Common Sense Philosophy/Chapter 7

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Chapter 7: Maximum Liberty, Minimum Harm -- The Freedom Principle

The Default Setting

If you had to choose a single principle to distinguish a civilized society from an uncivilized one, you could do worse than this: In a civilized society, the individual is free unless there is a compelling reason to restrict that freedom. In an uncivilized one, the individual is restricted unless there is a compelling reason to grant freedom.

The difference is not merely rhetorical. It concerns the burden of proof. In the first model, you are free to speak, to move, to associate, to worship or not worship, to love whom you love, to think what you think, to live as you see fit -- and anyone who wants to stop you must justify the restriction. In the second model, you are permitted to do only what has been authorized, and any freedom you enjoy exists at the pleasure of whoever holds power. The first model treats the adult individual as a competent agent whose autonomy deserves respect. The second treats the individual as a potential problem to be managed.

This distinction sounds simple. It is not. It is the product of centuries of political struggle, philosophical argument, and hard-won institutional design. And it remains, in much of the world, aspirational rather than actual. According to Freedom House's 2025 report, only about 20 percent of the world's population lives in countries classified as "Free," while the global trend in the last eighteen consecutive years has been toward declining freedom. The default setting, for most human beings alive today, is not liberty but control.

This chapter argues that individual freedom -- understood as the maximum space for autonomous action consistent with the equal freedom of others -- is not just one value among many to be balanced against competing claims. It is the foundational political value, the one without which all other values -- dignity, flourishing, even species preservation -- cannot be reliably pursued. Freedom is not the whole of the good life, but it is the precondition for any good life that deserves the name.

Mill's Harm Principle: The Starting Point

The most influential articulation of the freedom principle in the Western tradition remains John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859). Mill's formulation is worth quoting at length because it remains, a century and a half later, both powerful and contested:

"The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right."

This is the harm principle, and it is the cornerstone of liberal political philosophy. Its power lies in its clarity: it draws a bright line between legitimate and illegitimate exercises of power. The state may prevent you from punching your neighbor in the face. It may not prevent you from reading a book that your neighbor finds offensive, smoking a substance that your neighbor disapproves of, or holding a belief that your neighbor considers heretical. The line is drawn at harm to others. Everything on the liberty side of that line is protected; everything on the harm side is regulable.

Mill understood that his principle was radical. It was radical in 1859, and it remains radical today. Consider what it implies. It implies that laws against blasphemy are illegitimate (no one is harmed by someone else's irreverence toward their deity). It implies that laws against homosexuality are illegitimate (consenting adults do not harm one another by loving one another). It implies that laws against drug use are at least prima facie illegitimate (the drug user harms primarily themselves). It implies that censorship of political, religious, or scientific speech is illegitimate unless the speech constitutes a direct incitement to violence.

These implications were too radical for Mill's Victorian contemporaries. They remain too radical for most governments in the world today. And yet the logic is difficult to resist once you accept the premise: that the burden of proof lies with those who would restrict, not with those who seek to be free.

Beyond Mill: What He Got Right and What He Missed

Mill's harm principle, for all its elegance, requires significant supplementation for the twenty-first century. Mill was writing in a context where the primary threat to individual liberty was the state -- and more specifically, the tyranny of the majority exercised through democratic legislation. He was less attentive to several threats that have become central in our era.

Corporate power. Mill could not have anticipated the emergence of corporations with more power over individual lives than many governments. When a handful of technology companies control the platforms through which most human communication now occurs, their decisions about what speech to permit, what data to collect, and what algorithms to deploy are exercises of power that fall squarely within the scope of the harm principle -- even though they are technically "private" actions. The harm principle needs to be extended from state action to any exercise of power that is functionally equivalent to state action.

Structural coercion. Mill assumed a world of relatively autonomous individuals making free choices. But many people face constraints so severe -- poverty, discrimination, lack of education, psychological manipulation -- that their "choices" are free only in the most formal sense. A woman in a patriarchal society who "chooses" to remain in an abusive marriage because she has no economic alternative, no legal recourse, and no social support is not meaningfully free. The harm principle must be supplemented with attention to the structural conditions that make genuine choice possible.

