(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); I'm interested to see what people think about this, my belief is that regardless of your economic state, oppressive goverment or whatever other factors people often say are linked... we're all slaves to something. Sure I agree we could be 'more free' without all our modern-day reliabilities but does that truly matter, I'm a very left-wing person and I do stand for change so we can truly have freedom, mainly of speech and other things e.g recreational drugs. But I'm not naive in thinking pure freedom is good, most of the world's population would die out without the 'care' of their sometimes ruthless goverments and we'd end up living in a darwinian society although there are some more sadistic people who'd enjoy such a turn of events;p And even in that state we'd still be slaves to our natural masters, e.g hunger and whatnot so why make it more difficult?:'
Anyways, please post your opinions on the topic because as I said I'm eager to hear other views on it.

And I'll leave you with a possible debate starting quote; “Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.” - Voltaire

First of all, sorry if what I'm about to say has already been said, I haven't read all of the posts. I subscribe to a deterministic point of view. The notion of cause and effect, physical rules of the universe, etc. I'm a very holistic thinker, in the sense that i like functions, and mutually exclusive/collectively exhaustive descriptors of concepts, because i feel like if i can account for every element in the system, then i can predict its behaviour accurately. This translates directly to our behaviour and choices. I feel that every "decision" we make is a result of cumulative stimuli. For instance, me deciding to reply to this thread is due to me being intrigued by the topic, which was due to me being exposed to similar questions and ideas in the past, which was due to the type of upbringing I happened to have been exposed to (mom was an academic). So did I really have a "choice" in the matter? I believe that everything is circumstantial and "freedom of choice" is illusory and maybe even sort of dangerous when you look at the judicial system and how that's carried out. (sense of guilt and thus punishment over empathy and maybe treatment)... that's not to say our "decisions" (whether or not they really are OUR decisions) don't matter though. Rather, I think with this implication (if accepted), we should attempt to move to a point of view of creating the best environmental stimuli to create the best possible "decisions." i.e. knowing that there are factors that affect crime and that criminals aren't self-acting (excluding psychopaths etc.), we should actively try to minimize the stimuli that lead to those negative decisions (i.e. poverty levels). Before I totally go on a different tangent here, yeah those are my thoughts.