Freedom Sucks, Actually

Freedom sure sounds great, doesn’t it? It inspires whole convoys, after all. There is an entire American congressional caucus dedicated to it! We’re supposed to let it ring, and for that privilege, we are charged a buck-oh-five. There are statues dedicated to the very notion of liberty, and yet it remains vague and undetermined, generally on purpose by those advocating for it. Typically ‘Freedom’ in the political sphere means rich people not having to pay any taxes, but that’s never explicit, and so people often have this vague, fuzzy feeling about the term that’s generally positive. So what does freedom actually entail? Is it more than just feeling secure against the threat of terrorists and commies through lower corporate tax rates?

Freedom, when pressed, is obviously about the freedom to choose. We can’t choose anything if Sharia Law is enforced and we all have to convert to Islam, or the communists have us all wearing the same grey sweatsuit lining up for the same loaves of bread. Freedom means being able to choose between loaves of bread and the freedom to convert to Christianity!! Right? To an extent. Freedom in its most absolute sense would be all the choices from choosing between two loaves of bread to killing yourself. If we are truly free, there are an infinite number of choices available to us at any given moment.

Memes, you’re definitely growing on me as an educational resource

Does this sound terrifying? It should! The freest person in the world is the recovering drug addict. Their entire lives were previously dedicated to all aspects of doing drugs: grinding to get the drugs, doing the drugs, a short grace period to do some wallowing, and then grinding again. It’s a loop that’s hard to escape, but it does happen. When it does, that person has only known a very constrained lifestyle, and now, without any of it, they are free to do literally whatever they want. Maybe they might go back to school, or start working again, or reconnect with their sober friends. Or maybe they might travel, or go to a treatment centre, or move to a new home away from their drug den, or go for a walk or a movie or the library or the mall or a drop-in centre or a counseling session or a swim in the ocean or a music festival or back home to their parents or a cry in the shower or, as has been established, just end it all. These are choices that must be made every second of every day without any idea of when this flood of choice will end. People off themselves all the time in recovery, and part of the reason is the amount of freedom that they have. The experience of absolute freedom is a void of unknown and infinite possibility, an expanse of overwhelming nothingness ahead of you, and you are the only person responsible and capable for taking that desolate void, both outside and inside of yourself, and turning it into a worthwhile life. Alcoholics Anonymous tells recovering addicts to take things one day at a time simply to limit the number of choices people in this precarious and vulnerable position have to make. The existential anxiety of making a choice is so great that many people relapse simply because the miserable cycle of drug use is at least a known quantity and has a degree of comfort in taking those choices away. Anyone calling them a coward for this has never undergone the experience.

Limiting freedom is actually quite healthy for normies too! You ever hear of structure and routine? They’re great ways to stay healthy. People have a hard time making it to the gym when they have to choose to go to the gym, but when it becomes habit, and they are no longer actually choosing to go, they now have a routine. This is actually incredibly beneficial! If someone is feeling low and unable to do much, their bodies will automatically follow the routine they’ve habituated, and voila! They’ve still made it to the gym despite their blues, and you know what? They’re probably feeling a bit better because of it. Obviously the reverse is true with bad habits, but creating a good life is about creating good and healthy habits. Even something like making a list is helpful because it forces our decisions into a box that restricts our choices to the items listed – they get done because we don’t allow ourselves to choose outside of that box. The irony of freedom’s celebrity is that the goal of life is reduce the number of choices we actually have to make on a day-to-day basis; we just automatically make lunch for work the next day, or go to bed at a reasonable hour, or use the healthy groceries that we buy rather than leave them to rot in our refrigerators. Success comes when our lives are mostly automated, and an automated lifestyle is not a free one.

