Why the decrease in freedom

 The greater the population density the more people there are that can adversely impact one’s ‘freedom’. With the profusion and acceleration of technological developments more people can organize more efficiently to oppress others. Organizations have more surveillance and tracking capability each year, and every dollar one spends can be tracked as well as cars, conversation etc. Global media and spy agencies, government officials and the curious get into everyone’s private space apparently so much as they like. Public education conditions students to think in accord with political correctness preferred by the ruling class.

With a limited area that is the Earth for people to live in, exploit and try to control in some ways with governance, free ranges of motion may continue to decrease for some, in some ways, while increasing for others, in some ways. President Biden recently referred to those states loosening Covid 19 mask wearing and public spacing as ‘Neanderthals’ (who presumably would not understand what germs and airborne pathogens are or how to defend against them). Does mandatory masking wearing impact freedom? In some ways it does, in other ways it doesn’t. If one asked some people not to use talcum powder riding public buses because it makes some people sneeze, they might be offended and cry havoc about attacks on their freedom.

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2021/democracy-under-siege

One could move on to the subject of what is freedom and then determine if that can be quantified and if the amount of it is increasing, decreasing or stable. Regulating people so they don’t drive their environment-tramping vehicles into storefronts or throw people out of the good seats at the basketball game that they didn’t pay for impacts things. I wonder if there is some sort of coefficient between population density and freedom that isn’t environmentally determined that also effects the level of skill specialization possible.

A commune with all things equal for everyone would have a kind of freedom that would not exist in a society based on individual rights and political self determination, strong border security, private property and private business, and the latter would have freedom to be exclusive and develop their own ideas and inventions/products etc that would be lacking in a herd of animals without private property, private space or individual rights.

I don’t wish to take swipes and forced free to be the same as everyone else communes here Instead i wonder if demographics won’t drive the two polar opposites toward some sort of balance given the world population continues to increase and the environmental health continues to decline.

Concentrating wealth and networks of production, distribution and communications globally seems to be the inevitable result of transistors and miniaturization that occurred since the mid-20th century. Maybe leadership more like Casey Stengel or Yogi Berra with degrees in environmental economics, philosophy and a load of common sense and dead reckoning will fix the world if we are lucky.