What is freedom? Do we have it? Do we have anything else other than it?

not sure what this [the title] means [or what this was meant to be about when I jotted it down as an idea]. as in, what level this falls on: state, community, individual, whatever. i don’t think people have a “right” to food, water, shelter, etc. i think they have a right to the freedom to make their own choices, but nothing else. there’s something naturalist/Darwinian about this i guess.

But wait, why do they have that right (freedom) if they don’t have any others? what about “freedom” is more natural? Do I think that maybe “freedom” is some kind of base state of all things (organisms included)? Like perhaps “freedom” doesn’t have a definition - it’s just the state of anything before any external forces are applied. I think maybe that’s what I think…

This line of thought seems to be - like most things here - distilling itself down to the nonexistence of objective truths (in this case, a disavowal of the existence of “rights”). Sort of a pickle, that! Hard to have every topic reduce down to the same topic, especially when that kernel topic appears to perhaps be incoherent…
Or is that actually the most realistic and accurate way for things to go?

Update 2018-08-13:

From Sapiens 1 :

[…] “Liberty”? There is no such thing in biology. […] Liberty is something that people invented and that exists only in their imagination. From a biological viewpoint, it is meaningless to say that humans in democratic societies are free, whereas humans in dictatorships are unfree.

It’s both exciting and a bummer when you read something in an expert’s book that you’ve spent a bunch of time thinking about independently (see Blog Posts as Dibs and Apologetics).

  1. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, 2015 ↩