Pictured: successful humans

This seems somewhat intuitive. Has anyone faced a major life choice and thought: wow, this is a pleasurable experience! Or was there a lot of anxiety and catastrophizing about what the future might look like whether you choose this or that? Especially once you realize that not making a choice is also a choice, and allowing the status quo to perpetuate itself is one of those infinite choices you have to deal with. If a choice seems easy, it’s likely because you’ve been culturally primed to accept that choice as typical and normal – and how free is that of a choice, really? Jean-Paul Sartre, notorious philosopher of freedom, tells us we are “condemned to freedom.’ Choosing negates all other possible choices, and is a terrifying, inescapable, and necessary experience.

And I do think it’s necessary! Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against freedom! We must choose. Having someone else making these major choices for us is an unforgiveable oppression. Just, as with everything, in healthy moderation. Even those Freedom Truckers wore their seatbelts on their drive to Ottawa, and had nothing to say about seatbelt mandates, or traffic light mandates, or pants mandates. No one was out there protesting their freedom to not wear pants, only masks, even though the arguments against pants are way more grounded in science than the arguments against masks!

Don’t you just hate them?

So why is freedom, something that actually kinda sucks, celebrated like it’s the fundamental aspect of Western civilization? I mean, I think it’s reasonable to yadda, yadda, yadda over the escape from the tyranny of the British monarchy since the freedom I’m describing goes well beyond the fight for democracy, but I think the Freedom of today has far evolved beyond that democratic rebellion oh so many centuries ago. Given the link between the fascistic elements of Western society and claims of Freedom, I think that much is clear! So what is it? My personal thoughts are that Freedom has come to represent the dream of a meritocracy. We obviously aren’t living in a meritocracy, but if we are Free, then we must be! I earned my life through the choices I’ve made, and if there are outside social factors subtly influencing my position in life, then the value of my merit is lessened. If I am Free, I am not determined. Whether my life is good or bad, it is my own. I have carved out my place in this world, and the only way that that’s going to change is if the commies and terrorists are allowed to come take our Freedoms away. When people talk about Freedom, they aren’t actually talking about freedom at all since, as discussed, freedom is an incredible burden foisted upon us by an uncaring universe. They’re talking about dignity. I matter because I am Free. Their vitriolic shouts of Freedom and spittle aren’t a call for action, but a plea to have the meaning of their actions recognized.

Freedom is a good thing in the same way that democracy and socialism are good things; we ought to have a choice in our governments and our workplaces. We ought to have choices in our own lives even as we aspire to limit them. Those choices can be painful, and an overwhelming amount of freedom is such a sublime threat that I pray none of you ever have to face that kind of dread. Freedom is… fine, I guess. We’ve become kinda weird about it, but that’s because society has become kinda weird. We’ve become so disconnected from the world around us that we actually insist on it now; if the world is connected to me in any way, then what I do doesn’t matter! How broken of a culture is that? Freedom with a capital F has seemingly become the last bastion of being okay with ourselves while all other forms of meaning are being erased by those who profit off our existential despair. This is why Freedom and fascism can exist in tandem. The thing is though, we can create our own meaning without having to believe that we are alone in creating it. Being alone sucks, but being free around other people means respecting their freedom which often means limiting our own. Given we’ve established that limiting our freedom can be a good thing generally, this shouldn’t be seen as a threat, but as a way to lead a happier, healthier, and more cohesive lifestyle.

I am choosing to add this image to this blog, not because it is relevant in any way, but because I want to. Or am I only doing it to adhere to the goal I set for myself in my previous blog? How free of a choice was this really?

Freedom is like eating our vegetables. We don’t want to do it, but we have to, and if we can find a way to make them more appealing by dousing them in the ranch dressing of moderation, that’s probably for the best. What we don’t want is for Freedom to distract us from the reality of freedom. Freedom more often than not needs to be limited, whether that’s to avoid existential dread, to have a healthy routine, or simply to get along well with others. This doesn’t eliminate meaning, but enhances it. Freedom with a capital F is a lie. Freedom with a lower case f is all we have, all we are condemned to endure. Best to make the most of it!

