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This book begins with a treatise on free speech by Quintus Curtius, he makes the point that we assume incorrectly that society will just get better and better. We assume that we will just become freer and freer, we see the tremendous improvement in human quality of life in the past hundred years of history recorded via grainy photographs, shaky newsreel, and newspaper clippings and we assume that it's just going to get better but Quintus warns that progress is not our birthright...
It's especially easy for young people with no children to assume that the nature of the world is just to get increasingly free over time, barring some extraordinary life experience it's likely that over time all they've personally experienced is their freedom expanding.
We do associate the abstract idea of freedom with our concrete quality of life, consumer choice, and the advent of new technologies making our lives more convenient and amusing. Since there is no sign of the Cambrian explosion of consumer options slowing, the idea of freedom contracting seems incomprehensible to most. But Quintus writes...
Time is as much a destroyer as a creator: and perhaps more of the former than the latter.
He makes the case that our society of unequaled freedoms wobbles on a knife's edge and that there is a good chance that human rights will regress within our lifetimes. I've long believed likewise that... human rights are antithetical to human nature.Human nature is evolutionary - of course - and prone to devolve into brutal competition. Human nature is a strong man taking power, money, women, and resources from those who he can by sword, law, or guile. Human nature is a tribe being fiercely unsympathetic to an outgroup. Human nature is a syndicate of elites depriving the common people of the fruits of their labor. Human nature is a dictator depriving his people of the ability to defend themselves from their overreaches. Human nature is a ruling narrative stifling and censoring dissenting voices.
