I feel every time I start tussling with an idea in my head, you've got a video for it. For that, I'm infinitely in your debt. Thank you so much for the work you do.
Fascinating explanation; I was getting bogged down in research and you have cleared things up for me. Interesitng, and well presented. Thank you so much.
It would be absolutely wonderful to get Berlin's perspective on the modern world and the growing debate over peoples willingness to surrender their own privacy in the pursuit of convenience.
Thank you for the time and work you put into these videos. I wonder what Berlin would have thought, if he could see peoples submission and happy surrender to any master willing to lift the burden of decisions off their backs.
Abdication of responsibility is attractive. Confusion, stress, and desire to avoid threat, real and IMAGINARY, lead to submissiveness. That submissiveness can lead to authoritarianism, to which MUCH of any population (look at the rise of "leadership" in minds, college courses, and politics. This infantilism response has been used by Social Dominance Oriented aberrants throughout history, perhaps as long as the measured reduction in human cranial capacity, 10,000 measured years, paralleling the equivalent brain diminution occurring in domesticated canids and felids -- about 15 to 20%, when compared to wild conspecifics! Experiments with confined and overdense social mammals mirror human behavior exactly, with extremely aggressive/dominant as well as withdrawn, submissive individuals being the two major behavioral outcomes.
Thank God there’s a then & now video about this because reading berlin’s actual article is like having two opposing views play tug-of-war with your brain.
14:20 “Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.” ― Walter E. Williams
I just came across Mr Berlin through Dr Orr’s course on classical philosophy at the Peterson Academy. This is a useful summary - thank you but it would be better if we heard your point of view and its application to today.
So highly pertinent with today’s discussions on covid vaccines and whether government measures to safeguard the vaccinated majority of society, by cutting off those who *freely* choose not to vaccinate, are justified or not.
I honestly feel like I've completely misinterpreted Freedom To and Freedom From, Freedom To to me is your ability to achieve or do something and Freedom From is your ability to not experience certain events. For example I might want to jump on the bus tomorrow to get to a destination (freedom to travel) but I have a freedom from the passenger who speaks incredibly loud next to me (freedom from noise). This sounds like the latter is completely not considered.
I disagree with the statement “to be free is to know what’s best for us”. In line with Dostoyevsky I argue freedom is to do what you wish at the benefit or detriment of oneself. Freedom doesn’t implicate an urge of well being, we act freely to ruin ourselves all the time.
This statement is to highlight the rational aspect of human nature as it was said by js mill " Man is a rational creature" When we talk in this sense of rationality then a human knows his or her best interest and what he thinks is good for him is good for society too because he is rational But no individual is perfect they are only capable of perfection so we tend to misuse our freedom.. This is our fault that doesn't mean the statement is wrong🙃
What I do not understand about concept of positive liberty is that it is not only freedom *to* do something, but also a state of reason dominant over your lower instincts. I'd argue that control over lower instincts is not vital to be free *to* do, even though without self-control and education it would be meaningless. Having freedom *to* do is one thing, having conditions to use it properly is another.
Same here. Atwood's Gilead books are like an illustration of what can happen to society if 'negative liberty,' is what certain groups of people get (women, non-elites, non-white people) while other groups (white, elite, males in the books) get positive liberty, but only in a clandestine way. It ends up in corruption and suffering on all sides.
@@9000ck I don't see how the women in Gilead get negative freedom. You might be misunderstanding and thinking that negative = bad. The women in Gilead don't have either negative or positive freedom. The men/rulers have negative and positive freedom.
As always, what a simple, accurate, and nice explanation. Does anyone know if we can cite those videos as a reference for a final degree thesis? Huge thank you !!
Sometimes I found my roommates regretted after playing video games for a whole day during the weekend before the exam. Maybe that's how positive liberty is illustrated.
