Yesterday we had a lot of snow and today I woke up to −16°C and sunshine — I decided to take a walk. While I was out there, following my whims, I realised that we have lost something essential, something core to our being.
When I had made my decision, I put on warm clothes, opened the door, and started walking. There was no process, not even a thought spent on asking someone’s permission, justifying my need, or even explaining what I was doing.
This is freedom.
If I had to justify what I was doing, to others or even to myself, then I wouldn’t be free. If someone else could demand that I explain myself to them, then I wouldn’t be free. Even if I just had to give a motivation what what I was doing, then I wouldn’t be free.
The last point may sound pedantic, but it is essential: if all our actions followed from permitted extrapolations of what we were before, then life would be deterministic, we would not have freedom of choice. Whether this choice is an illusion created by some invisible hand is an interesting question, but not relevant here. My concern is my human hunger for heartfelt freedom.
How have we lost it?
I must admit that the above contains a small contradiction: how can we have lost something that is essential to us, as human beings? The more precise description is that we have subdued it, we have lost sight of it, we have allowed our freedom to be put into a shrine, out of reach.
There are many ways in which this has happened all over the world, to varying degrees. Our freedom is curtailed wherever we have to answer to someone, whether they represent legal authority(*), sheer brutality, or some higher cause. And with today’s communication platforms everyone can demand an explanation from everyone else for anything they do. We have seen oppressive systems in the past, developing from extremely labour-intensive physical means to ever more sophisticated hierarchical power exertion, and all of these were supplemented by peer pressure. The latter has now become a central element, examples abound from politics over culture to the sciences, independent of background — political or otherwise.
Perhaps this last insight, bitter as it is, bears a glimmer of hope: we have not actually lost our hunger for freedom, we are just channeling it in unhealthy ways. People are substituting their lost freedom by usurping power over others, sometimes petty and sometimes for a presumed higher cause.
I am convinced that by giving people back their freedom, by not stifling them anymore, we can again talk to each other to sort out our problems. We do have a lot that we should talk about in earnest! But the current oppressive way of trying to deal with our issues — great and small — is leading us into a dead end.
(*) The rule of the law is the single most important invention in human civilisation, it is the basis for everything we have achieved, so we must respect legal authority. The onus is on the legislative to very carefully weigh everyone’s freedom before restricting it by law — and we are not very good at this part yet.