epistemic status: ongoing
Can a society be politically free if its citizens are no longer intellectually dependent?
Given this question, a small ponder unveils that the question is built on a number of assumptions. Firstly, an assumption that political freedom is connected to, a presence or lack thereof, of intellectual capacity. Secondly, that intellect is something which may wax and wane. Since societies of the historical record have become more or less politically free. Each of these assumptions beget questions within that posed by the heading: Do political arrangements change with the intellect of a population? What might cause intellect to wax and wane?
Political freedom may relate to many things, depending on who you ask: * ability to voice political opinions counter to any “government of the day” * to vote and participate in a fair election for a new or continuing “government of the day” * resulting governance reflects the desires of the voting majority, fairly and transparently.
Each of these components have in common the necessity of an individual to exercise choice. Choices to (or not to) speak, vote, protest, challenge, and otherwise exist in some minority. The choice to exist in a minority may seem undesirable. However it is the fundamental act of adopting an opinion or stance which is too progressive or too conservative for any current state of affairs. Knowing that they may never see legitimacy, but without fear of reprisal, deviate in thought.
Thus, our choices are manifestations of any inherent intellectual capabilities. Through choice, one applies their best faculties, to choose one thing over many others. From here, the necessary discussion is found in answering the question: if intellect can wax and wane, how would this affect choices? If our best faculties lend to the best choices of opinion, speech or action; using our worst capability of faculties produces the inverse. Engaging our best, individual faculty for reason requires time and attention to arrive at a response to information. Engaging our best, individual faculty for reason requires time and attention to arrive at a response to information. Without that interval, reaction displaces response. The mind receives a stimulus and returns an echo, not a judgment. Political choice, which the earlier list made plain, cannot survive on echoes. A vote cast in the half-second after a headline, a protest joined because the feed showed faces already marching, a silence kept because the cost of speech was already priced by other. These are not choices in the sense the arrangement of freedom demands. They are the after-images of someone else’s faculties.
Intellect waxes when the conditions for response are ordinary: time enough to hold a claim against its counter, attention enough to notice which of one’s own prior beliefs the claim threatens, and a public square in which the resulting minority view is not immediately converted into a status penalty. It wanes when those conditions are removed. The removal need not be a decree. It can be the simple compression of the interval between stimulus and expected reply. The expectation that an opinion will be ready before the next scroll, that a political identity will be legible before the next interaction. Under that pressure the faculties do not disappear; they are simply not engaged. The population remains literate, numerate, and in many cases highly credentialed. What declines is the habit of treating one’s own mind as the site where a political stance is finished rather than borrowed.
History records both movements. Periods in which literacy, printing, or later mass education widened the circle of people who could form and defend a view tended to widen the circle of people who could safely hold minority views. Periods in which information arrived faster than it could be tested, or in which testing itself carried social cost, produced the opposite contraction. The contraction is not always dramatic. It can appear as rising conformity among those who still vote, or as rising abstention among those who no longer believe their vote is the product of their own faculties. In either case the formal apparatus of political freedom; speech protections, ballots, competitive elections, continues to operate. What it operates upon is a thinner stock of independent choices.
The question therefore turns on a narrower point than it first appears. A society can maintain the legal forms of political freedom after its citizens have ceased to practice intellectual independence. It cannot maintain the substance. The substance is the repeated act of arriving at a response that is not already supplied. When that act becomes rare, the remaining choices are still counted, still protected, and still described as free. They are simply no longer the choices of a population that is thinking for itself.