The Science of Freedom, Oppression, Liberation, and Equity

Science

The nature of being human must be inherently determined by what we require in order to have well-being. The causes of well-being are more commonly known as needs. There is rigorous scientific model for distinguishing needs from mere desires that has been developed by the  Self-Determination Theory (SDT) community. SDT necessarily gives us insights into human nature. This is a link to a 15 minute video that explains the science of needs in the context of education. 

Freedom

Humans are universally recognized as yearning to be free. Having a precise model of how that yearning occurs in human experience through the lens of the well-established psychological model of SDT means we can more precisely define freedom. Freedom is proximately about having our needs satisfied, but freedom is ultimately about enabling each and every individual person to contribute productively to the collectives that make that individual freedom possible. Infancy and childhood present a challenge because infants are literally helpless and their freedom is severely constrained. Parents and other adults who care for children must contend with the fact that the children in their custody are in a transition from utter helplessness to empowered agency. There is a risk that adults who do not provide adequate need support for the children in their care are training them for a lifetime of oppression.

Oppression

Oppression is proximately the neglect and/or thwarting of needs, but ultimately the use of collective powers to prevent some people’s needs from being satisfied either through direct acts against those people’s efforts to satisfy their needs or systematically preventing them from having access to whatever resources would enable them to satisfy their needs (a.k.a. structural oppression).

Liberation 

Liberation from oppression requires both the removal of barriers to need satisfying resources and actively educating the oppressed folks about their restored freedoms. An educated person is one who perceives accurately, thinks clearly and acts effectively on self-selected goals and aspiration that are appropriate to their situation without necessarily being aware that any of those things are happening. Education is centrally about the agency to act in community; it is only peripherally concerned with the tools of our culture, such as academics. The centrality of agency follows from the fact that it is an unwavering necessity across all time and space while the choice of which tools (such as academics) to use in any given situation will vary according to accidents of history and society.

Equity 

Equity is ownership of the collective in which we are embedded. Ownership means that we have the power to contribute to the governance of the collective, to participate in making the decisions that will affect us, and to participate in resolving the conflicts that we experience as a consequence of collective decisions and of the behavior of others. Achieving equity requires four elements: 1) define needs scientifically (SDT), 2) distribute resources fairly to satisfy needs, 3) remove structural barriers to need satisfaction, and 4) satisfy needs with parity across groups. 

Inspired by Dover, M. A. (2019) A Needs-based Partial Theory of Human Injustice: Oppression, Dehumanization, Exploitation, and Systematic Inequality in Opportunities to Address Human Needs. Humanity & Society, 43(4) pp. 442-483. DOI: 10.1177/0160597619832623