Liberty: "The state of being free within a society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views." (www.oxforddictionaries.com)
Liberty: "Being free from the contrary preferences or other people." (yours truly).
A sea of blooming alpine tundra was visited and parted by Moses, I presume, or one of his progenitors, because the day I walked that stretch of the Wind River Range there was a trail parting the sea of tundra. The dirt shuffled under my every step and in this manner each step pulled the trail away from the Nature's entropic overgrowth and towards the order of society that makes one feel compelled, by the obligation we have to others' preference for pristine Nature, to "stay on trail", to not go tramping just anywhere, because if everybody trampled just everywhere then the precious, remote alpine tundra would look less and less like "the path less traveled by".
One has to be remarkably empathetic - or embarrassingly brainwashed - to obey the tug of society and other people's contrary preferences when 20 miles from the nearest trailhead, especially once you've felt the glory of wanderlust that comes from walking wherever you please. To leave no trace, or to wish there were no people to notice a trace? Dithering between my confining empathy and my liberating wanderlust, I farted out loud, and then laughed about it.
And then I urinated on the tundra.
I had to walk a little ways to urinate, occasionally letting a foot touch the preciously soft mat of tundra as I tried to hop from rock to rock. I didn't cower behind a tree, hide behind a door, force it out quickly in an alley to avoid getting arrested (for public indecency and, knowing myself, evading arrest), and I didn't lift a toilet seat with concerns about how many women would be pissed if I either didn't lift it beforehand or un-lift it when I was done.
No fuss. I just pissed, right there, not having to worry about what other people think about pissing. I've answered nature's call more times than I can count, but this time was special. This piss was special... in the context of my musings about trails and the formal and informal tugs of society that coerce you into obedience, and in my position in the heart of nature where one should feel most free to define oneself as one sees fit, this piss was the defining moment when I realized that my liberty depends on the abundance of people in my vicinity who would take offense to what I did, stomping on all that alpine tundra, farting and laughing about it, and spinning 360 degrees while pissing shamelessly with my hands akimbo, thinking and laughing aloud about Liberty.
The absence of people made that piss a hallmark moment. That piss was true Liberty.
Throughout the remainder of the trip, other acts of public indecency include wiping my butt with a pine cone, singing country songs loud & out of tune, and talking to myself out loud.
I went to the Wind River Range because I felt claustrophobic in New Jersey. I felt claustrophobic in New Jersey because it is the most densely populated state in the nation, and I set my baseline for how populated a place ought to be by growing up in one of the least densely populated states, a place with about 1/100th the population density of Jersey.
Why does having people in New Jersey make me feel claustrophobic? Having grown up with a motley crew of Wild Western guys & gals and come to understand their love of literally and figuratively pissing in the woods, I've come to the opinion that one's sense of liberty has the same indeterminate growth of a crocodile: it fills the cage it grew up in, and putting it in a smaller cage once it's fully grown will stress it out. In New Mexico, when I was upset with people and all of their associated bullshit - contrary preferences for how to drive, how to treat women on the street, how to be a good teacher or a good colleague - I would leave the packed room of people and their contrary preferences. I would go into the mountains and pump my thighs hard enough up a hill high enough to pump enough endorphins into my head so that, upon arriving at the summit, I couldn't feel anything but good. Sitting at the summit, with a clear head and the dignifying solitude fit for a human being, I would contemplate my course of action - should I conform to the other people's preferences, should I avoid it, or should I fight back?
In New Jersey, there are 100 times as many people per square mile, but from my experience the perceived intensity of bullshit is an accelerating function of the population density because not only are there more people to bump into, but the people you bump into are bumping into more people and, consequently, more prone to being upset by feeling squeezed out of an authentic life.
