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View submission: /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | February 24, 2025
I would say the ability to *not* participate in society is rapidly shrinking. Facebook has a profile for you ready to go, even if you’re not on it. Squatting in abandoned homes is criminalized. Land is almost entirely privately owned, you cannot build a house without permits, common space to grow plants is limited if it’s even available at all.
Yes, we “choose” to participate in society to a certain extent, but that is not a “free” choice in an ever-increasing portion of the world: we are penalized for not doing so. It’s not even that we simply lose the benefits of society if we try to leave, it’s that choosing to live outside of society, even nonviolently, is actively interfered with if not outright prevented.
The “decision” to live in society means that such an amount of other decisions (such as whether to wear clothes, what language you speak, how you interact with the natural world, and so on) are made *for* you by that initial choice, that you can hardly say you have free will in any meaningful sense.
There's nothing here!