What does a snake eating its own tail have to do with freedom?  Freedom is an interesting concept.  Recall that it is one of those things that doesn’t actually exist, or if you had a spectrum between real bricks on one side and bricks made out of skittles that you imagined because you read them on a piece of paper covered with squiggles and your mind created the image on the other, it would be much nearer the brick made out of skittles than the heavy thing that people tend to build walls with.  As more of an unreal than real kind of thing, it is therefore a bit slippery to define or grasp.

When you declare yourself to be something, an identity politics kind of thing, then you are no longer as free as you were to begin with.  So, for example, let’s say that you have declared yourself to be an anarchist, and therefore are not going to be following the rules of hierarchy for as much as you can get away with as a matter of principle.  That means you are not free to support hierarchy.  You can’t become Emperor, and you can’t become CEO of a trans-national corporation which provides Tasers for the human trafficking system.  By declaring yourself to be free from rules, you are less free.

It works all the way on the other side of the spectrum as well.  Let’s say that you have declared yourself to be a Unitarian, and a member of the local Unitarian church.  That means you have decided to be bound by their rules, be bound by their democratic decisions, their bylaws and consensus processes.  That is a tradeoff, you can’t do these dignity-lowering things here, and yet because they are many, you do have more options than you would as a lone individual.

If, on the other hand, you declare that you will never join a group, because you want to remain free?  Then you are not free to join groups.  Or to leave them.  Freedom of association isn’t quite the contradictory statement that one sees at first glance.  If you are free, then you are able to join the most hateful nationalist group out there, and to vote or not vote as your conscience dictates.  If you are free, then you are able to create massive wars, and to change the climate through the efforts of multi-national joint military and drug-running gang efforts, and to lie to the public about what you are doing in complete privacy.  If you are truly free, you can change the way the money works, or you can lead people down the path of their own destruction as The Satanic Bible says you can.  Or can you?

Then we get into the old philosophical argument of free will, wherein POSIWID (The Purpose of a System is What It Does) is used to disprove its existence.  If people truly had free will, then 100% of them would not have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  The argument is, if everybody makes a particular choice in one direction and not the other, then that is proof that everybody was coerced to make that decision.  Res Ipsa Loquitur.  Are people truly free?  You couldn’t disprove it, because no two people really make all of the same decisions.  Then again, using the same logic, you could disprove that sin exists, by simply proving that not-sin doesn’t exist, and therefore everything is sin, and therefore the definition of sin versus not-sin can’t exist.

Originally, I had told a friend that a group MUST be able to exclude others, or it would not remain a coherent group.  That’s one of those negative axioms: freedom to associate necessarily implies a freedom to disassociate.  Freedom of speech necessarily implies a freedom to remain silent and private.  Freedom to exist as a church necessarily implies the ability to exclude people who don’t obey the membership rules.  Freedom to exist as a tribe necessarily implies the ability to exclude the bastard who beats his neighbor’s wife who he’s been raping.  Freedom to exist as a nation necessarily implies the ability to exclude criminals who don’t obey the membership rules.  Shunning is different than imprisonment.

I thought that these truths were self-evident, but I should have looked around and realized that they definitely are not self-evident.  I can’t bind groups like that.  Groups are free to make stupid decisions, stupid membership rules, and to fail.  There are no “musts” in the world, nor even any “shoulds”.  There is only probability of adverse consequences, and the grinding wheel of time which dissolves all groups and destroys all statues of Ozymandias over time.  It was a form of yelling at the tide to stop advancing, and I’m sorry.  I make lots of philosophical mistakes, and I probably will continue to do so.