Against Freedom

While maybe not surprising to long-term readers who have been following since I wrote an article defending communism, I am now writing an article about how maybe we could all use a little less freedom. George W. Bush was right: we hate your freedoms, and we’re coming to take them away. Sorry America, but the terrorists just had the better argument. Blame the free market of ideas, and then marvel at the irony.

The thing is, freedom is actually a paradoxical ideology. Universal freedom is necessarily contradictory. The current “debate” about masking during a pandemic is case-in-point. If you are free to disregard masks and parade around mouth-breathing your aerosol droplets all over me, my freedom to avoid getting sick from Covid is reduced. There are millions of examples you can come up with: my freedom to be verbally abusive limits your freedom from verbal abuse. If you are free to make puns, it renders my freedom to live in a world without puns sadly utopian. If you believe yourself free to cheat on your monogamous partner and your excuse is, “I thought this was America!”, you will quickly discover that people aren’t super thrilled when your alleged freedom impinges on their own.

Kill me.

Am I entitled to mature and well-developed humour? Maybe not. Am I entitled to health? This point becomes harder to argue against. Am I entitled to health that is not being actively damaged by the choices of others? It would probably be a good idea to have a society that adopts that mentality, yeah. The issue is that the debate never focuses on the issues impacted by the free actions of others, and the freedoms they might be reducing in turn. It typically focuses on ‘freedom’ as an abstract, unexamined concept that just has that certain je-ne-sais-quoi that most people find appealing. Even those denouncing the demands of those freedom-loving anti-maskers won’t condemn the concept of freedom itself, but you heard it here first: freedom the way most people imagine it is a masturbatory fantasy.

Freedom advocates would argue that freedom should not exist completely deregulated, but that the only reasonable regulations are negative ones: you can’t murder, for example, but you shouldn’t be compelled to act in any particular way. Hence, you can’t make me put on a mask, you commie! However, the limits on negative regulation are arbitrary. Being forbidden from making puns is a negative regulation, but I have yet to come across a libertarian seriously making this argument despite its expansive merit. The distinction between negative and positive impositions on freedom is completely meaningless, and doesn’t address my original point that all the actions we take are going to be affecting those around us in ways that may well reduce their freedom. While this is a small case of conjecture, I can speculate that the ‘true believers’ would say that those who are negatively impacted by their free actions should just suck it up; they should content themselves with having less freedom than others. Sounds completely reasonable and not at all systemically oppressive.

Those kids should be free to do whatever they want, and if she doesn’t like it, she has the freedom to start her *own* school!

Freedom is a pretty great idea. I like being able to do things, but I also recognize that I am one individual among many with equal entitlement to the things that I ought to be entitled to. I want to be healthy, but I have to recognize that everyone else wants to be healthy too. I want to live in a world without puns, but I have to recognize that other people have the wrong sense of humour, and I just have to live with their wrongness. If I begin to act in a way that limits the puns of others using my own freedom to coerce their behaviour, I am limiting their freedom to make awful “jokes.” I would appreciate the same consideration when I make delightful and well-timed fart jokes from the plebeians that simply don’t understand the nuance!

When we recognize the needs of others as equally requiring consideration, we recognize that we must be responsible to those needs and our freedom must be curtailed. If we disregard the needs of others, we are not actually advocating for universal freedom, we are demanding selfish preference. Freedom is not generalizable, but the great thing about responsibility is that it is! Everyone is capable of shouldering equal amounts of responsibility to their neighbour. An argument could be made that some parties may be more responsible than others (more polluting nations are more responsible for reining in their carbon emissions to address climate change, for example), but aspirational responsibility is not as contradictory as aspirational freedom.

I may have lived long enough to see myself become the villain, here

Viktor Frankl is quoted as saying that America needs a Statue of Responsibility to temper its Statue of Liberty, and his worries are coming to deadly fruition today. Politicians and pundits that espouse and proselytize freedom can only be pandering to the selfish ego of their followers, by the very nature of the ideology they are spouting. The purposeful disregard and neglect of one’s neighbour is the disregard and neglect of their freedom. I guess the point is you’re not supposed to give a shit about your neighbour because your freedom is the only freedom that matters.

