and chain - and in this situation, I can finally concur that it is a lack of freedom - they can still exercise free will. Perhaps the way they are treated are unjust, but I have seen and heard many people brand the citizens who simply lack the right to vote as "needing freedom." They have a smaller degree of freedom compared to someone inhabiting a place such as Taiwan, simply because they lack that one ballot every X years. Freedom in its most intense state would return to primality - perhaps what Thomas Hobbs had described many years ago, with everyone living in a state of fear but free to do whatever they want because the world lacks a set of laws. Freedom needs to be regulated, and these regulations make sense - laws, they are called. Most people in this world live in proximity of each other in terms of the levels of freedom. For the point of this journal entry I suppose, these "levels" would be things like very restricted freedom or something of the sort.