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I think perhaps "bullshit" is too strong.

Any time we're talking archaeology and cultural inference, we're talking stuff outside the bounds of knowledge. (As distinct from history, where we're faced with information incomplete to unknowable degrees through both unknown filters, supposable filters, and the random depredations of time and chance. It's possible for history to be knowledge, or at least contain it at a single remove.)

Given that, it's going to be narrative.

A preference for narratives about freedom over narratives about the inevitability of autocracy can be defended for that characteristic while being chided for doing world-building in preference to world observing, especially when the world-observing is itself as much narrative as error bars.

There'd be an interesting study in the filters; how women get written out of political movements, for example. Or how the manipulable abstraction tends to replace observation. People have this fondness for definite answers.

(Pointing out that "freedom" is a uselessly theological concept, frequently applied to justify terrible actions, nigh-impossible to usefully define, and when defined turns out to be an unhelpful abstraction, seems churlish. People want to feel good about their organising principles, too. Which is why Utopian projects can't fail, only be failed, and why it's so hard to think about the connection between systemic function and "less bad".)

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Touché... But perhaps our narratives of freedom should be well-grounded ones. I mean, von Hayek believed that Sparta had been an example of Ordered Liberty and that it had been instituted by a temporary dictator named Lykourgos—and that was the role in which he decided that he would, in his mind at least, cast Pinochet...

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An ability to rationalise Pinochet as a necessary manifestation of a mythological werewolf is just about perfectly why I think worrying about freedom is fantastical nonsense.

Everyone does as they must -- to eat, to feel secure, to have what they desire. Society is (in principle) a machine for saying "if no one does these things, all benefit; yes, this does mean you". Which works for the statistics but not the monkey-status, and we know, or ought to know, looking around us in this second year of plague, that a whole lot of people will kill themselves horribly for monkey status. (Will kill their children horribly for monkey status.) (Just as a whole lot of people bend their whole wills to not being subject to the law; they will have what they want without regard to the distribution of costs.)

I'd much rather talk about agency and how it is to be constrained and how it can be measured. "Freedom" is a lot more about how you feel than about what you can do, and how you feel ought to be outside the bounds of policy. Once it's permissible to make policy out of feels, well, that's how we get the mythological werewolf as good example. (Or the sitting-under-the-bridge-roasting-sparrows-on-curtain-rods measures of relative status.)

The feels, well, that IS the job of narrative. The legitimacy of conquest (and today, conquest without acknowledgement or obligation!) has been made up; we can, in principle, make up something else.

I find we have very few stories which are not about conquest. We have even fewer stories about agreeing that not getting what you want is right. I find that the machinery to tell these stories is in the days of hand-filing the capstan pawls, too, so perhaps I am more sympathetic to a lack of ground. Much like it's a long, long reach back toward facts, to get past the German Romantics and Snorri and ask who the raiding Norse thought their gods were, it is (especially in English!) a long, long reach back to any notion of constraining obligation on the great, or expectations of transitory status, and so on. Which is not a way to say I think I would think well of the book if I read it; "egalitarianism" is a feel-good way to say "lose all your wars"; "other societies exist" turns out to be a miserable constraint. You have to be better at warfare than the Romans if want to have the option of being something other than Romans, that empire of slave shackles, genocide, and torture as public entertainment. "Our generals are not great", well, that's all kinds of difficult.

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How one feels should not be outside the bounds of policy, at least if one reads Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "Wealth of Nations" as part of a coherent whole. Self-regarding preferences need their limits in magnitude; other-regarding preferences need their limits in kind.

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Smith is writing from a position of presumed universal morality and from inside the early phase of an imperial project; Smith is also writing from an inescapable position of profound ignorance about mechanisms of selection and the concept of system. (No one had figured any of that out yet!)

If your feelings are legitimate ends of policy, there's no way to resolve conflicting "this makes me unhappy" positions. (Look at the amount of political capital being consumed today in a number of places over the degree to which it is appropriate to regulate a style of hat! Look at the Thirty Year's War, too.) Once there's no way to resolve the dispute, the only stable alternatives are to agree that it's not important or to commit genocide. (Force majeure can hold for a little while, but only a little. It's never structural.) The historical record is clear that, out of these two options, people prefer genocide a significant amount.

It could be that "you can never get what makes you happy; you can argue for what everybody gets (you, a part of everybody, included), but you can't make your feelings or any feelings a part of policy" would have structural stability. I would certainly like to see it tried!

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