Degrees of Freedom

Free comes from the root prai which means beloved, hence precious. Somehow our capitalist system has turned the word free into meaning ‘without value.’

If there was a red flag to indicate just how beholden and ‘unfree’ we have become as humanity to the god of money, it is the overuse of the word free. The marketing department knows the power it wields.

Big bold letters saying FREE, and people lose their sense of rationality.

The sun gives light and warmth every day, for free. It is beloved and precious. I am benefitting from its warmth as I write. Yet to call this free in the context of our capitalist system is to divorce the intrinsic value of the sun and my experience into a commodity that, because it does not appear on a human constructed balance sheet, we humans dismiss as lacking value unless we can find a way to put a paywall around it and sell it off.

It is for this reason I avoid using the word free in the context of an exchange between humans. There is value offered and an expectation of value received which requires acknowledgment if we want a world that no longer extracts and exploits.

Freedom on the other hand is the capacity to be at choice. From the old English freodom “power of self-determination, state of free will; emancipation from slavery, deliverance.

Degrees of freedom is an indication of how much choice we have. To be free as a sovereign human is to be able to express our intrinsic Pattern Integrity with equivalent access to knowledge, resources, technology, community, safety, health care, education, within the ecology and context of our current existence.

Creating enterprises that enable the highest degrees of freedom within a structure that holds its shape, its integrity, is a critical aspect of a Syntropic Enterprise.