Submitted by sharp_dressed_left in Politics
Hello I'd be really interested in your personal views on:
-
what value you assign to freedom and equality. Whether you think one is more important than the other, whether they are fundamentally incompatible, whether you can't achieve the desired results of one without also actualising the other.
-
the best policies or practices that you think would achieve your ideal in reality
Thank you very much for your time, I hope to hear your thoughts.
OniLinkPlus wrote
First, I'm going to be sure to define my terms since these are fairly... abstract things.
Freedom to me is the idea that an authority cannot tell you that you must or must not do something.
Equality is the idea that all people are given a fair chance (equality of opportunity), and not treated differently for inherent characteristics such as race, gender, or sexual orientation. As an addendum, I tend more to believe in equitable treatment of people, such that those who need a leg up are provided what they need, e.g. people with disabilities, with the idea being that equity is the method by which we reach equality.
In an idealized society, we would have both freedom and equality. Right now we have neither - government removes freedoms in the interest of "stability and order", and people are discriminated against worldwide for being LGBTQ/women/PoC/etc.
It's tempting to believe that if we eliminate authority in order to restore freedom, equality will naturally follow. I do not believe this to be the case. The fact is, a lot of the time it is private individuals who are promoting inequality and discrimination (that's not to say the government isn't promoting inequality - it definitely is) (see cases like Kim Davis who admittedly used a position of authority to promote her private beliefs, or many of the incidents with bakeries refusing gay customers).
Even if we do eliminate authority to restore full freedoms, there will still be people who discriminate. Equality won't naturally follow (though the situation will likely improve drastically). If we want people to be treated equally, which I think is a necessary goal, then we need some form of community policing to protect the marginalized which then constitutes some form of authority. The question then becomes - is community self-policing an authority that we are willing to accept? I'm fairly new to leftist politics, but it looks like people agree with and are fine with community self-policing?
It's also possible that I'm naively pessimistic about humanity and authority really is the source of inequality so :/ But I do find equality to be of more importance than freedom, personally, as you cannot have freedom for all without equality (if people are not equal, then somebody must have less or more freedom than others, which is undesirable and seems to imply the existence of authority).