Freedom and fear

The clash between individual rights and civic duties is a never-ending one. Over the weekend Trevor asked me for help commenting a quote from Mahatma Gandhi:

The Ganges of rights springs from the Himalaya of duties

Hard as I have sought, I have been unable to find the literal quote, but the idea was already in his 1909 book Hind Swaraj or Inidan Home Rule. The quote is probably a paraphrase of the concept that it is everybody else's duties that holds our rights and the latter are only as accomplished as the duties are fulfilled. For instance, if many women do not their right to equal pay come true, it is because many employers fail to comply with their duty of paying equal salary for equal work.

Photo: By Source, Fair use, Link

It is a frequent argument that many basic rights can be deemed "natural": the right to a life, the right to healthy and nutritious sustenance, the right having a family and a home. But surprisingly none of these "rights" are present in nature: roving bands (in a number of species) have been known to leave their sick and elderly to die alone because it would burden the group too much; the predominance of physical force (and hence of males in the case of many primates) is an unavoidable part of wild life; and the examples go on and on. It is noteworthy the different measuring stick that use when comparing with animals: to praise them we use the term "natural", and to deride them we prefer "wild". Because that is precisely one of the benefits of civilization: protecting us from the wild.

However, regardless of how powerful the protection of society is, it also provides another benefit which could be considered even more important: it protects us from freedom (or at least from too much freedom). I have discussed in the past how difficult it can be to make a decision just out of the sheer number of options. Having too many options requires analyzing each on in particular and weighing them against one another, so doubling the number of options means four times as much comparison work. But even binary decisions, such as "shall I take this job offer?", can be sometimes very hard, because each of the options has a lot of implications and the analysis of all the details is certainly very tiring and can even exceed the capabilities of more than one.

My mother introduced me to the concept of "The Fear of Freedom" through a book of the same title by German psychologist Erich Fromm. I have just learnt that the book, published in 1941,  is not only older than myself, but even older than my mother, and still every bit applicable. Everyday millions of people give up significant portions of their freedom unnecessarily for the benefit of not having to think, because thinking is effortful and scary. Making the wrong call can spell disaster in a number of ways, from social exclusion to economic ruin or a broken marriage, so a lot of people are content with following their book (whatever it is) and live the life that someone else has designed, trading the accomplishment linked to their own triumphs for the comfort of the mainstream.

It has been posited that Fromm wrote the book in reaction to the horrifying blindness of the German society who, afraid of making mistakes that would shame them again in front of the international community, fell into the arms of an always-ready savior that would tell them exactly what to do, and then followed the instructions without questioning. Luckily democracy has evolved a lot since and most of the silent bystanders who "choose not choose" do not go on to achieve anything great, but they do not cause any major harm either.

This morning I was pushed really hard to test a command sequence in the instrument that we had never run before. In theory, it should run, but without factual proof we would have been running the risk of unexpected behaviors. I expressed my concern that the test could fail and then I would not have time to fix it, but agreed to proceed in case everything went fine and we could have the sequence cleared. The instrument demonstrated that it was able to produce images of 896x896 pixels with the same reliability that it had previously produce others of 768x768. The problem now, and this is where it comes to freedom, is that now the science team has to choose which size to use, because bigger images will also mean less images. And now they are not actually sure that they want the bigger ones.

Freedom is scary, but unavoidable, and even when we decide "not to decide" the only thing that we are achieving is to let the circumstances choose for us. But circumstances can be wrong too. Have a nice week.