Monday, September 17, 2007

Freedom and Operating Range

Providing freedom to move and change one’s self is one tool for enabling people to live within their “operating range,” restricted only to the extent where they might damage others. The success of this tool depends not only on the amount of freedom allowed, quality of rules, and proper enforcement of those rules, but also on the operating range of the entire system. And the range of the system is ultimately dependent on its environment and quality of interaction (impedance matching) with that environment.

Humanity is apart of a larger system, the Earth’s biosphere, which interacts with the non-living Universe to extract resources and deal with its waste. The types of resources available, and our ability to access and process them, determines how much variability in conditions we will have to work with. So that resources will be continuously available, our “waste” must be processed back into resources (or at least not interfere with the production of those resources). Our ability to efficiently “complete the circuit” and the fidelity of that connection equally impacts our system’s range of operation.

Freedom, therefore, is simply one part of an overall strategy to maximize each person’s longevity and quality of life. The other two parts of the strategy are the management of interactions between people and the controlling of inputs and outputs of our population.

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