For instance, consider the honk of a car horn, arguably the rudest means of telling another person that their driving actions don't fit your preferences, all while staying under the guise of anonymity that brings out the inner asshole in all of us. I rarely got honked at in New Mexico, and when I was honked at I took it VERY seriously, assuming that the honk came as I was a hair's width away from killing some poor, innocent family. My first time getting honked at in New Jersey was like my first time showing my parents an "F" on my report card. I went home and thought to myself... "Geez... I made someone feel bad today. I want to leave happiness in my wake, so I need to get my act together and start driving better. That person wanted me to drive faster, so I'll go faster than the speed limit and more the flow of traffic to accommodate them." I return to the streets, and within minutes someone is honking at me because I'm going too fast. I use my turn signal to exit Route 1 and nobody will let me in. Bullshit...
When in New Jersey and upset with people and their contrary preferences, I tried to leave... I went to the "Last Great Wilderness of New Jersey" and got my legs pumping... and after passing hordes of families and finding no place fitting to sit and get away from it all, I finished circumnavigating the place in 2 hours having never found this so-called "mountain" in Sourland nor anything like solitude that could help me figure out my place in society. I had to go farther to find solitude and freedom from bullshit.
I drove 7 hours to the prodigious peaks of New Hampshire, that state with "Live Free or Die" stamped on very license plate. Surely, this is the place where one can experience the pure, untrammeled liberty of solitude. I trucked it across the Presidential Range towards the summit of Mt. Washington... on one summit (Adams) some guy with a Boston accent had the nerve to ask me to be quiet so he could talk on his cell phone. Upset with that guy's contrary preference, I moved on to the main summit where I found an army of loud, morbidly obese monkeys in automobiles, buying bumper stickers that say "This Car Climbed Mt. Washington". It's bad enough having to buy health insurance with people whose main hobby is eating and subsequently shitting, but then having to share the summit with their cars and having someone honk at me because I'm walking in the road after 12 miles... Let's see, maybe this, too, is not the place for me to get my inner peace and contemplate what I ought to do, so I drive back to Jersey... Advertisements on the road parasitize my preference to be content with what I have by blocking trees with annoying signs telling me I'm not buying enough stuff I don't need... music on the radio tells me I'm not having sex with enough bullshit... Another advertisement of a hot girl trying to sell a mortgage so I can buy private property where nobody but me can be free, where my preferences are Law, but I can only buy the boob-jobbed woman's house if I slave away to make money, earning a confined freedom by becoming someone's servant... GAH!!!!!
So I return to my rented house in New Jersey, run into my room and slam the doors shut, keeping out the rampaging brigade of bullshit by sitting in a 10x10x10 cube with my windows closed, door locked, and books open to contemplate things in the wisdom of those who seem to be a lot better than me at dealing with other people being contrary. Dalai Llama, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Dr. King, Jesus, etc. have all saved me in the past, and they had delightful things to say, but no amount of their honeyed words could fit me into this cage. I felt like there was no escape from those obese monkeys with their bumper stickers and horns and... and... and... and now I have to take a piss, but can't go outside because there's so many people out there, all the time!!
I grew up howling on the mountaintops, trekking through pathless woods with bears and mountain lions, and now I'm cooped up in a box reading books by saps whose lunch money I would've stolen all because a bunch of other peoples' informal social control led me on a trail that led me to a Masshole on a Mountaintop and a bunch of other contrary people and now I'm trying to be happy and dignified sitting in a box...
The solitude found in a box is not fit for a human being. My church of solitude stripped away from me, I didn't have the liberty to sit by myself on a glorious perch in good weather and think about how I ought to be, how "they" ought to be, and how "we" can coexist in a pluralistic society without getting at each others' throats.
So I went to the Wind River Range. I hiked 100 miles with my dog, Jack. I pissed in open fields while twirling in circles with my hands akimbo and I sang Toby Keith and howled on the mountaintops. I had never felt so free in my life, because never before in my life had I known the opposite of Liberty - entrapment in a pool of contrary people. In New Jersey, I've seen how liberty in its purest form gets corroded by the masses of people in a densely populated world. The product of two factors measure the extent of your liberty: the number of people who can sense (see, hear, smell) you and your tracks on the world, and the probability that the people will disagree with something they sense in you (your car is too fast, your skin is too black, your horn is too loud, your body smells too bad, etc.).
