Freedom takes a lot of responsibility.
Responsibility = Courage, Endurance, Perserverance, Willpower, Strength, Self-Improvement, Selfishness
People don't realize what it takes to be free. You have to watch out for yourself first. You need a lot of money, knowledge and you need to be able to be alone for a long time.
Sounds like a box to me. I believe freedom is actually a lot more than that. ;) It is also expressed in an individual and potentially different for each of us.
It also exists with or without money.
I'm agreeing with most of what @valorforfreedom is saying, but I recognize that being free is also kind of a mindset for folks with little option to resist as well.
I'll take a stab this this:
The actions required to keep a society free depend on the personal attributes that @valorforfreedom notes; the actions required to keep an individual free depend on that person's abilities and goals
Money is a tool; it's not necessary in the struggle, but it sure is useful!
There are different levels of freedom.
I know from experience that you can not be free without money dwinblood.
You will not be able to go where you want, you will not able to resist the government, you will not be able to get what you want.
Total freedom is like a box without money.
People will not want to be around you as no money is a sign of laziness, no motivation and a lack of dreams.
I suggest you check out Operationwerewolf.com to see what freedom with money looks like.
They have built their own world with money, sweat and blood and they prepare themself everyday to prevent other people from taking it away from them. I really love it.
Cannot is a form of absolute. It only takes one example to disprove an absolute.
There are societies and people without money. There are also people living off the grid (I've encountered a few in the mountains) that have no need of money.
So by your logic they can't be free.
Money is a tool. We are tool creators. Freedom existed before tools.
I agree with that argument. I just don't like freedom without money which is like a "limited" freedom.
Hahaha.... Well I can get not liking it. :)
I will tell you I served a very rich guy his last meal before he went and blew his brains out with a shotgun. And no, it was not my food that put him to it.
He was very unhappy.
Money can become a trap too.
My response to you initially was basically to say FREEDOM is a lot bigger than what you were describing. It was like if there was a big open space called FREEDOM full of stars and you pointed at one solar system and said "That's freedom" when in reality all the stars out there were freedom.
Freedom can be a very subjective thing. For me it is basically about voluntaryism. Being able to make choices, rather than having choices forced upon me.
As far as money and today. The problem is we are not truly free today. There are MANY things forced upon us which we cannot choose to not do.
They are not also things required for survival. They are things created artificially by other people.
When such situations exist we cannot truly be free.
So money as you and I deal with now is from a perspective from WITHIN that environment.
Part of why money seems like freedom is because they take more and more of that money and you can't say NO DON'T TAKE THAT. Which leaves us with less and we struggle due to that being the tool of trade in our environment.
When we have more money their taking of our money is less of a burden.
Yet, as my example above (it was true by the way... that really did happen) states even a wealthy person can feel trapped and not free.
The problem with rich people is that they lack meaningful relationships, for most of them people are a means to get money.
The video I posted above is a society of men with a goal. They created a family, that is what rich people lack.
I don't want to be a rich guy without people.
I want to be rich, have my chosen people around, improve myself in every aspect and experience life.
This is not true. You are trying to put them in a box. You are GROUPING people.
Freedom is about viewing people as individuals.
What you said is indeed true about SOME rich people. It is also true about SOME poor people.
Yet it is a haste generalization and is not true overall.
Being rich is not a crime. Being poor is not a crime.
Being a slave is a crime.
Also I thought I'd add. Some of the most free moments in my life did not involve money in any form.
I can agree with that too. So the conclusion is that freedom does not need money but it is limited. With money you have all the options.
No. Yet you can see the other response I just wrote you that was long. That explains why I said no. :)
That does not mean that options are limited. You can create your own things without taxes.
You can create your own things without money too. ;) I do it very often. I've been poor my entire life. I simply learned to do things different.
I've known some very rich people, who didn't share their wealth with me.
I've observed them say "I'm broke" because they were having trouble making one of their car payments that month.
I realized to that person they THOUGHT THEY WERE.
Yet that year my family and I (wife, and 4 kids) survived on $19,000 for all of us.
In my opinion he truly had no idea what BROKE really meant.
Yet I realized recently that we can ALL think we are broke, or poor regardless of how much money we have.
It is all in how we perceive reality. If we have not experienced what a beggar on the streets eating scraps from garbage has experienced then that doesn't mean we won't have our own idea of what broke means.
These are all defining societies with money as a tool. Yet we exist whether money exists or not.
The problem with money is that it becomes the easy path. We think with it our problems are solved. We think with it that it opens all paths.
It does not. There are paths that those with a lot of money never see. They don't even know they exist.
They don't know how to entertain themselves and their family without money for example. I on the other hand am very well versed in entertainment without money.
So it is about perspective. Yet there is a lot more to it than money. Thinking about it just in terms of money can blind you to the other parts of freedom.
Amen!
Sure everything he said is a factor. Yet, ultimately they do not define freedom.
Freedom if I were to get as simple as I could is. Individualism. Freedom is being you, and not trying to mimic someone else (unless you choose to).
All money does is open more paths that you can walk in your adventure. That gives you more choices.
Yet if you have fewer choices you can still be free.
Money IS a tool, as you indicate. It also is a necessary tool. As with all tools it can be used for benevolent or malevolent purposes.
I don't disagree with @valorforfreedom. I simply see trying to stuff freedom into a box as the step towards no freedom.
Freedom is not being in a box.
freedom is deciding if you want to be in the box, or if you want to run off in the woods and eat flowers and moss, or deciding that you want to be a corporate slave ;>
I've seen some people say they want to sleep on the ground. What are they afraid of? Why give up what you have, just to run and hide? I say stay and fight for what you still have left.
I do see the option of going underground, or Galt.
Different people have different aggression levels, and different thoughts on the best way to protect their families
And deciding WHEN you want to stop doing any of those things.