Information manipulation. Mill assumed that in a free marketplace of ideas, truth would eventually prevail over falsehood. This assumption has been severely tested by the age of algorithmic disinformation, deepfakes, and state-sponsored propaganda campaigns. The question of how to protect the conditions for rational discourse without resorting to censorship is one of the most difficult problems in contemporary political philosophy -- and one that Mill's framework, by itself, cannot solve.

These supplements do not undermine Mill's core insight. They deepen it. The harm principle remains the right starting point. But it needs to be understood as the beginning of the analysis, not the end.

The False Dichotomy: Freedom Versus Security

Every authoritarian in history has justified the restriction of freedom in the name of security. Caesar crossed the Rubicon to "restore order." Napoleon crowned himself emperor to "save the revolution." Every twentieth-century dictator -- Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pinochet, Saddam -- presented himself as the protector of the people against some existential threat: capitalism, Bolshevism, imperialism, terrorism, chaos. And the pattern continues in the twenty-first century, where leaders from Orbán to Xi to Putin restrict civil liberties in the name of national security, social stability, or civilizational defense.

The rhetorical structure is always the same: You face a terrible threat. Only strong authority can protect you. Freedom is a luxury you cannot afford in times of danger. Trust us to keep you safe.

This argument is almost always fraudulent, and for a specific reason: the greatest threats to human security in the modern era have come not from too much freedom but from too much power concentrated in too few hands. The twentieth century's greatest catastrophes -- two world wars, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Great Leap Forward, the Rwandan genocide -- were not caused by individuals exercising too much liberty. They were caused by states exercising too much authority. The empirical record is unambiguous: the more power a government accumulates over its citizens, the more dangerous it becomes -- not only to external enemies but to its own people.

This does not mean that security is unimportant. Of course it is important. People cannot exercise their freedom if they are dead, starving, or under constant physical threat. The point is that freedom and security are not opposed. They are complementary. Free societies are, on the whole, more secure than unfree ones -- because they have mechanisms for peaceful power transfer, for the correction of policy errors, for the expression of dissent before it becomes revolt. It is precisely the societies that suppress freedom in the name of security that tend to produce the greatest insecurity: political purges, civil wars, famines caused by policy errors that no one was permitted to criticize.

The "freedom versus security" dichotomy is not a genuine philosophical problem. It is a propaganda tool. And the appropriate response to it is not philosophical engagement but empirical debunking.

Two Concepts of Liberty

Isaiah Berlin's famous 1958 lecture "Two Concepts of Liberty" introduced a distinction that remains indispensable for thinking about freedom: the distinction between negative liberty (freedom from interference) and positive liberty (freedom to act on one's purposes).

Negative liberty is the absence of external obstacles. You have negative liberty to the extent that no one is preventing you from doing what you want to do. The prisoner lacks negative liberty because the walls of the cell physically prevent movement. The dissident in an authoritarian state lacks negative liberty because the secret police will punish any expression of dissent. The woman in a society that forbids her to drive lacks negative liberty because the law prohibits her action. Negative liberty is about the removal of barriers.

Positive liberty is the capacity to act on one's own purposes. You have positive liberty to the extent that you have the resources, education, health, and psychological autonomy to shape your own life according to your own conception of the good. The illiterate person in a formally free society lacks positive liberty because they cannot access the information necessary for meaningful participation in political and economic life. The person trapped in addiction lacks positive liberty because their capacity for autonomous choice has been compromised. The person living in abject poverty lacks positive liberty because the struggle for survival leaves no room for anything else.

Berlin himself was suspicious of positive liberty, arguing that it had been historically abused: totalitarian regimes had justified coercion in the name of making people "truly" free -- free from false consciousness, free from bourgeois decadence, free to realize their "authentic" nature as defined by the state. The Soviet Union claimed to provide positive liberty by liberating workers from capitalist exploitation; in practice, it crushed negative liberty on an industrial scale.

Berlin's warning is well taken. Any concept of "positive freedom" that can be used to justify forcing people to be free is a contradiction in terms and a recipe for tyranny. But the conclusion that only negative liberty matters -- the conclusion drawn by many libertarians -- is equally untenable. Consider a thought experiment.

