This is really interesting. I've long argued that even though we elevate "freedom" as our cardinal value in the West, boasting that we're the "free world" vs the supposedly unfree one, we in fact largely don't understand what freedom is.

We typically mix up "freedom" with personal freedom, that is your right to act on individual desires (what philosophers call "negative liberty"). But we typically forget that this "freedom" is largely meaningless if you concretely don't have the material conditions to exercise it.

Take the latest Gallup "Global Safety Report" which was published recently (news.gallup.com/poll/69…). They look into "freedom from fear", whether people feel safe or not.

And, stunningly but perhaps unsurprisingly, the U.S. - supposedly the "freest" country in the world - scores pretty badly. For instance when it comes to how safe people feel "walking alone at night where they live", the U.S. is 64th in the world, scoring even worse than India (59th), whereas China is 3rd (right behind Singapore and Tajikistan).

It's even worse when one looks specifically at women feeling safe to walk alone at night where they live: on this metric the U.S. is 77th in the world, with only 58% of women saying they feel safe.

In fact, incredibly, out of the 10 countries globally with the worst gender gap in the percentage of men vs. women who feel safe walking alone at night, 8 of those countries are part of the supposed "free world": the United States, New Zealand, Italy (the worst-scoring of the group with just 44% of women feeling safe), Malta, Australia, Cyprus, Greece and the Netherlands.

In practice, what this means is that women in these countries are technically "free" to walk alone at night - as in they have the right to do so - but they concretely can't because the material conditions to exercise that right are simply not there. They're afraid to do so, and probably justifiably so.

Is this "freedom" if women in the "free world" are concretely less free to walk their own neighborhoods than women in countries we routinely condemn as unfree?

China, for instance, has many measures we consider restrictive on "freedom" - such as ubiquitous security cameras - but the end result is that it ranks 3rd in the world in personal safety and 4th in the world in Gallup's "Law and order" index, safer than ANY country in the "free world". In concrete terms it has secured "freedom from fear" when the "free world" hasn't.

We could also speak about other dimensions of freedom, such as freedom from need: what good does it do to a homeless person to know they're technically free to buy a house, or a diabetic to know they're free to purchase insulin they can't afford? The right exists; the freedom doesn't. Real freedom - the kind you can actually live - requires material conditions: safety, healthcare, shelter, dignity.

As such, I'd argue we need to completely redefine what we mean by "freedom" by measuring lived reality rather than the mere absence of restrictions on paper. If that became the measure, we'd have to redraw the map of the actual "free world" entirely, and likely confront some uncomfortable realities about which countries are in it or not...