Inculcation can be described as the imposition of culture. Early in life we can be exposed to parental and other modeling of behavior, and later, thoughts, rationalizations, and beliefs. Deluded directly atrocious antisocial behaviors, assertions, and beliefs are thus imprinted. In our species, babies appear to be pre-armed with the disposition to survive through pleasing expressions, including imitation. Because comment must be severely truncated, only such notes on evolved social behaviors can fit here. But you can see how evolution favoring survival of such altricial individuals as humans, as we are, with so many years of direct physical dependency and lifelong emotional and cognitive dependency, includes the hormonal and neural systemic response to inclusion. Therefore, sincerity, as well as hedonic pleasure of inclusion, leading to effort - right up to messianic reinforcement of belief and development of coherent systems of rationalization of beliefs - are universal among us. We persuade, in order to survive, reproduce, and persuade others to gain or retain the social niche and status we crave. Abuse by those adult models can prevent us from fully persuading ourselves, a condition described in the psychological literature. Various aspects of the flawed cognition that arise, are called callous psychopathy, Machiavellianism, the two typologies of Narcissism, and the odd resentful satisfactions of Sadism. Abuse leads to unreflective cognitive deficits, Borderline personality disorder. Abuse can be as seemingly minor as neglect in childhood, most often perceived by adults as a minor or necessary behavioral and emotional failure, excused by exhaustion. Yet, breding resentment, which massively, violently, distorts a child's concept of freedom, results in its being used as rationale for dismissiveness, hierarchical discrimination, normalization of violence, decepption, dissimulation,, and lethal violence as acceptable social norms. Essentially they become or ARE social norms. Coercion, claimed as necessary due to such aberrant inculcation and consequent acculturation, is perceived by the damaged individuals of too many cultures as acceptable norms and normative tools. A few indigenous cultures, those not using exogenous neuromodulators as "recreation" , teach greater attentiveness, empathy, and affiliative recognition to ALL other life. All, though, are affected by exploitation imposed by aberrant individuals, groups, cultures, and respond defensively. That very defense is easily overstretched into pre-emption. "freedom is something i want/need, while i associate coercion with anything YOU do", as we continue to violently destroy the intimacy natural to us, the connectedness that allows trust, with which we were born.
'A few indigenous cultures, those not using exogenous neuromodulators as "recreation" , teach greater attentiveness, empathy, and affiliative recognition to ALL other life.' Such as? Which indigenous cultures? 'as we continue to violently destroy the intimacy natural to us, the connectedness that allows trust, ' What do you mean by that? Do you have a specific example please of this general assertion? 'Yet, breding resentment, which massively, violently, distorts a child's concept of freedom, results in its being used as rationale for dismissiveness, hierarchical discrimination, normalization of violence, decepption, dissimulation,, and lethal violence as acceptable social norms.' Can you put this word salad in a clearer way please?
Binary is hardly exclusive to the West nor is it representative of the entire tradition of thought. Hell, one reading of the golden mean could be a critique against false dichotomies. Binary options are a simple heuristic which is easily comprehensible to a vast amount of people.
@@occupationallystrong1606 Maybe I should have been more specific and said the dichotomous thinking that has defined Western thinking and that, for example, many feminist thinkers have been trying to break out of. There are numerous cultures and societies throughout history that have not subscribed to dichotomous thinking. Hindu thought, in all its diversity, is but one example. Your last point is irrelevant, or maybe more so it is incomplete. Why is it comprehensible? It is so because of a tradition that has well prepared its people to think in such a way. Also, Descartes wasn't writing for the masses.
@@growingmelancholy8374 True in many ways, but I believe heuristics and evolutionary psych will point more towards the expediency of binary. There are tales contradicting binary in every culture, but binary is weighted by the masses. I believe it moves back toward Arendt arguing that we simply have much of our time robbed from us so we become desperate for wholesale ideologies and ease vs in-depth discourse and confronting our preconceived notions.
This distinction between negative and positive liberty seems biased. Let's look at a simple example and see how it cannot properly capture liberty. You want to buy groceries, but you are prevented from entering the grocery story by armed guards. --Is this positive or negative liberty infringement? You want to buy groceries, but you don't have enough money. --Is this positive or negative liberty infringement?