Let’s instead work toward a universal responsibility. It’s not particularly difficult because it’s something that can be adopted in every action. We can be responsible to others as individuals; it can be foisted upon our politicians and other macro-level actors sure, and adopted by corporations and those on the mezzo level too. Everyone can be responsible. The less we focus on a pointless concept like freedom, the more we can focus on taking care of one another. I think the world would be much better off, and we’d probably have fewer Covid cases too.

Wage Slavery

Would you ever sell yourself into slavery? If you think this is a paradox, remember that slavery is not simply unpaid labour, but giving up our control to the whims of another. Slaves were property, not unpaid labourers. The conditions of the slavery aren’t even that important; I don’t think anyone would go back in time and choose to be a slave, even if they got to be a house slave. Slavery isn’t abominable because of the conditions, though they certainly didn’t help, nor was it anything to do with the type of labour involved since all of that labour still exists today with little controversy. Slavery was abolished because it took away our liberty as human beings.

Maybe you’re a bit more cynical. I was a quite vague in my offer, but perhaps a huge cash sum might change your mind? The thing is, though, if any amount of money tempts us to give up a fundamental condition of our human nature, then that desire can only be driven by desperation. If the thought arises that this amount of money might make life more livable, it is only blinding us to the fact that a life of slavery is less than a life. We cannot abandon liberty and still be fully human.

Now, if we wouldn’t accept a single cash buyout to enter into slavery, then why do we accept smaller, biweekly payments in the form of a wage? The conditions of our labour today remove from us our autonomy just as much as any plantation, even if the conditions might be better. If you disagree, ask yourself how able you are to say no to your boss, and how able your boss is to say no to you. There is a disparity in freedom there, and it very likely isn’t favouring you. Any ability to say “no” to your boss that you possess today was fought and bled for by unionists before you. The pittance of liberty we possess at work was not given but taken, and, under many employers, is slowly being clawed back.

You might be skeptical. If you aren’t happy with your job, you can just pick up and leave for another, right? But consider this: how many employers are there out there right now that allow you to say no to your boss? How many employers are there that don’t follow this fundamental relationship of capital ownership? Trading one plantation for another is not liberty.

“Let’s work next door. I hear they only give out ten lashes for insubordination instead of twenty!” Businesses might offer perks to compete for your labour, but never liberty; all you receive are allowances from your master.

Maybe you dream of one day becoming the boss, then you’ll have freedom! Climb that corporate ladder! Regardless of how unfeasible this might be in reality due to the disparity of opportunities, the number of aspirants, the nepotism and politics of advancement, this is still the dream of the hooker wishing to become the pimp. Regardless of where you might fall along the spectrum of middle management, it is still an immoral system. Self-interest and greedy delusion are not sufficient justification.

The movie Office Space exists and is so relatable because we all inherently recognize that the disparate hierarchy we possess in our workplace is ultimately degrading. We agree to it because if we don’t work, we starve. We agree out of desperation.

And yet if Peter’s new boss asks him to come in on Saturday, he is still in the same predicament as in the beginning of the film. His relationship to work has not changed.

In our work today, we live less than a life. What we need is autonomy in our labour. What we need is a voice in the conditions of our labour. We demand democracy in our politics, but remain blind to it for the eight hours or more we slog through in our employment. We’ve been convinced we’re free because we have a few tired hours after work to spend the money we’ve been allowed on streaming television, forgetting that those hours required workers to die because the bosses of the past couldn’t be bothered to allow us even that.

Is that what we want? A life where our few pleasures are those “allowed” to us by our employer? Or do we want a say in our lives? Do we want real choice? If we do, what then are we willing to do for our liberty?