You cannot live in society without rules. Your freedom can never be absolute because that conflicts with the absolute freedom of others. That means that there will always be rules and "Authorities" to enforce the rules.

The only way to escape the Authorities is to live completely alone.

I suppose you could also achieve absolute freedom from Authority by becoming an absolute ruler. Then you would be the Authority and have absolute freedom while no one else had any.

It's not a prison, its just a system to make living with millions of other people bearable.

I get the idea that these people really want to live by themselves somewhere. They should be supporting space travel for all they're worth.

Since the article I quoted was talking from a spiritual perspective, and your response addresses it from a political perspective, I'm not sure which level to answer on. So I'll try to do a little of both, and in the process probably end up biting off far more than I can chew. :)

You make the implicit assumption (as most people in our culture do) that the natural state of humanity is to be constantly at odds with one another, and thus anyone who has absolute freedom will automatically use it to infringe upon that of others. I would suggest that in a natural environment, this is true for only a tiny percentage of the population. (Incidentally, that tiny percentage generally ends up being the same group who become the "Authorities" because of their very nature.)

Our society, by and large, is constantly encouraging people to be selfish -- to take as much as we can from everybody else, to deprive others so that our own bank accounts can be "richer" and we can feel secure from others who might try to take it. This behavior, when practiced on a mass scale, ends up actually making everybody poorer in the long run. This leads to a cycle of artificial scarcity that is self-reinforcing, and people are led through fear to believe that the rest of humanity is just like they are -- out to get them, because they're trying to take as much as they can from everybody else (whether they really need it or not).

In cultures where everybody is encouraged -- starting from the cradle on up -- to believe that the well-being of their neighbors is genuinely necessary in order for their own well being to be assured, there is no such idea that "my absolute freedom conflicts with others' absolute freedom", because anybody who had absolute freedom would use it to increase the freedom of others, rather than restrict it.

The problem we have is that the aforementioned tiny percentage who are infected with what might be called a "hoarding disorder" have, over the course of many generations, managed to convince pretty much everybody that the only way to survive is to grab as much as possible at the expense of others. That is to say: their disease has infected the rest of us! How and why that happened is a big subject that I'm not going to tackle right now.

Now, with people converted to their way of thinking, these "authorities" can impose laws and rules to regulate the greed that has is caused by their own idiotic ways of operating. (For evidence of the insanity inherent in this, just look at billionaires who have enough money to buy everything they could possibly want for the rest of their lives, yet still they continue to try to make more money. What good will it do them? They don't know, but their disease compels them to continue seeking it. So it is with pretty much anybody raised in this country (i.e. none of us are starving), albeit to a lesser degree.)

I agree that this isn't going to be solved in our lifetime, if ever. You say:

"The only way to escape the Authorities is to live completely alone."

The article I quoted agrees with you, although I didn't include that part earlier. Here it is:

"Obviously, unless one becomes a hermit in a cave (and even then it can be difficult), one who lives within the constraints of the system can't help but be caught up within it."

But this isn't what fp is proposing we try to do. The solution he suggests is not a political one, but it is a personal way to live and find happiness despite being surrounded by the prison. ("A prison, for your mind." Sorry, I couldn't resist. ;)

I would posit that if one follows the solution that fp suggests, and constantly renouces the illusions of the authorities, then in addition to finding personal happiness, we might also avoid catching and spreading the disease to others, thus perhaps reversing the trend just a little.

"I suppose you could also achieve absolute freedom from Authority by becoming an absolute ruler."

If by "absolute ruler", you mean having absolute control over oneself, then I would agree. If you're talking about trying to control other people, then I would say (again, going back to the spiritual context of the article) that anybody who even tries has already fallen under the illusion, and is a slave to it.

As for space travel... Well, it's a tangent, but I'll bite. Space colonization makes good scifi stories, and that's about all IMO. To my knowledge, astronomers have yet to discover any habitable planets using telescopes (even with the ability to look hundreds of lightyears into space), yet no human has even touched the surface of any of the other planets in this solar system.

Even on the theorotical assumption that the technology for space colonization is within our grasp, it would do no good in addressing these problems. The Authorities would just follow anybody who tried to escape into space and hunt them down as effectively as they did here. (Incidentally, that's today's Salon cover story.)

I'm not sure that everyone ends up poorer in the system we've got. It obviously works, because its become the dominant system on the planet. All the nice cooperative cultures get wiped out by the nasty aggressive ones. There's a lesson in there.

Back to space travel... We'd better keep our greedy aggressive warmongering culture so that when the alien conquerers arrive we can defend ourselves. :-)

I think space is our next Western Frontier. There was plenty of freedom and escape from Authority when you could travel west and live on your own. When the Authorities arrived you could move farther west.

With sci-fi-ish space travel, you could go far enough out and lose yourself so well that it'd be hundreds or thousands of years before anyone else found you.

Again, that's a great fantasy. Good for books and tv shows. Just not practical unless there is some huge breakthrough that ends up reversing much of the current knowledge about physics.

Make a craft that has not only enough onboard energy to power itself out of the solar system, but also to support human life for the many years (or, more likely, lifetimes) it would take to reach another habitable planet. All this time would be spent cooped up inside a tiny piece of metal. Away from the sun, there has to be another energy source to create food (unless it's all stored onboard, which would make the craft more massive). Also, a constant supply of oxygen and heat would be required.

The wild west was an environment that was already suitable for human habitation. Space isn't.

More babbling from me... :-)

What is an illusion about absolute power? You give orders, they obey.

If they don't, hurt them until they do or die and then use them as an example to encourage the next one in line. Start out as the toughest bully around, then get some enforcers, then you can keep them in line because they won't be sure the other enforcers won't protect you.

Voila, kings, knights and aristocracy right there.

The illusion is that it will bring happiness. Unless you define living in a state of constant paranoia and suspicion as happy. Look at pretty much all dictators throughout history. They're always having to watch their backs, because they're rightly afraid that some of the repression and violence they have perpetrated might come back to strike them (and it often does).

Even if I could be an absolute dictator, I'd rather not be, because the overall conditions brought about by an authoritarian state are undesirable to me. Wouldn't it be better to live in a world where you don't have to lock your doors, not because criminals fear the punishment, but because everybody is taken care of and nobody feels the need to rob from others? That's what we should be aiming for.

Living off Nature might sound good, and all, but I really don't think it'd work like you expect.

The first time a shortage of food or water happened, the strongest would take what they needed for themselves and their family/tribe/nation and screw the other guys.

That's nature for you. No one is going to share what they have so they can all die cooperatively together.

Chances are that the energy spent fighting over the resources would result in more overall loss than gain. This is true even for *most* of the people in the "winning" party (but there are a few at the very upper echelons who would benefit materially). War at any scale is expensive!

For a modern example, look at the war in Iraq. One country has a resource shortage (oil), so it invades another country to try and take it. In the process, it expends massive quantities of energy, materials, money, and life. Who benefits? Nobody, except perhaps the Halliburton executives. The oil gains are offset by the cost of the fighting.

The same is true of primitive cultures, just on a different scale. In the water example, I bet less people from both tribes would die if they got together and dug a well instead of killing each other over who gets to drink from the stream.

The only reason they wouldn't seek such an alternative first is because the Authorities, afflicted with what can best be described as a mental disease (which is contagious), trick them using lies and hatred. It's happened over and over again throughout recorded history.

The question we need to be asking is this: How do we cure it?