There is actually nothing in your example that shows it, the distintion seems preety clear. Even more, I would actually use this example if someone wanted me to picture the difference between the two ideas of liberty The first one, whether justified or not is an obvious example of negative liberty infrigement. You want to do something, but there's an external force that stops you and threatens you with violence. The lack of money is not such a force, even if it has resulted from an earlier negative liberty infrigement. All it takes is to ask oneself what money, in principle, is. It is a proof that you have provided someone with something of a certain value, a useful replacement to a service done directly for the owner of groceries. If you're not able to provide someone with a service that's equal in value to the groceries you're asking for, it is certainly a matter of positive liberty
@@mighteven5104 Your position is the one I would have started at. However, the video's discussion of positive liberty contradicts the idea that positive liberty means merely the freedom to do something. Given, for example, that positive liberty is promoted by things like reeducation camps and laws against doing drugs. There is similar difference in the way the video frames freedom from something and a naive view of freedom from something, such as freedom from government violence.
@@warrendriscoll350 '''''''Given, for example, that positive liberty is promoted by things like reeducation camps and laws against doing drugs.''''' the laws against drugs doesn't promote any freedom of citizens
I feel every time I start tussling with an idea in my head, you've got a video for it. For that, I'm infinitely in your debt. Thank you so much for the work you do.
😅😅😅😅😅❤2
One of the most interesting subjects I have seen in this channel, it structures many thoughts I have been having
Fascinating explanation; I was getting bogged down in research and you have cleared things up for me. Interesitng, and well presented. Thank you so much.
same
It would be absolutely wonderful to get Berlin's perspective on the modern world and the growing debate over peoples willingness to surrender their own privacy in the pursuit of convenience.
These are fantastic videos, thank you taking the time to make them
Thank you for the time and work you put into these videos. I wonder what Berlin would have thought, if he could see peoples submission and happy surrender to any master willing to lift the burden of decisions off their backs.
That is nothing new. There is a reason Camus considered the idea philosophical suicide.
@@occupationallystrong1606 The survival instinct thrives on the existential dread.. and the other way round.
Abdication of responsibility is attractive. Confusion, stress, and desire to avoid threat, real and IMAGINARY, lead to submissiveness.
That submissiveness can lead to authoritarianism, to which MUCH of any population (look at the rise of "leadership" in minds, college courses, and politics. This infantilism response has been used by Social Dominance Oriented aberrants throughout history, perhaps as long as the measured reduction in human cranial capacity, 10,000 measured years, paralleling the equivalent brain diminution occurring in domesticated canids and felids -- about 15 to 20%, when compared to wild conspecifics!
Experiments with confined and overdense social mammals mirror human behavior exactly, with extremely aggressive/dominant as well as withdrawn, submissive individuals being the two major behavioral outcomes.
Thank you so much for linking to the Two Concepts of Liberty pdf. Much appreciated!
Can't wait for next episode. 😃
I love how topical your videos are without laying into the more controversial examples of the day that may turn away some from your videos.
This is the best video I've seen on this topic - so helpful, thank you very much!
Thank God there’s a then & now video about this because reading berlin’s actual article is like having two opposing views play tug-of-war with your brain.
14:20 “Democracy and liberty are not the same. Democracy is little more than mob rule, while liberty refers to the sovereignty of the individual.” ― Walter E. Williams
Thanks a lot for the useful observation of the two principles. It helped me!
Ačiū!
Your work is always amazing!
I just came across Mr Berlin through Dr Orr’s course on classical philosophy at the Peterson Academy. This is a useful summary - thank you but it would be better if we heard your point of view and its application to today.
The key question here is one of Knowledge in relation to Power. Rhetoric is a problem, as Plato Argued.
So highly pertinent with today’s discussions on covid vaccines and whether government measures to safeguard the vaccinated majority of society, by cutting off those who *freely* choose not to vaccinate, are justified or not.
will the nozick criticism video come out soon? x
Love from India😊
Very clear, thank you
Thank you
This is such a good explanation
I honestly feel like I've completely misinterpreted Freedom To and Freedom From, Freedom To to me is your ability to achieve or do something and Freedom From is your ability to not experience certain events. For example I might want to jump on the bus tomorrow to get to a destination (freedom to travel) but I have a freedom from the passenger who speaks incredibly loud next to me (freedom from noise). This sounds like the latter is completely not considered.
Not a lot of other video essays out there on Berlin.
