When we have a conversation with someone else about our world view, we quickly get to very fundamental questions. Who believes in God and assumes a living being to be the creator of this world will have a different concept of an ideal human society compared to a person believing that matter is the last cause behind everything that exists. One perspective sees life itself as the origin of the world and all its content, including the laws of nature and spirit and all the particles. The other assumes the particles and their characteristics to be the cause of the laws of nature and the cause of life, creating our bodies and thoughts in a more or less random or deterministic way. Freedom is then found in chance or not found at all.
We should consider this when we communicate with other people. Often we can conclude someones world view based on the opinion they have in common questions of day to day life. Then we can ask ourselves whether that opinion is a logical consequence of the world view or not. If it is, there is no point in presenting arguments against the opinion. We can only accept that given the assumptions the opinion is valid and reasonable. Of course we can present our opinion, and if there is time an interest we can even try to explain our world view and extract the opinion from there.
The position we take in ethical or social matters is strongly dependent on our image of humanity and our world view. What we believe humanity to be like, that varies from a biological machine to a mutated animal to an image of God. There are different ideas of what the nature and purpose of animals are. And what a machine is in comparison, that is also something we have different ideas of.
Often human characteristics like fear, jealousy, ambition oder greed are carried over to a computer. In movies, we have been introduced to that idea already decades ago. Who considers humans to be the result of a complex formation of particles will not see any major difference between himself and and a sufficiently complex computer or machine. The difference becomes apparent only when we begin to wonder about a possible mix-up of cause and effect. We can all observe that living creatures can cause a complex formation of matter, humans are especially good at that. So far, I have not witnessed this to happen the other way around. In todays world, we are distracted and detached from the world that causes life. That is not an insurmountable gap, but it leaves us blind to the cause of life for the moment. Still, modern science is already close to finding out that the cause of life cannot be found in the particles of matter. Only the expression of life can be found there. Until then our society will have difficulty with concepts like freedom.
When I have no possibility to include the idea of freedom into my Weltbild, then I will likely want to program and guide each human being in a way that it behaves and functions as good as possible. In the same way as we would do with a computer. A society must be designed to provide the right incentives and result in the desired individual behavior for all situations that a human can experience. When unwanted actions are observed, the rules must be changed so that it will not happen again. As one would fix a bug in a software, so that it runs as intended. To do so, it is important to understand how a human reacts to influence from the outside, how the inner “program” looks like. Unpredictable behavior is in conflict with the optimization. For this reason, humans are observed very closely, for each one a profile is made in the digital world. There, as much information as possible is collected about each human, and based on that it is attempted to understand and predict the individual behavior. If we share the worldview motivating this, then we will approve of this endeavor. Especially if we are frightened and feel unsafe without control. Then, the fear of loosing something or someone will motivate us to get everything under the control of a force that we trust or even believe to dominate.
The world will look very different when we do not assume life to be a threatening product of chance in a random universe, that needs to get subdued by a central force, but consider it to be a creation of God. Then we can experience that our purpose and our task is to become free. When we become aware of that, we do no longer hope for external powers to solve and remove our problems. Then we have no interest in ourselves and everyone else to be managed and controlled like a machine in a factory. We recognize our problems as our own tasks and challenges, which help us to develop and move forward. Then, we do not want to permanently keep other humans under external control, but want to help and support their development towards freedom. As we normally want it for our children as well.