The Wrong Take on Freedom

Nobody asked but …

A few days ago, on Facebook, one of my favorite resources, The Advocates for Self-Government, posted the following meme:

If you’re only free to make choices approved by government, are you really free?

I immediately replied with a meme of my own:

If you’re only free to make choices contained by reality, are you really free?

I suggested this change because “government” actually plays no part in defining “free.”

Government is just a pretense, a Potemkin village set up by narcissistic egoists.  But reality is not a set of fictions.  Reality is random — with some coincident causality.  Reality is a universe filled with colliding particles.

You are free until your particles collide with another, larger set of particles.  There are no rules, no legislation that can undo that collision.

— Kilgore Forelle