Treaty of Middelburg
I think promoting a culture where people value truth and rational deliberation is essential to safeguarding freedom. Apart from freedom, people also need certainty in their lives, and decisions that guarantee their prosperity need to be made. Freedom is only guaranteed if the social consensus needed for these decisions is made through rational deliberation and not arbitrary social will. The latter of these is often a recipe for coercive social systems.
Team members
- ā Aryaman Bordoloi
Why do you want to participate?
It's fun for me to participate in this event because I get to spend a weekend in a room full of interesting people talking about an idea that i'm quite passionate about. I presume this event will be a discussion about freedom where insights from philosophy, economics, law, psychology, and other social sciences will play a huge part in guiding our discussion. This kind of interdisciplinary discussion is something that I enjoy and is reflective of my university college background.
What does freedom mean to you?
I understand freedom to be equivalent to autonomy. Freedom is a state where each individual is able to guide their own life. The reason that a lot of people don't have freedom is that their autonomy is constrained by various factors which can be economic, social, psychological, legal, etc. It's precisely these factors that we need to investigate to figure out how to arrange society in order to maximize freedom.
What are the biggest challenges?
This answer varies depending on where you live. In a lot of countries, there are countries where the freedom of the youth is suppressed by the legal system and society in general by illiberal laws and social norms which constrain their ability to be themselves. But, in the West, I think the biggest freedom challenge for the youth is one regarding financial freedom. For most young people, owning a house for example is far more difficult and out of reach than it was for their parents and grandparents.
Do you have a message?
One idea Iād like to share is the importance of education in fostering freedom. A well-informed and critically thinking population is better equipped to challenge constraints on autonomy, whether they come from economic, legal, or social pressures. Educational systems should prioritize teaching people how to think rather than what to think, encouraging open discourse, critical analysis, and intellectual curiosity.
