this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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That doesn't work. The average individual is too hedonistic to refrain from any pleasureable or self reinforcing loop. It's been a cautionary tale in stories since ancient times.
There's no shortage of people. If the "real world" people all get along with reasonable consensus on what "individual freedoms" mean, and some (hopefully small) percentage of those people decide they'd rather live in an alternate reality where they trample the rights of others, instead of incarceration / punishment / inadequate efforts at rehabilitation, transferring those people's consciousness to a virtual reality where they can "be themselves" would seem to me to be a far better use of their individual spirit than trying to break it or simply terminating it. Maybe most of them never rehabilitate - that's o.k. Of course, this is feeding right into a prequel for Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan.
That is a system predicated on getting rid of the problematic, like the one it exists today, just with an added layer of distancing, to ease the rest of the population's mind. It does not solve any problem.
The inherent problem with freedom in a society is when one person's exercise of their freedom takes away from another person's freedom. Absolute freedom only exists in a society of one person (and, by extension: the more people we have in a resource/space constrained society, the less free we all must be to share the common resources and space.)
If you don't "get rid" of the problematic - what's your option? Just shrug and ignore them when they rape, murder, pillage and destroy? If you "rehabilitate" the problematic, how is that respecting their freedom?
Back in "the Australia Project" (Manna story) - the development of the overall project was kind of vague, but implied access to a lot more "space" in which people could choose to live with others in ways that each group chose to be "acceptable society." If you are more at home in one society than another, you are free to migrate. If a particular society chose to cap its size at 200, or 2000, or however many members, you were free to organize another modeled on it... The key aspect of behavior was: respect. Whatever the size of your social interaction: 2 million down to 2 people - respect the others in that society within the boundaries of local societal norms. The availability of virtual reality expanded the available "living space" many orders of magnitude.
I am going to repeat my point as many times as necessary until it gets through: your example is only a punishment system with an extra layer to be more palatable to the society where it is inserted.
Being free does not imply in any moment an individual can do whatever they may concieve or desire; freedom requires and demands constraint, precisely because the freedom of the other is the boundary of my own. Life in society predicates on this. There is no society of one; the individual often finds a swift end if insisting on it, by its own actions.
A society that simply represses or discards individuals because they engaged in destructive behaviour is not doing anything to in fact solve a problem. A society is as responsible by its individuals as the individuals are by their society. And a society that so simply and easily opts by fractioning itself just to allow more (blatantly artificial) freedom to its elements is not a society. It is something I lack the word to describe but a society it is not.
And I am going to repeat my real-politik question to you explicitly:
What's your grand non-punishment solution for members of society who actively harm other members of society? What to do with those who are non-compliant with "freedom requires and demands constraint"?
I considered it to be implicit that society would do everything reasonable and appropriate to "solve" the problems of individuals engaged in destructive behavior, but experience has shown: the best efforts in these areas still fail to achieve 100% success. Certainly current societies all over the world (the U.S. especially) could try harder and do better, but 100% success has been historically elusive all over the world.
And should the entire human race be confined to a single society? Irrespective of our present predicament of cheap instant global communication I would submit: no, there is no one answer for how people should live in society. The one "basic human right" I would proffer to a universal collection of human societies is that: when someone wants to leave one society, they should be free to do so into any other society which is willing to accept them. No society should be under obligation to accept all applicants, but all societies should be required to let people leave whenever they want to, to wherever will willingly accept them.
It sounds like you're both missing the core concept here: Freedom is responsibility. Responsibility for one's self and actions. If someone is refusing to take responsibility for themselves, they are lacking self control and are not free in the first place. They are beholden to animal impulses. You get me? By not taking responsibility for their actions they are disqualifying themselves from freedom regardless of whether they're physically arrested and incarcerated. We need to stop pretending that everyone just has freedom as an intrinsic quality instead of it being a right to which they are entitled.
Yes, it is. And responsibility is the opportunity to fail to live up to that responsibility, and then what?
I get you: tell yourself they're "just animals" so you can cage them without a guilty conscious.
There are a lot of flaws in the U.S. foundational documents, but "Life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness for all" is a concept I think worth defending.
Actually, no. Quite the opposite. Treat them like people who have chosen to abrogate their responsibility as humans in order to fulfill animal impulses. I'm definitely not okay with putting people in cages. Irresponsible or not, they're still people.
Great, so these people who you're not okay with putting in cages, the ones that go out and kill other people (for drama's sake), or just really grief society with constant home burglaries, maybe some drug addictions driving that, maybe assaulting people to avoid arrest, maybe "accidentally" killing someone with that gun they use to threaten the cashiers - no cages for them, either? I 100% agree, they're still people, they deserve the best possible shot at becoming better integrated members of society, rehab programs instead of incarceration when appropriate and all that, but even with the amazing money saving rehabilitation rate of psych counselling for drug convictions (which a friend of ours does for a living), they're still far from 100%. Our courts throw too many under the jail for no good reason, wasting their lives and costing the community far more money than the shot at rehab they deserve, but at some point, rehab isn't working for some of them - then what?
Of course there are literally thousands of other "common" anti-social behaviors that eventually rise to the level of incarceration as well...
It's disturbing to me how you can think of no other thing for me to mean than that I want to either murder criminals or let them commit murder. This discussion is over.
Last word: you're the one who brought up murdering criminals - I just suggested you needed to equate them to animals in your head so you could justify caging them like animals.
Criminals commit murder, about 400,000 officially recognized / classified murders per year, much higher than that in reality of course, but 400K/8B is 1/20,000 per year, more like 1/400 lifetime, average, globally, just the official ones not the overlooked ones in war zones or lawless / uninvestigated situations. It's not a problem that can be ignored or written off as insignificant.
Sounds like a society that exists only because it tramples the rights of others. Nah, fuck that.