Freedom Lite
Freedom is the most highly vaunted thing there
is. Material gain and the social status attached to it are close competitors,
but the people who get those things like to think they have done so by their
own free effort.
Yet when
confronted with the ultimate freedom, that feeling of being a living-feeling-thinking
individual (a place we often end up in existentialist philosophy), you
cannot gloss over the hole-filled road of life with easy answers. Eventually, you must stare death itself in
the face. You must come to grips with the very fact of your mortality and fully
comprehend that you will someday cease to exist, becoming nothing. All
of your personality ends at that terminus point, scattered into the winds. The
body is broken down into tiny fragments and devoured back into nature. In the eye of cosmic time, you were
not even the batting of a lid - you were a slight twitch! What then confronts
you is the sheer scale of this existence, and the grand context we human beings
are thrown into. Just to continue breathing becomes a choice; each inhalation,
each exhalation, is passed through a valve of thought and feeling. Why,
breath in, why, breath out.
How many
will retreat from this and say: 'No thank you. I do not want to wake up every
day and question why I should bother rising. I do not want to grow bored in a
tiny room because I cannot afford anything larger. I want work to tire me and
make me feel like I have earned something, and come the weekend I want to
intoxicate my body and drive some form of motorized vehicle to where the young
people play. I want to stand upon a gilded path, literally made of gold, ending
in the dazzling light of desire. I want to live and breathe and be carried by
nature's current, to where beauty is fleeting but irresistable, and where
living the harmless pleasures of life makes up our only morality. I want to be
vain and shallow, ignorant of the questions of philosophers, and utterly gay
and fleeting, (despite the eventual decay and possible annihilation of the
universe - who care about such things). I want to tick a box once every four
years and let the big boys do they want with their power, so long as I get my gadgets
and a bit of sexual attention at the end of the week. I want my safety net of
Gods and Masters to put the horrible or dull aspects of nature into a box and
not have to confront them every single day'. Indeed, who
wants actual freedom when you can have Freedom Lite? For the former will
plunge you into a spiral of scepticism every so often, whereas the latter is
conformity disguised as freedom. Freedom Lite is like telling someone
what to do, but convincing them they have chosen it themself.
Real freedom
is the freedom to fail. It is the freedom to grasp onto the butt of a rifle and
thrust it forward to bayonet someone trying to wreck your community - there
will be no men and women in uniform to
deal with violent threats in such a free society. That is the real philosophy
of real freedom; what begins with words must end with the ability to defend
oneself. It is absolute and ultimate
trust and responsibility. It is the freedom to realize how little you actually
know, and how dependent you are on others to keep the machines of civilization
rolling and the fire of knowledge aflame. It is something that requires
impossible responsibility, adapting to constant change and the destruction of
routine - for surely that which we can do without much thought cannot be
considered a free and aware action?
And what
of our relation to our communities in this freer world? How will we look to
them so much for guidance when we no longer wish to be constrained by rigid
common morality? And how will we relate to our own bodies? Will we consider the
impulses of desire to be indicators of free choice? Ask it, ask it!
No one
wants to admit they enjoy following the blue-print set out for them, they want
to feel like they have got somewhere by their own strength of will and merit.
Every time they do cave in, to a powerful desire, to a command by authority,
backing down from a challenge, they say it is an exception. They cannot make it
on their own freedom, they cannot justify themselves to the great void that is
the meaningless cosmos by searching within themselves, and so they compensate
with an impotent rant at the unhearing stars once every cycle.
Given
the impossible solitude, difficulty and boredom of actual freedom, who can
blame them.
St.Zagarus
The Philosophy Takeaway Issue 48 'Freedom'
