Towards a Redefinition of Freedom Away from a Western-Led Liberal Paradigm
Human development in a world where the current liberal order is increasingly delegitimized can only be achieved through a rethinking of its foundational assumptions: from freedom understood as the pursuit of desire to freedom defined as the capacity to realize human potential.
History is full of contradictions. Whenever there is a dissonance between outdated values and institutions and a changed reality of our society and its material conditions, crisis becomes inevitable. This is precisely what we are witnessing currently. The dominant liberal order is no longer widely held as legitimate because it can no longer uphold the social contract that once justified it.
In effective terms, the middle class is contracting, inequality is rising, and effective freedom is increasingly constrained by less visible but banal mechanisms: algorithmic incentives, bureaucratic complexity, economic precarity, and identity-based performative signaling. Taken together, these induce self-censorship in everyday socio-political life. Freedom formally exists, yet in practice, remains heavily constrained.
This erosion has also contributed to a demographic collapse across much of the developed and developing world alike. People do not plan families in eras of prolonged stress, uncertainty, and economic insecurity.
Compounding this is the role of technology. We are at a stage of technological advancement where a large share of what is conventionally defined as “work” is being rendered redundant through automation, yet no corresponding systemic transition is being provided for those displaced. This creates a structural contradiction within the current economic model reliant on consumption: how can demand be sustained when there are increasingly fewer people with stable incomes to purchase goods and services?
Institutions and policies that have attempted to address these crises have so far failed to yield effective results, precisely because the foundational assumptions on which they are built are now outdated.
At the core of this failure lies the very idea of what constitutes freedom.
We continue to rely on philosophical frameworks inherited from three centuries ago. Distilled to its essence, freedom today is commonly understood as the ability to act on desire without infringing upon another’s ability to do the same. This conception has led to a development discourse still fixated on GDP growth, consumption, market access, and aggregate output.
Ignored within this framework are other equally necessary human needs: spiritual well-being, a sense of community, and self-actualization. Development may continue to occur under these assumptions, but development grounded in this premise of freedom will result only in societies that are more materially affluent yet less cohesive, less meaningful, and more unstable and unsustainable in the long run.
Development, therefore, must begin with a fundamental shift in the very lens through which the end goal is understood. A transition is required: from freedom as the fulfillment of desire to freedom as the ability to realize human potential.
This shift aligns closely with Amartya Sen’s capability approach. A Nobel Prize-winning South Asian economist, he defines development not by income or utility, but by the real freedoms individuals possess to live the kinds of lives they have reason to value. To expand on this framework, a development philosophy rooted in potential fulfillment would prioritize education, health, skills, purpose, and long-term institutional coordination, rendering sustainability an outcome rather than a constraint.
Starting from this foundation, the goals of development themselves become inherently more sustainable.
Under the current Western liberal conception of freedom, which implicitly nudges individuals toward maximizing personal desire, family formation is often deferred or deprioritized as an individual cost.
By contrast, under this new potential-based understanding of freedom, planned families become a rational and valued outcome, as stability, continuity, and long-term investment in human capability are central to freedom itself.
Similarly, desire-based freedom incentivizes continuous resource exploitation, and taken at scale, it becomes evident that current consumption-based growth models cannot be indefinitely sustained. One byproduct of this framework is rising inequality: as individuals maximize their abstract “freedom,” they deny others that same freedom in effective terms. Freedom remains equal in theory, yet in practice manifests as extreme overconsumption by a small minority and persistent deprivation for the majority, even though both are formally “free” to act on their desires.
A historical example that underscores this distinction is the Bengal famine of 1943. Amartya Sen famously demonstrated that the famine occurred not due to an absolute shortage of food, but due to failures in access; people lacked the economic and institutional means to acquire available food. Markets functioned, but freedom in any meaningful sense did not. The famine thus illustrates how formal liberties and functioning markets are insufficient without substantive capabilities.
A potential-based conception of freedom is intrinsically more sustainable and safer for human societies. The very notion of potential realization implies delayed or moderated gratification, which in turn leads to lower overconsumption and more responsible resource use. Within this framework, the natural environment is no longer viewed merely as a stock of resources to be managed, but as an interdependent system whose preservation is necessary for continued human potential.
Moreover, this conception of freedom is more consistent with human psychology. Humans are not inherently averse to effort or challenge; rather, they derive meaning from growth, mastery, and contribution. What individuals resist is not difficulty, but uncertainty and instability.
The solution, therefore, lies not in radical individualism but in a return to the principle that has historically enabled human survival: convergence. Alone, individuals remain fragile and easily overwhelmed by uncertainty; as coordinated collectives, they become resilient. Freedom understood as potential realization is necessarily relational and institutional.
Moving beyond philosophical abstraction to practical prescription, this reconceptualization of freedom requires a corresponding shift in how development metrics are measured and pursued. Human development must move away from short-term indicators such as GDP growth and consumption levels toward long-term institutional capacity building, as potential-based freedom requires sustained investment in human capital.
One possible operationalization is a Potential Realization Freedom Index (PRFI). This will be composed of five core dimensions:
Health & Vitality (H): life expectancy, access to basic healthcare, and nutrition levels.
Education & Knowledge (E): literacy rates and mean years of schooling
Economic & Opportunity Access (O): employment rates, income distribution, and poverty levels.
Agency & Participation (A): political participation, freedom of movement and personal choice, and gender parity.
Safety & Security (S): crime rates, perceived personal safety, and the rule of law.
Freedom here is defined not as the proliferation of choices, but as the capacity to grow. Technology, under this model, becomes an enabler of human potential rather than an accelerant of distraction. Artificial intelligence augments human capability rather than displacing purpose. Globalization becomes a mechanism for capability sharing rather than extraction from the many into the hands of the few.
The PRFI can be calculated as a weighted average of these dimensions, initially assigning equal weights, yielding a score between 0 and 1. A higher score reflects a society’s capacity to enable its people to realize their potential.
In redefining freedom in this way, development ceases to be a race toward infinite consumption and becomes a coordinated project of meaning and purpose.