[Wellsy]

Found an interesting point about constraint as a necessity for freedom from Terrence Deacon.
He uses mechanics degrees of freedom as an example, where by limiting something it makes it possible to control in a purposeful way. And prt of what defines things is in part what they don’t have or what isn’t there, the limitations inform the nature of what is there.

[Unthinking Majority]

Freedom is acting without restrictions.

We give up some freedoms to secure others.

[Wellsy]

https://zero.sci-hub.tw/3183/ee1d015ee73246ffa72351256fff060d/bakhurst2001.pdf

It is a mistake, he argues, to hold that objective reality is exclusively material in nature and to try to reduce everything putatively nonmaterial to mental phenomena located in the heads of individu- als. The real world beyond individual minds genuinely contains ideal phenomena: It embodies meaning and value, the presence of which provides objective reasons for belief and action. Ilyenkov’s position represents a form of Platonism, but a modest one, for objectively existing ideal phenomena are by no means supernatural in nature. The ideal has its origin in collective hu- man activity, which writes meaning and value into nature. Human activity is objectified as cul- ture, and culture exists as a real presence that is identical neither with the vehicle of its material embodiment nor with the mental states of individuals. This position has significant consequences for psychology. For Ilyenkov, thought is the capacity to inhabit a world of ideal properties and re- lations—to conform the trajectory of one’s activity to meanings and values rather than to be moved by merely physical causes or biological imperatives. A thinking thing is thus a culture
1 dweller,abeingathomeinthespaceofreasons. Ilyenkovthereforeargued,inVygotskianstyle,
that human children become thinking beings as they are assimilated into culture, as they appropri- ate the modes of activity that sustain the ideal. Human beings create themselves through the cre- ation of culture.

http://www.aworldtowin.net/resources/SpinozaIlyenkovWestern%20Marxism.html

Spinoza proposes that we become free by understanding the world and acting accordingly. Such a Spinozan-Ilyenkovian perspective can help us arrive at a richer, dialectical understanding of collective/individual freedom to achieve social and political transformation. As Andrei Maidansky writes in his essay about Ilyenkov’s Ideal, human concepts have the advantage of “absolute freedom”. [39] Or to quote conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim: “The more a person can determine his or her thoughts... the more he or she can arrive at a self-determined existence and real freedom.” [40]

I like this view of freedom as a quality of self-determination. As one can have a multitude if choices but lack any real sense of self determination where their decisions are subject to the ideas rather than ideas critically subject to the thinking person. To not understand things with adequate ideas means you can’t make an actually free decision as its arbitrary and constrained by not understanding the options available to you.
The freedom to choose among things is a degree of freedom but without a critical ie thinking sense of things then you’re subject to hegemony.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/sen-critical-voice.pdf

This concept of critical voice is thus the fifth in a series of determinations of advantage: wealth, functioning, capability, voice and finally, critical voice.
Critical voice is the capacity of a person living “inside” a society to form views available from a position “outside” that society:
“... virtually every society tends to have dissenters, and even the most repressive fundamentalist regimes can ‒ and typically do ‒ have dissenters .... Even if the perspective of the dissenters is influenced by their reading of foreign authors, the viewpoints and critical perspectives of these members are still ‘internal’ to the society.” (Sen 2002a, p. 476-77.)
Critical agency is thus “not only to the freedom to act but also to the freedom to question and reassess.” The answer to the question Sen asked in 1980 ‒ Equality of what? ‒ seems increasingly to be “critical voice.” This does not imply that the demand for equality of critical voice necessarily has traction as a normative demand, any more than does equality of wealth. But “critical voice” does more truly determine the essence of human need and is the true measure of inequality in a society

This is what Zizek summarizes that one wants the freedom not to choose among set coordinates but to actually be able to determine the very coordinates of choice itself. A child can choose between two options posed by a parent but an adult doesn’t confine themselves to the options given by someone else but can decide for themselves to the degree they understand the situation adequately.
This is pivotal to a lot of political dichotomies which for example are focused on the legality of something but not the very cause of the problem and its solution ie pro-choice/Pro-life. There isn’t typically a discussion of alleviating the basis for wanting an abortion hut only on what grounds it should be legal and accessible.
One never questions the conditions in which one would seek an abortion. So we uncritically accept those conditions which create the problem. Band aid management rather than solutions.

https://zero.sci-hub.tw/3183/ee1d015ee73246ffa72351256fff060d/bakhurst2001.pdf

Ilyenkov’s vision of rational action is intimately connected with his conception of freedom. Freedom is manifest in human actions that are guided by reasons—that issue from an appreciation of what ought to be—and a being is free to the degree to which it possesses the capacity to act in appropriate recognition of reasons as they present themselves. Thus, Ilyenkov endorses the famous adage of German classical philosophy that freedom involves the recognition of necessity. This does not mean, of course, that we are free to the extent that we knowingly acquiesce before causal forces but that free acts are those that are dictated by rational necessity, by an appreciation of objective reasons. Individuals manifest freedom insofar as they chart an appropriate course through the world of reasons, a course for the most part dictated by the geography of that world. On this view, free acts are contrasted with behavior that is the outcome of causal forces beyond our control, but they are also contrasted with acts that are merely arbitrary (proizvol’no) expres- sions of the will and hence cannot be explained as issuing from an appreciation of objective rea- sons. The existentialist idea that a truly free choice is one unencumbered by constraint rests on a mistake: Free acts must chart a course between the Scylla of causal determination and the
charybdis of arbitrary volition.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Article_on_Teleology.pdf

Any given social arrangement has an inherent ‘logic’ which constrain the actions of all the particular actors; no-one ‘forces’ any actor to act in a certain way (indeed they would not be actors at all if they were forced), but the social arrangements constrain them in what can be called ‘logical necessity’: “You don’t have to do X, but look at your options. You’d be well advised to do X.” But it does not stop there; people endeavor to change arrangements which do not suit them. Responses to institutional arrangements are a kind of practical critique of the concept on which the institution was based. Institutional arrangements will be changed in response to such critique and the changes decided upon by rational deliberations, however imperfect, will respond to the practical critique explicitly in the form of thinking and argument. Institutional change in modern societies is not like crowd behavior, but takes place according to what is found to be necessary in the circumstances. Institutions try to do what they have to do according to their concept, rather than simply striving to maintain a status quo.