Thursday, June 14, 2012

Liberty is Natural, Tyranny is Artificial: A New Way to think of Nature, Artificiality, and Liberty

Nature and natural things are seen as more desirable in the general consensus, as compared to artificial things.

Humans are considered not to be natural: in the sense that what ever a human does is artificial as opposed to natural.

Liberty is understood to be the freedom to think or act without being constrained by necessity or force.

Where most westerners see nature as anything not to do with humans and their affairs, the traditional oriental cultures see nature as simply that which left to itself.

So we can apply this idea of nature as things being left to their own devices to the idea of liberty: the human right to be left to make their own choices.

So in this sense, the non-natural is not the non-human. Rather, the non-natural is that thing which is disrupted from its own state of free liberty.

Therefore, the artificial is the natural disrupted of its liberty by some outside force sometimes called tyranny.

With all that said, we can see how much of what we considered to be artificial is really natural. The real artificiality comes from coercive manipulations of things where the manipulator exploits the manipulated- the victim receiving little or no benefit.

In short, liberty unhindered by tyranny is the natural state of things. True artificiality is when one hinders the liberty or nature of another thing.

I believe we should drop the notion of the artificial being what ever the human does. One can include what the human does as natural and apart of nature. We should then exclude from the definition of nature that which is called tyranny.

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