Summary of my points:
“Capitalism and liberalism made the idea of freedom”: before the enlightenment, people had a different vision of freedom, that mostly were dictated by institutions like the church. I think we have indeed become freer compared to 100 years ago, the desacralization has a lot to do with this. In the past it was the church that said what was allowed and what was not allowed to be able to experience life in paradise/heaven after death. They said if people did X or Y they will be free in the afterlife. The church created a lot of limits/rules.
Nowadays people want freedom right here and right now.
Since the church lost power over people, capitalism end liberalism stepped in. Freedom and thinking about freedom have been highjacked by capitalism and liberalism. It turned into a product, an idea or a feeling that we can buy. It has become an ideology!
Hannah Arendt talks about ideology; for her it is the ideo-logie; the logic of the idea. It is an inherent totalitair idea, so we see everything through those glasses, we see it as the idea is telling us.
For me people look at freedom from a very egocentric way. Talking about freedom is reduced to talking about what everyone wants for himself or herself. Even when we were talking in the small groups during the first part of the experiment, it really caught my attention that a lot of people were answering for themselves, they wanted the freedom. They were setting an ideal set of rules for their freedom.
We should consider freedom as a concept for society, not only for the individual. We need to think about freedom on more levels: individual, local, sublocal, global, environment, … The perception of freedom is different from culture to culture, as well as the viewpoint from which people consider it. In the western world, we are looking at it from our own individual point of view, in Asia, people tend to look at freedom more from a collective point of view.
Kenneth Nelis