Pure or complete freedom is an impossible theoretical. There will always be constraints on a persons activities. Lack of constraints and control is essentially what freedom is. One is not free if one is constrained. And removing certain constraints for one person can allow them to constrain another.
When discussing freedom, we often focus on constraints placed by the government. Indeed, governments tend to be the most powerful bodies where they choose to control our lives. But removing them and their laws is anarchy. Without their constraints, individuals will be able to assert their own power. Groups will form to increase power, and they will place constraints on others. One could argue that these would just be new governments, and they would eventually become just that, but that’s somewhat semantic.
The relevant takeaway there is that groups and individuals always can and do place constraints on us. Often they are more constraining in our day to day lives as is. Our parents and teachers are pretty much the most powerful constraints that we notice most of the time as children. Though our friends, neighbors, grandparents, bullies, and many others can place constraints on us every day. As adults, those can continue to constrain us, but corporations and other organizations, our bosses and coworkers, and of course government agents, play a bigger part.
One could posit that someone could become all powerful over everyone else and at least they would be completely free, obviously within the constraints of physics. Maybe so. But if there were ever two of them, able to affect each other in some way, then they would constrain each other. At the least, they would have to avoid each others’ stuff, activities, and people. Based on human nature and history, with that much power, they would most likely distrust each other and vie to win out. And of course, time and age will eventually catch up with any all powerful someone. As long as this someone could be killed or injured, others would likely try to take them out, and the powerful person would likely have some level of thought of this constraining their actions. Maybe one could speculate that some far future technology could prevent ageing and provide absolute control of all other people, life, and things. Maybe then. But I highly doubt that could really happen in the real world. And, quite obviously, in that scenario, there would be a great lack of freedom for many.
Freedom is an invention of the mind. It is a word we apply to a perception of a situation. We are as free as we perceive ourselves to be. If we are in an impossibly huge cage where we’re sure we can’t ever reach the edges, then we could say we perceive ourselves completely unconstrained. But there will always be edges. There will always be constraints. The best we can do is position ourselves so that we can do what we want to do with those edges far enough away that we don’t notice them.
And for freedom to be considered applicable to the situation of the world rather than just a single person’s perception, we need every kind of edge around every person to be perceived as comfortably distant from their personal desired paths. No doubt impossible to truly achieve in real life.
I think that near equal power is an important part of creating the closest thing to complete freedom across society as a whole. But there would have to be larger constraints where people want to constrain and control others, and this would require giving some extra power of constraint to those who don’t want to constrain. Somewhat of a paradox. And of course, in reality, people who already have more power will not want to give much of it up, people will have different ideas of what is and isn’t constraining and how much, and we’re very, very far from this ideal.
I hope this is useful. I wanted to get down some thoughts and then, writing it as a blog post made me want to flesh things out to try to cover the full topic, which took me well beyond my initial train of thought.