Who do we thank for freedom?

I sat up one night recently fighting off sleep, trying to answer a simple question and worried because I couldn't.

I strongly hesitate to use the word 'freedom' as it's become a tool for the US to bludgeon the rest of the world to its economic will, but in it's purest sense that's what it is.

Freedom to associate, freedom to worship, freedom to choose and pursue my career of choice, freedom from persecution because of my skin colour; I enjoy these things a great deal more than the vast majority of the world's population does.

And trying to work out who or what to thank for that led to a process of backtracking through history, rejecting or accepting every notion I could come up with.

The first was capitalism. I own a comfortable house full of nice things – much more than I need to merely stay alive. Of course, whether I should have only what I need to stay alive or whether – when so many other people don't even have that much – justice allows me to have more than I need so I can enjoy being alive is an entirely different argument.

I'm hesitant to thank capitalism because it has a bad name after globalisation and the unfair balance of power in the world. Noam Chomksy talks about corporate welfare, including how one of the richest electorates in the US enjoys unparalleled handouts from the government just because so many weapons manufacturers are situated there.

But as I have to remind myself, that's their kind of capitalism, the capitalism of protecting the rich – the kind that proliferates in today's world and makes life unfair for so many. I believe in its pure form where we all provide services or products we're good at creating and try to sell them to buyers in an unhindered market together with our competitors.

It's the reason that – when people complain about the loss of manufacturing jobs to China – part of me can't sympathise because that's capitalism at work, and measures like protective tariffs are the same kind of manipulation as the burgeoning market in government handouts to already-rich industries.

So yes, after some consideration I thank capitalism.

Do I thank God, for having been born in a stable country with a lot of natural resources, resources industries based here can capitalise on and assure a high living standard through the mechanisms of the capitalism mentioned above?

South America, Africa and the Middle East all enjoy similar natural and marketable resource than Australia does, in many cases more so. It seems the instability of their political system and their history of colonial invaders and overseers has tripped them up. No colonial power has left the third world without making sure they still pulled the string locally, hence why society ladies in New York and Paris wear the diamonds that come out of Africa's mines while Africans fight and kill each other for them.

Therefore, no, I don't think being born a citizen on a continent with resources is enough.

Genetically, I'm more British than Australian. It's in large part because I have white skin that I live comfortably. Countries where they have black or dark skin were overrun in the 19th century by the European powers, their people subjugated and enslaved, their resources pillaged, conditions and cultures many dark skinned people are still struggling to free themselves from. If I'd been from native Australian stock, I'd more likely be one of the people living in a remote community ravaged by ill health and alcoholism.

So do I have the colour of my skin to thank? Because my white skinned ancestors were aggressive, expansionist, territorial and used armed invasion as a political tool where the dark-skinned races were passive and ill-equipped to defend themselves? Partly so, I think.

Do I thank technology? Absolutely. Without it, I'd be sleeping in a cold cave worried about how I'd protect my wife and daughter if a sabre-toothed cat came in. Technology enables almost every measure of security, occupation and enjoyment I have in life. Technology is the result of our genetic sense of ambition, conquest and power. But that sense of ambition has an evil twin, because when the first caveman bashed the head of an enemy in with a club to settle a land or mating dispute, it led directly to a society where I can put a DVD on or look at a web page.

Do I thank the US government, for making sure freedom endures in the world? That's the subject of a million treatises by much smarter thinkers than I, so the US as a force of destruction in the world through their program of selective interference and widespread mass murder doesn't even warrant further discussion.

Like them, the Australian government would like to do everything it can to tear up the public contracts of freedom, and has done so to a large degree in the name of convenient and scary labels like paedophilia and terrorism.

It's the institutions and the way of life in Australia that are more relevant. We operate under a constitution that in theory trickles down to set the judicial and legislative standard across all political, economic and cultural life. Do I have that to thank – the fact that it's all too unwieldy to change such a raft of tradition and law that we've had for 200 years but many would like to?

If so, where do I go to track back through the Australian rules of law and freedom? The British parliamentary system, which for all its faults still has the right spirit – of not putting too much power in the hands of too few, designed to give voices to separate interests.

Of course they all work for the same corporate paymasters nowadays just like in any western democracy, so even if the practice has been grotesquely perverted the theory is still intact, and without the theory some megalomaniac would sweep the whole system away and we'd be living under a fascist dictator.

The ethos of British government came from a single cache of documents, the Magna Carta, which enshrines rights of protections against the state such as unlawful detention without trial (interesting that it's one being steadily dismantled for the first time in 800 years across the western world right now despite being one of the most powerful concepts of the charter).

A potted history of the Magna Carta is that the King of England committed several acts of such shocking ill judgment the land barons of England rebelled and demanded limits be placed on his power.

So do I have only the lack of political skill of the human race to thank? Prior to the Magna Carta (and to some extent since then) any rights of the people were overseen by the notion of the Divine Right to rule, where the whim of a born monarch was unchallenged law.

Do I have my own nature to lust after power and control to thank, a nature that was curtailed by people who realised that everyone's lust for power should be balanced against everyone else's?

Is that not only the reason I can feel safe and secure and pursue happiness and liberty in my home today, but the reason we as a species have a shocking record of living in harmony and sharing what we have, the reason war and poverty are just two of our biggest legacies to history?