Expansion of freedom (was: Fwd: Re: [ox-en] extrinsic motivation = coercion)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:23:20 +0200
Hi Markus and all!
Last month (36 days ago) Markus wrote:
logically, if more than one person is living together, this causes a
conflict of interest situation resulting in one of them giving in (or
adapting their behaviour or adjusting their self interest) to the others
around.
Well, today I think this is really a myth. Interestingly enough I came
to that conclusion when I read a summary about Sartre's philosophy.
What I understood in this summary, was, that Sartre believed that the
freedom of one individual limits the freedom of another individual.
Indeed this is something I learned in school. The usual picture used
was like this:
/-\
|A| /-\
\-/ |C|
\-/
/-\
|B|
\-/
This shows three individuals A, B, and C with their "freedom circle".
To explain the effect of expanding freedom the next picture was like
this:
/-\
|A| /-\
\-/ |C|
\/-\
/ \
| B |
\ /
\-/
As you can see the expansion of the freedom circle of B harmed the
freedom circle of C.
When I read that summary about Sartre peer production came to mind.
Here we can see a different effect of expansion of freedom at work. If
a peer producers expands her freedom to produce more / better stuff,
then everyone has a benefit from it.
Meanwhile I think in fact the picture above is one of the basic
capitalist myths. In fact it is a basic need for capitalism to draw a
picture of society where "everyone is everyone's wolf" (Hobbes IIRC).
And it is perhaps the only way to see a society which is based on
atomized monads.
Sure there are situations where the expansion of an individuals harms
others. But in peer production we see this principle reversed. May be
it can be depicted like this:
/-\ /-\ /|\ benefit
|A| |C| |
\-/ \-/ |
/-\ |
/ \ |
| B | |
\ / |
\-/ |
Now the expansion of the freedom circle of B lifted C to a higher
level of benefit.
Well, just another attempt in myth busting ;-) .
Grüße
Stefan
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