Comment on Alpha males
squaresinger@lemmy.world 5 days agoThere are two kinds of freedom, and you are mixing these up.
There’s positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom is “freedom of”, while positive freedom is “freedom to”.
Negative freedom means I don’t have to follow rules. Nobody tells me what to do or not to do. A man starving in the desert has perfect negative freedom. He can choose completely freely on which dune to die, nobody’s there to stop him or to tell him what to do.
Positive freedom means I have more choices. A good example is the highway system. I can drive at any time of day or night into any direction I want to at a very high speed and quite high safety. I have more freedom of movement than kings had 200 years ago.
Positive and negative freedom often contradict. Again, the highway system is a good example: The only reason I can safely and quickly drive wherever I want is because of the highway code (or equivalent depending on the country). There’s a huge rule work with rules upon rules on what I can and cannot do, and only the fact that most people follow these rules quite closely enables fast and safe travels for me.
A large portion about the “missing freedoms” you describe are only possible because people follow rules. If there was no rule of law, then there would be no club, there would be no concert and so on.
And that’s why the “domestication is captivity” argument of yours falls flat. Captivity takes freedoms without returning anything. If you sit in jail, there’s a lot less things you can do compared to when you don’t sit in jail. “Domestication” sacrifices some negative freedoms (aka you need to follow rules) but in turn you get positive freedoms that are completely out of this world compared to how people used to live.
Compare the things you can do (never be hungry, live in a heated/cooled building, travel around the world if you want to, learn whatever you want whenever you want, never be bored due to endless entertainment, and so on and so on) with the things a “wild” human from 100 000 years ago could do.
This massive increase in freedom is in no way comparable to captivity, which just takes freedom without giving anything in return.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 days ago
I mean, your two types of freedom discourse is largely correct, but this is missing the point I am making.
My original point is that civilization essentially is a form of self-domestication.
Then comes someone to attempt to disprove this by basically turning this into a discussion of comparative freedoms and standards of living.
Sure, ok but thats a non sequitur, its talking around my point, my claim, instead of actually challenging it.
Yep, we generally have more freedom from starvation, disease, etc.
The trade off is that we have more requirements of other kinds and less freedoms of other kinds.
This has nothing to do with the fact of domestication, it has to do with determining whether or not it is good or desireable.
At no point have I said anything like ‘it was better before we invented cities and civilization and industrial technology.’
That would be a different claim, where what you point out would be relevant, but its not the claim I’ve made.
Also, captivity does not return nothing, strictly necessarily speaking within the original domain specific comparison of animal captivity, also the history of civilization very much includes the history of slavery, and yep, your definition of domestication agrees with what I am saying, have said.
You and underpantsweevil have both assumed I am making some kind of moral, ethical, ‘should be’ type claim.
Nope, I am not, I am just pointing out that civilized society is way different than 100k BCE society, and that if you time teleported a person from that era to our modern era, they’d likely describe the experience of integrating into our society as similar to being made into a pet, or perhaps highly ritualistic social role from their society, that they would feel like they were acting or performing in a world of millions of rules, and expected to do so all the time.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You are using a motte-and-bailey switch right now.
Nobody was talking against the self-domestication point. That one is your bailey argument: A simple, easy-to-defend stantement that means very little and is largely correct.
The motte argument that everyone was contending was that domestication equals captivity. That one is a garbage claim that just doesn’t hold up.
You lead with the domestication equals captivity point and when you got called out on it you are now trying to switch from your motte argument to the bailey argument, claiming that this was what you were saying all along and not acknowleding that you switched arguments half-way in between.
And yes, equalling domestication and captivity is a moral, ethical, ‘should-be’ claim, and you repeated doing so in this last comment of yours as well by equalling the cuman condition with animal captivity while bringing up slavery in the same line which actually is quite close to animal captivity. The general human condition in 2025 does not equal slavery.
The only way you would seriously make that argument is if you either have no idea what slavery is (which I doubt) or if you want to claim that slavery is not “some kind of moral, ethical, ‘should be’ type” of problem.
And if you can’t see problems with slavery, we might have a bigger issue at hand.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Again, no, you’re wrong, you are thinking I made a claim I didn’t make, and at this point are just generally not able to read and parse what I am saying without imposing your own incorrect interpretation on it.
I am making a semantic, definitional, technical ‘claim’ or argument, not a moral one.
Also, specifically to slavery and captivity, If you think slavery existed before civilization, anthropological and historical data strongly suggest you are wrong, slavery came about with civilization.
For a more modern and widrspread comparison of animal captivity to modern human society, consider prisons, incarceration, whch also came about with civilization, particularly became more widesprrad with industrial civilization.
But anyway, I won’t be arguing with you on this anymore, as you are determined to continuously misconstrue what I am saying.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
If your point is semantic or definitional, then it needs to follow the semantics and definition of the word you are referring to. Not being able to steal things or consume services without paying for them is not captivity.
Your point is that you made up a definition and then claim that this definition is correct.