Figure 1: Thingvellir, Iceland
A post inspired by the 2025 Thought Experiment on Freedom. To read the original post outlining the goals and objectives of this experiment, click here. https://miklavelaw.com/a-2025-experiment-you-can-thank-ivan/
Spoiler Alert: This blog contains references to the television series Lost. If you have not yet watched the series (what have you been doing for the last twenty years?), stop reading now!
Oldest Democratic Assembly
Þingvellir (Thingvellir in American English) lies in a rift valley on the tiny island nation of Iceland, where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates converge and create a dynamic background for the site of the longest surviving parliament in the world. For 868 years (three times longer than the life of the current American Republic), the men of the island gathered for two weeks every summer at the Alþingi (Althing in American English), where they set laws, settled disputes, and engaged in social and business exchanges of all kinds. You may recognize the landscape from The Game of Thrones, the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013 with Ben Stiller), or Ridley Scott’s movie Prometheus.
Icelandic life in 930 CE was “challenging.” The Althing may not have been as “democratic” as we would have liked. Only free men could express their views, not women or slaves. The nation possessed a “complicated” legislative and judicial system, relying on a system of escalating fines to keep the peace and compensate victims. See, e.g., David Friedman, Private Creation and Enforcement of Law: A Historical Case, University of Chicago Law Review (1979) available at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Iceland/Iceland.html?t (last accessed Feb. 18, 2025).
Freedom is Not Democracy
Thus, “democracy” is different from “freedom.” They are not the same. To equal them would be wrong.
At its core, I believe freedom means to be unbounded and unrestricted in one’s actions, thoughts, and choices. It refers to the power to act, speak, or think without restraint, to be not subject to domination by another, or to be in a state of not being enslaved or imprisoned.
Democracy, on the other hand, refers to a system of government where power is vested in a collective “people” (however defined) who exercise that power either directly or through elected representatives.
We should be clear when addressing these concepts whether we are speaking about “freedom” (to be able to act without restraint) as opposed to “democracy” (the process by which the collective decides what restraints limit an individual’s actions).
How Free, Democratic was the Island on “Lost”
To illustrate the point, imagine you are one of the actors on the television series Lost (apologies to everyone under the age of 30 who has no idea what I am writing about) – you have survived a crash on an island in the middle of nowhere. While there are some resources on the island, they are limited and primitive. You have some food and medical supplies with you that survived the crash. You find fresh water from a nearby source. Later, you might find a secret “hatch” with a generous supply of food.
You are not “free” in the sense you cannot leave the island (i.e., you lack the physical power to make that result come about), but no one is telling you what to do all day long. There are no police officers, no central government, no taxing authority, and no limitations on what you are able to do except for the other people with whom you are in contact. If you want, you can hike off to another part of the island far from the other survivors where “no one’s the boss of me!” This is the ultimate freedom.
Going off by oneself may sound like the perfect solution. But remember, there are limited resources on the island; there is also a “Smoke Monster” and “the Others.” If you “go it alone,” you risk finding out (as Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651) that life might be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
How Free Are We?
In 930 C.E., Iceland had a “democratic” system in the sense that all free men in the country could gather in the summer and make decisions to bind the collective. However, women and slaves could not vote.
And Iceland may not have been “free” in the sense that, hey, women and slaves could not vote! And resources were more limited.
The point for the 2025 thought experiment is that we should be clear about the concepts about which we are speaking or writing. As the saying goes, “Say what you mean, and mean what you say.”