Liberty, in its purest form, is corroded by the acid of other people's social control, telling you, explicitly or implicitly, what you should or should not do. For the exception of our innermost thoughts, anything we do in the world runs the risk of pissing someone off. Eating, the most essential thing for an animal to do, is not exempt - I just made that comment about fat people, remember? There, I did it again. That's me being contrary and imposing mybeliefs about an ideal human physique on other people, and it pertains to their liberty to EAT as they well please. I'll summon arguments and stand by my preferences on grounds of healthcare costs, preventative diseases killing >500,000 people a year, and the non-obese size of airplane seats, but, at the end of the day, I am being contrary. I am informally trying to change people to be more like my image of how people ought to be. This coercion happens with other essentially human behaviors like sex (slut), sleeping ("lazy"/"maniac"), drinking ('alcoholic'), and every other action that leaves the privacy of our innermost thoughts, including speaking about your innermost thoughts ("Man, that Al Washburne guy is such an asshole... did you hear what he wrote?").
The more people there are, and the more deeply different people's preferences are, the more likely it is that something you do will annoy or deeply offend someone else. Thus, the diversity of a pluralistic society can corrode liberty, but this corrosion can be prevented by keeping population densities low and/or keeping reserves where people can get away from each other.
Liberty pertains to more than the formally delegated liberties - those rights & liberties mentioned in the constitution or other official documents. Sometimes the mountain of liberties is eroded away by legislation that protects people from risk, and the risk of an action affecting other people depends on the density of other people. For example, guns are dangerous yet they are not the same risk to society everywhere; it's no surprise that Ak-47's are legal in New Mexico but illegal in New York City. Where would you even go to shoot an AK in NYC? Where can a kid even go to throw a rock in NYC without risking hitting someone or breaking a window?
However, Liberty can still be eroded while the law stays constant; it doesn't have to be a law saying "You can't do this" - just the presence of other people who think you "ought not do this" is enough to leave one feeling restrained from being themselves. Many liberties, like pissing in public and farting aloud (have you ever tried farting aloud in the subway?), are also determined by population density through the probability that someone nearby sees you & doesn't want you doing it. Another way that population density determines our liberties is in the arguments of justice - the golden rule - what if everybody else did that? What if everybody else walked off trail? What if everyone else tossed shit-stained pine cones on the ground? Well, if there weren't so many people, it really wouldn't be a problem, and we'd be free to live more dignifying lives.
The line between formal and informal social control is a gray one, but if, at the end of the day, you feel like you shouldn't do something either by fault of your empathy for others or sense of justice, or by fear formal punishment, then you do not have the same kind of liberty as someone in an area with nobody around to hear (or get hit in the head by) the tree they felled. Public indecency requires a public, and surely a family with kids would be offended by my 360-spiraling-piss in the Wind River Range. I'm glad there wasn't a ranger with authority to arrest me, because otherwise I wouldn't have felt free to piss the way I did.
So how do we secure such "low-density liberty" against infringement by a growing population? How does one who wants to preserve open space and its associated liberty to do whatever you want fight against other peoples' liberty to have 8 babies all of which grow up to be obese monkeys with car horns driving on Route 1? My hunch is that to keep ourselves free from the "oppression of the contrary", we need to be actively contrary (I know, it's hypocritical). On a mountaintop overlooking the Titcomb Basin, I resolved that I'm going to move to some place remote, encourage people to have few kids, educate everybody everywhere in the world - especially women - as that is most effective at lowering reproductive rates, vote and petition for zoning ordinances that preserve areas of public open space from unnecessary development (and I've got a very strict view of what constitutes a "necessary" development), and if anybody tries to develop open space, whether into an offensive strip mall or a less offensive but still rule-bound city park where one is not free to piss in the bushes, I'll start a contrary (and very messy) movement called "Piss Off".
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