I disagree with the statement “to be free is to know what’s best for us”. In line with Dostoyevsky I argue freedom is to do what you wish at the benefit or detriment of oneself. Freedom doesn’t implicate an urge of well being, we act freely to ruin ourselves all the time.
Freedom to indulge the lower impulses.
That would be negative freedom.
This statement is to highlight the rational aspect of human nature as it was said by js mill " Man is a rational creature" When we talk in this sense of rationality then a human knows his or her best interest and what he thinks is good for him is good for society too because he is rational
But no individual is perfect they are only capable of perfection so we tend to misuse our freedom.. This is our fault that doesn't mean the statement is wrong🙃
What I do not understand about concept of positive liberty is that it is not only freedom *to* do something, but also a state of reason dominant over your lower instincts. I'd argue that control over lower instincts is not vital to be free *to* do, even though without self-control and education it would be meaningless. Having freedom *to* do is one thing, having conditions to use it properly is another.
I actually first heard of this concept through The Handmaid's Tale.
Same here. Atwood's Gilead books are like an illustration of what can happen to society if 'negative liberty,' is what certain groups of people get (women, non-elites, non-white people) while other groups (white, elite, males in the books) get positive liberty, but only in a clandestine way. It ends up in corruption and suffering on all sides.
@@9000ck that comparison just made me understand positive and negative liberty XD
@@clairewatson857 cool. glad to be of help. when I listened to this video I totally thought about Atwood's Gilead.
@@9000ck I don't see how the women in Gilead get negative freedom. You might be misunderstanding and thinking that negative = bad. The women in Gilead don't have either negative or positive freedom. The men/rulers have negative and positive freedom.
Helpful❤️
As always, what a simple, accurate, and nice explanation. Does anyone know if we can cite those videos as a reference for a final degree thesis? Huge thank you !!
Sometimes I found my roommates regretted after playing video games for a whole day during the weekend before the exam. Maybe that's how positive liberty is illustrated.
I'm still can't see how "positive freedom" is a form of political freedom. It just seems to be conflating freedom with capacity or self-development.
It's difficult to be free if you have no capacity.
Do capitalism, socialism and democracy (schumpeter) next !!!!
Yeah that's a masterpiece
Here because i watch AOT
I prefer Hegel's idea of freedom as a capacity for self-determination
that would be positive freedom
How does the concepts of freedom help humanity? Is it a concept that today is more harmful that helpful? Can humans thrive without this concept?
Nope.
Inculcation can be described as the imposition of culture. Early in life we can be exposed to parental and other modeling of behavior, and later, thoughts, rationalizations, and beliefs.
Deluded directly atrocious antisocial behaviors, assertions, and beliefs are thus imprinted.
In our species, babies appear to be pre-armed with the disposition to survive through pleasing expressions, including imitation.
Because comment must be severely truncated, only such notes on evolved social behaviors can fit here.
But you can see how evolution favoring survival of such altricial individuals as humans, as we are, with so many years of direct physical dependency and lifelong emotional and cognitive dependency, includes the hormonal and neural systemic response to inclusion.
Therefore, sincerity, as well as hedonic pleasure of inclusion, leading to effort - right up to messianic reinforcement of belief and development of coherent systems of rationalization of beliefs - are universal among us.
We persuade, in order to survive, reproduce, and persuade others to gain or retain the social niche and status we crave.
Abuse by those adult models can prevent us from fully persuading ourselves, a condition described in the psychological literature.
Various aspects of the flawed cognition that arise, are called callous psychopathy, Machiavellianism, the two typologies of Narcissism, and the odd resentful satisfactions of Sadism.
Abuse leads to unreflective cognitive deficits, Borderline personality disorder.
Abuse can be as seemingly minor as neglect in childhood, most often perceived by adults as a minor or necessary behavioral and emotional failure, excused by exhaustion.
Yet, breding resentment, which massively, violently, distorts a child's concept of freedom, results in its being used as rationale for dismissiveness, hierarchical discrimination, normalization of violence, decepption, dissimulation,, and lethal violence as acceptable social norms.
Essentially they become or ARE social norms. Coercion, claimed as necessary due to such aberrant inculcation and consequent acculturation, is perceived by the damaged individuals of too many cultures as acceptable norms and normative tools.