Imagine two societies. In Society A, the government enforces no restrictions on speech, movement, association, or economic activity. There is no welfare state, no public education, no public healthcare. Citizens are "free" in the negative sense: no one prevents them from doing anything. But 40 percent of the population is illiterate, life expectancy is 45 years, most people work 14-hour days in conditions they cannot negotiate, and only the wealthy can afford to participate meaningfully in political life.

In Society B, the government provides universal education, healthcare, and a social safety net, funded through progressive taxation. There are modest regulations on working conditions, environmental protection, and consumer safety. Citizens have somewhat less negative liberty (they must pay taxes; employers must meet safety standards) but vastly more positive liberty: nearly everyone can read, think, participate in public life, and pursue their own conception of the good.

Which society is freer? The libertarian answers Society A, because it has fewer restrictions. Common sense answers Society B, because more of its citizens can actually do something with their freedom. And common sense is right. A freedom that exists only on paper -- a freedom that you are formally permitted to exercise but practically unable to exercise -- is a freedom in name only.

The position defended in this book is that both negative and positive liberty matter, and that a civilized society must attend to both. The state must refrain from interfering with individual autonomy except where harm to others requires it (negative liberty). And the state must ensure that the conditions for meaningful autonomy -- education, health, economic security, access to information -- are available to all citizens, not just the privileged few (positive liberty). These two requirements are not in tension. They are two sides of the same coin: the commitment to treating every individual as an agent capable of self-determination, rather than as a subject to be managed.

The Hierarchy of Freedoms

Not all freedoms are equally important. The freedom to choose between thirty brands of breakfast cereal is not equivalent to the freedom of political dissent. The freedom to drive without a seatbelt is not equivalent to the freedom of religious belief. A serious philosophy of liberty requires a hierarchy -- a ranking of freedoms from the most fundamental (which may never be legitimately restricted) to the least fundamental (which may be regulated for good reasons).

I propose the following hierarchy, from most to least fundamental:

First tier: Freedom of thought and conscience. This is the most fundamental freedom, the one on which all others depend. No external authority -- state, church, corporation, or community -- may legitimately dictate what a person believes, what they value, or how they understand the world. This freedom is absolute. It admits of no exceptions. You may think anything you wish, believe anything you find compelling, doubt anything you find doubtful. The internal life of the mind is sovereign.

Note that this freedom is not merely about the right to hold unpopular opinions. It is about the right to the process of thinking -- the right to encounter diverse ideas, to weigh evidence, to change one's mind, to arrive at conclusions through one's own reasoning rather than through coercion, indoctrination, or manipulation. Any institution that controls what information people may access, what questions they may ask, or what conclusions they may reach is violating the most fundamental human freedom.

Second tier: Freedom of expression. The natural extension of freedom of thought. A freedom to think that does not include the freedom to communicate one's thoughts is hollow. Freedom of expression includes the freedom to speak, write, publish, broadcast, and transmit ideas through any medium. It includes the freedom to criticize governments, religions, cultural norms, and powerful institutions. It includes the freedom to create art, literature, music, and other forms of cultural expression that may be offensive, disturbing, or subversive.

The limits of free expression are narrow and well-defined: direct incitement to imminent violence, true threats against identified individuals, fraud (deliberate deception for material gain), and the violation of others' fundamental rights (such as child exploitation). Offense is not harm. The fact that someone finds your ideas upsetting, blasphemous, or morally repugnant does not give them the right to silence you. This distinction -- between harm and offense -- is one of the most important in political philosophy, and one of the most frequently violated in practice.

Third tier: Freedom of movement and association. The freedom to go where you wish, to live where you wish, to associate with whom you wish, and to leave associations you no longer endorse. This includes the freedom to emigrate -- to leave a country whose government you find oppressive. Any state that prevents its citizens from leaving is, by that fact alone, a prison. It also includes the freedom of assembly: the right to gather peacefully, to organize, to form political parties, trade unions, religious communities, and civil society organizations.

