(Up to: Philosophy )

I feel myself slowly unravelling everything I thought I might have known. Here's an attempt to make sure I don't forget it.

I start at the conflict between regulation and liberty. On one hand, you have state control. On the other, you remove this, and let things run themselves. Many equate this with a free market, and up til now I have been confused - why is having a corporate structure resulting from such an infrastructure, and the emergent restrictions on the individual, any better or worse than a form of centralised governance? I'm not too enamoured by either.

So I'm starting to tie in another flipside, an "anti-liberty" if you will, which is effectively responsibility - self-control. This means that, while on one hand the individual is free within themselves, that there is also a responsibility to both themselves and to others. Responsibility is the personal opposite to liberty, but the vital part is that it comes from within, and is not enforced.

Which presents the problem of where this moderation comes from. If one simply holds out hope for "human nature" then one will be waiting a long time, and not much gets achieved in the meantime. It is perhaps natural to see the world as a balance between ourselves and everything else, but within a society so deprived of naturalness, this is becoming increasingly hard to see. At this point, education becomes an important factor - and with it the proliferation of data, and the filtering thereof, that I have become more interested in over the last few years. Perhaps this should form some kind of foundstone in my philosophies.

Thus, I am definitely converging on a point of duality that takes into account the relationship between entities, although I need to hammer it out some more before I can start making assumptions on it.

More will follow...

See "Slipping Through The Gap" for more on the individual vs the state vs corporacy.