A few indigenous cultures, those not using exogenous neuromodulators as "recreation" , teach greater attentiveness, empathy, and affiliative recognition to ALL other life.
All, though, are affected by exploitation imposed by aberrant individuals, groups, cultures, and respond defensively.
That very defense is easily overstretched into pre-emption.
"freedom is something i want/need, while i associate coercion with anything YOU do", as we continue to violently destroy the intimacy natural to us, the connectedness that allows trust, with which we were born.
'A few indigenous cultures, those not using exogenous neuromodulators as "recreation" , teach greater attentiveness, empathy, and affiliative recognition to ALL other life.'
Such as? Which indigenous cultures?
'as we continue to violently destroy the intimacy natural to us, the connectedness that allows trust, '
What do you mean by that? Do you have a specific example please of this general assertion?
'Yet, breding resentment, which massively, violently, distorts a child's concept of freedom, results in its being used as rationale for dismissiveness, hierarchical discrimination, normalization of violence, decepption, dissimulation,, and lethal violence as acceptable social norms.'
Can you put this word salad in a clearer way please?
If human kind is fallen, original sin, you can’t be free from indwelling sin unless you are rescued from it, I.e. born again. An, where does this lie?
Aw, the cute binary that defines Western thinking. *sigh*
Binary is hardly exclusive to the West nor is it representative of the entire tradition of thought. Hell, one reading of the golden mean could be a critique against false dichotomies. Binary options are a simple heuristic which is easily comprehensible to a vast amount of people.
Is that a Leonard Cohen profile pic?
@@philp521 Everybody knows
@@occupationallystrong1606 Maybe I should have been more specific and said the dichotomous thinking that has defined Western thinking and that, for example, many feminist thinkers have been trying to break out of.
There are numerous cultures and societies throughout history that have not subscribed to dichotomous thinking. Hindu thought, in all its diversity, is but one example.
Your last point is irrelevant, or maybe more so it is incomplete. Why is it comprehensible? It is so because of a tradition that has well prepared its people to think in such a way. Also, Descartes wasn't writing for the masses.
@@growingmelancholy8374 True in many ways, but I believe heuristics and evolutionary psych will point more towards the expediency of binary. There are tales contradicting binary in every culture, but binary is weighted by the masses. I believe it moves back toward Arendt arguing that we simply have much of our time robbed from us so we become desperate for wholesale ideologies and ease vs in-depth discourse and confronting our preconceived notions.
This distinction between negative and positive liberty seems biased. Let's look at a simple example and see how it cannot properly capture liberty.
You want to buy groceries, but you are prevented from entering the grocery story by armed guards. --Is this positive or negative liberty infringement?
You want to buy groceries, but you don't have enough money. --Is this positive or negative liberty infringement?
There is actually nothing in your example that shows it, the distintion seems preety clear. Even more, I would actually use this example if someone wanted me to picture the difference between the two ideas of liberty
The first one, whether justified or not is an obvious example of negative liberty infrigement. You want to do something, but there's an external force that stops you and threatens you with violence.
The lack of money is not such a force, even if it has resulted from an earlier negative liberty infrigement. All it takes is to ask oneself what money, in principle, is. It is a proof that you have provided someone with something of a certain value, a useful replacement to a service done directly for the owner of groceries. If you're not able to provide someone with a service that's equal in value to the groceries you're asking for, it is certainly a matter of positive liberty
@@mighteven5104 Your position is the one I would have started at. However, the video's discussion of positive liberty contradicts the idea that positive liberty means merely the freedom to do something. Given, for example, that positive liberty is promoted by things like reeducation camps and laws against doing drugs.
There is similar difference in the way the video frames freedom from something and a naive view of freedom from something, such as freedom from government violence.
@@warrendriscoll350 '''''''Given, for example, that positive liberty is promoted by things like reeducation camps and laws against doing drugs.'''''
the laws against drugs doesn't promote any freedom of citizens
@@robinsss To the contrary, a sober person maintains greater capability. Did the video not go over this? It has been a while.
@@warrendriscoll350 yes
but once you put me in jail you have taken most of my freedom