Fourth tier: Freedom of bodily autonomy. The right to make decisions about your own body: what to eat, what to wear, what substances to ingest, what medical treatments to accept or refuse, whom to have sex with (among consenting adults), whether and when to reproduce. This freedom is not absolute -- public health emergencies may justify certain temporary restrictions (vaccination requirements during epidemics, quarantine during pandemics) -- but the default is autonomy, and the burden of proof lies heavily on those who would override it.

Fifth tier: Economic freedom. The freedom to own property, to engage in trade, to choose one's occupation, to start a business, to enter into contracts. This freedom is important but the most regulable of the five tiers, because unregulated economic activity can generate forms of power that undermine all other freedoms. The robber baron who monopolizes an industry, the corporation that poisons a river, the employer who exploits workers in conditions of desperation -- all represent cases where economic freedom, exercised without constraint, destroys the conditions for freedom itself. Economic freedom is a real freedom, but it operates within a framework of regulation designed to prevent the strong from using their economic power to crush the weak.

This hierarchy is not arbitrary. It reflects a principle: the freedoms most closely connected to the integrity of the individual as an autonomous agent are the most fundamental and the least regulable. As we move down the hierarchy, from thought to expression to movement to bodily autonomy to economic activity, the freedoms become increasingly enmeshed with the freedoms and interests of others, and regulation becomes increasingly defensible.

Where Freedom Must Be Limited: Harm, Not Offense

The most dangerous enemies of freedom are not those who oppose it openly. Tyrants and dictators are at least honest about what they are doing. The most dangerous enemies are those who restrict freedom while claiming to protect it -- who censor in the name of "preventing harm," who surveil in the name of "keeping people safe," who suppress dissent in the name of "social harmony."

The key to resisting this sleight of hand is to insist on a rigorous definition of harm. In the framework defended here, harm means:

Physical harm: bodily injury, deprivation of the material conditions of life (food, shelter, health), or the credible threat of such injury or deprivation.

Fraud and deception: the deliberate manipulation of another person's decision-making through false information, for material or political gain.

Coercion: the use of force or the credible threat of force to override another person's autonomous choices.

Exploitation: the systematic use of another person's vulnerabilities -- economic desperation, ignorance, psychological dependency -- to extract benefits they would not freely consent to provide.

What harm does not include:

Offense. The fact that someone's speech, behavior, or beliefs makes you angry, upset, disgusted, or uncomfortable is not harm. It is the price of living in a free society. If you find someone's views repugnant, you are free to say so. You are not free to silence them.

Moral disapproval. The fact that you believe someone else's lifestyle, sexual behavior, dietary choices, or religious practices are immoral does not constitute harm. Your moral convictions, however deeply held, do not give you the right to impose them on others who do not share them.

Competitive disadvantage. The fact that someone else's exercise of their freedom reduces your competitive advantage -- that a rival business attracts your customers, that a rival political party attracts your voters, that a rival intellectual tradition attracts your students -- is not harm. It is competition, and competition is a feature of free societies, not a bug.

Cultural anxiety. The fact that social change makes you uncomfortable -- that immigrants speak different languages, that gender roles are shifting, that religious observance is declining, that sexual norms are liberalizing -- is not harm. Cultural change may be unsettling, but it is not an injury that justifies the restriction of other people's freedom.

This insistence on a narrow definition of harm is not pedantic. It is the front line of defense against authoritarianism. Every restriction of freedom in human history has been justified by some expansive notion of "harm" -- harm to public morals, harm to social stability, harm to national unity, harm to the feelings of the majority. The narrower the definition of harm, the wider the zone of freedom. The wider the definition of harm, the narrower the zone of freedom. The choice between these two orientations is the choice between a free society and a controlled one.

The Surveillance State: Freedom's Most Insidious Enemy

The traditional enemies of freedom -- the censor, the secret police, the inquisitor -- operated through visible coercion. They burned books in public squares. They arrested dissidents in the middle of the night. They tortured confessions out of prisoners in dungeons. Their methods were brutal, but they had a paradoxical advantage for freedom: they were recognizable. People knew they were being oppressed, and that knowledge was itself a form of resistance.

The twenty-first century has produced a new enemy of freedom that is far more insidious: the surveillance state, which controls behavior not through visible coercion but through invisible monitoring. When you know that every email you send, every phone call you make, every website you visit, every purchase you make, every location you travel to, and every person you associate with is being recorded and analyzed, you do not need to be told to conform. You conform automatically. The prison has no walls because the walls are inside your head.

Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations exposed the scale of the American surveillance apparatus: the National Security Agency was collecting metadata on virtually every phone call made in the United States, tapping the fiber-optic cables that carry the world's internet traffic, and compromising the encryption systems on which digital security depends. The revelations were shocking, but they revealed only part of the picture. The surveillance capabilities of the Chinese state -- the "Golden Shield" (Great Firewall), the Social Credit System, the facial recognition networks that cover entire cities, the monitoring of WeChat conversations and Weibo posts -- go considerably further, creating what some scholars have called a "digital totalitarianism" unprecedented in human history.

China's Social Credit System deserves particular attention because it represents something genuinely new in the history of social control. Previous authoritarian regimes punished specific acts of dissent. The Social Credit System punishes -- and rewards -- patterns of behavior. Citizens who conform to approved norms receive benefits: easier access to loans, better transportation options, priority in school admissions. Citizens who deviate from approved norms face penalties: restricted travel, public shaming, exclusion from certain jobs and services. The effect is not to punish dissent after it occurs but to prevent it from occurring in the first place, by making conformity the rational choice in every individual transaction.

But it would be a serious error to treat surveillance as a problem unique to authoritarian states. Democratic states have built their own surveillance infrastructures, often with less transparency and less public debate than the situation demands. The United Kingdom has more CCTV cameras per capita than any country on earth. The NSA Investigator General's Pegasus spyware was used by governments around the world -- including putatively democratic ones -- to hack the phones of journalists, human rights activists, and opposition politicians. The difference between democratic and authoritarian surveillance is real but narrower than democratic citizens would like to believe.

Corporate Surveillance and Data Capitalism

If state surveillance is the older threat, corporate surveillance is the more pervasive one. Most people in the developed world now carry a device in their pocket that tracks their location continuously, records their communications, monitors their purchases, analyzes their social connections, and feeds all of this data to corporations whose business model depends on predicting and influencing their behavior.

Shoshana Zuboff has called this system "surveillance capitalism": an economic logic in which human experience is treated as raw material to be extracted, processed, and sold. The product being sold is not the service you use (the search engine, the social network, the mapping app). The product being sold is you -- or more precisely, a predictive model of your behavior that advertisers and other clients pay to access. You are not the customer. You are the commodity.

The freedom implications of this system are profound and underappreciated. When a corporation knows more about your behavior, preferences, vulnerabilities, and likely future actions than you know about yourself -- when it can predict with high accuracy what you will buy, whom you will vote for, what will make you anxious, and what will make you click -- the traditional model of the autonomous consumer making free choices in a free market becomes a fiction. You are not choosing freely. You are being nudged, manipulated, and herded by systems designed to exploit your cognitive biases for someone else's profit.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has argued that this represents a new form of domination, more effective than any previous form precisely because it is voluntary. The surveillance state forces compliance through fear. Surveillance capitalism achieves compliance through convenience. You surrender your privacy not because someone holds a gun to your head but because the services are useful, the interface is pleasant, and the terms of service are too long to read. The result is the same: a world in which individual autonomy is systematically undermined by systems of monitoring and manipulation that the individual cannot see, cannot understand, and cannot escape.

A serious commitment to freedom in the twenty-first century must address corporate surveillance as aggressively as it addresses state surveillance. This means, at a minimum: robust data protection laws that treat personal data as an extension of the person rather than as a commodity; meaningful consent requirements that go beyond unreadable terms of service; limits on the collection, retention, and use of behavioral data; and the breakup of monopolistic platforms that have accumulated surveillance capabilities incompatible with a free society.

The Paradox of Tolerance

Karl Popper identified a problem that every defender of freedom must confront: the paradox of tolerance. "If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant," Popper wrote, "if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

The paradox is real, and it has practical consequences. Should a free society permit speech that advocates the abolition of free speech? Should it permit political parties that seek to destroy democracy? Should it permit religious movements that seek to impose theocracy? If it does, it risks its own destruction. If it does not, it compromises its own principles.

The solution lies in distinguishing between ideas and actions. A free society must tolerate ideas -- all ideas, including ideas hostile to freedom itself. You may advocate for theocracy, dictatorship, communism, fascism, or any other political system you find attractive. You may publish books defending these positions, give speeches promoting them, organize conferences celebrating them. This tolerance is not a weakness. It is a strength, because it demonstrates that a free society is confident enough to permit its own critique.

But a free society is not obliged to tolerate actions that undermine the institutional conditions of freedom. If a political party uses its electoral success to dismantle the very democratic institutions through which it came to power -- abolishing free elections, shutting down independent courts, silencing opposition media -- the society is entitled to defend itself. Not by banning the party's ideas, but by enforcing the institutional rules that protect freedom for everyone: constitutional constraints, independent judiciaries, term limits, press freedom, and the rule of law.

This is not a contradiction. It is the recognition that freedom is not merely an abstract value but an institutional achievement that requires institutional protection. A society that refuses to protect its own freedom in the name of unlimited tolerance is not principled. It is naive. And its naivety will be exploited by those who have no interest in freedom at all.

Practical Implications: What a Free Society Looks Like

Abstract principles are valuable only insofar as they generate practical commitments. The freedom principle, as articulated in this chapter, generates the following:

No censorship of ideas. A free society does not ban books, block websites, censor films, or prohibit the expression of any idea, however offensive, heretical, or subversive. The remedy for bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence. The narrow exceptions -- direct incitement to imminent violence, true threats, fraud -- are precisely defined and narrowly applied.

No persecution for belief. No person may be punished, disadvantaged, or discriminated against for their religious beliefs, political opinions, philosophical convictions, or lack thereof. This includes atheists in religious societies, religious believers in secular societies, political dissidents in all societies, and anyone whose worldview differs from the majority's.

No restriction on movement without cause. Citizens may travel freely within and across borders. Passports and visas are administrative conveniences, not instruments of control. No government may prevent its citizens from leaving. Border restrictions may be justified by genuine security concerns but not by the desire to control populations or suppress competition.

No surveillance without oversight. Both state and corporate surveillance must be subject to strict legal limits, independent judicial oversight, and meaningful transparency requirements. Mass surveillance -- the collection of data on entire populations without individualized suspicion -- is incompatible with a free society and must be prohibited.

Bodily autonomy as default. Individuals control their own bodies. Decisions about reproductive health, end-of-life care, substance use, sexual behavior (between consenting adults), and personal appearance are for the individual to make, not the state, the church, or the community.

Economic regulation for freedom, not against it. Regulation of economic activity is legitimate insofar as it protects the conditions for freedom -- preventing monopoly, protecting workers from exploitation, ensuring environmental sustainability, providing the public goods (education, healthcare, infrastructure) that make meaningful autonomy possible. Regulation that exists merely to protect established interests, to enforce conformity, or to extract rents for the powerful is illegitimate.

Conclusion: Freedom as the Air We Breathe

Freedom is like air. You do not notice it when you have it. You notice it immediately when it is taken away. And by the time you notice its absence, it may already be too late to recover it.

The chapters preceding this one established the foundations of the rational compass: species preservation as the minimal obligation, suffering reduction as the most urgent priority, human dignity as the inviolable core. This chapter adds the fourth bearing: individual liberty as the default political condition, restricted only when demonstrable harm to others requires it.

These four principles -- preservation, suffering reduction, dignity, and liberty -- are not in competition with one another. They are mutually reinforcing. A society that preserves the species, reduces preventable suffering, respects human dignity, and maximizes individual freedom is a society that has achieved something worthy of admiration. A society that fails on any of these dimensions is, to that extent, deficient. And a society that systematically suppresses freedom -- that monitors its citizens' every thought, punishes dissent, controls bodies, and manages minds -- is not merely deficient. It is, in the precise sense developed in this book, uncivilized: regardless of its GDP, its military power, its technological sophistication, or its cultural heritage.

The rational compass now has four bearings. One more remains before we turn to the great obstacles: the cooperative imperative -- the principle that human beings achieve more through institutions of cooperation than through hierarchies of domination. It is this principle, arguably the most practically consequential of the five, that occupies the next chapter.

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