The Fantasy of Freedom

"Liberty is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear." George Orwell

So listen up.

e duobus unum, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford together forever

Collectively we have imposed many restrictions on ourselves, some by convention, but many by law. Garbage bins of deodorant near airport security lines attest to this. "No shirt, no shoes..." No hitchhiking. Click it or ticket. No engine-braking, whatever. We can't even legally drive without like a dozen specific light bulbs on the exterior of our cars. Go ahead, stop and count them. My wife who abhors the proliferation of chintzy multi-colored Christmas lights should be even more aghast at the freeways full of red, yellow, and white that we wade through on a regular basis. The colors of our garish glowing flag and the toot of our dissonant horns are exhibited clearly from our homogenized four-wheeled chariots. We the people have chosen our allegiance: safety first.

Even so, when asked if we have too many choices or not enough choices, most of us will roll our eyes and think of the menu at the nearest Chinese food cart which offers at least 6 dozen mind-numbing ways to consume the same 15 ingredients. Even cars display many important differences while complying with thousands of protective standards. How can our choices seem so numerous and yet still be so few, so boring, and so self-defeating?

"Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." Ben Franklin

Go to the store and buy a T-shirt. You will have a hundred choices of color, design, neck, size, fit, and brand but you will only find two materials they are made from and one process by which they are made, thoroughly understood by only a handful of people on the planet. Or how about screwdrivers? You will find a fascinating array of lengths, styles, colors, and brands but good luck finding one made outside of China or with materials acquired with any kind of intentionality (i.e. outside of a monolithic global supply chain). Imagine ever saying this, "Hey check-out my new screwdriver. Beautiful craftsmanship, huh? The handle is made from premium tar-sand polymer from Alberta and the removable bits are from steel originally mined in a LEED-certified sustainable mine and recycled just across town in Rivergate. It is fastened together with epoxy chemically engineered and produced a few miles away in Tigard."

Squirrel!

In the majority of cases (food may be a new exception in some parts of the country) we aren't given choices, we are given distractions. Distractions from the fact that we don't know anything about how the world around us works. We couldn't make it work if we wanted to. All the practical skills we had a century ago have been outsourced to machines in the industrial economy. Most of us would literally die in a few weeks or months if the stores around us closed. So maybe all our choices are necessary distractions from the fact that we are no longer in control; from the fact that we have become helpless and dependent upon the homogenizing industrialization that is supposed to be serving us.

I just finished reading The Outline of Sanity, by G.K. Chesterton. The thesis of the book (written 85 years ago) is that capitalism and communism are both going to have disastrous consequences for humanity if implemented on a large scale. The irony for we who would pit them against each other is that they will do so in precisely the same way, by producing the kind of economy we have now. Most people seem to think that communism has been weighed in the balances and found wanting. Most people have much higher hopes for capitalism, but Chesterton, that portly prince of paradox, is not so optimistic. Capitalism for him is creating "big commercial combinations, often more imperial, more impersonal, more international than many a communist commonwealth."

I agree. This monopolistic tendency in capitalism is difficult to thwart and as corporations grow and follow their bottom line, they will not learn to compete better (as Adam Smith would have wanted) but learn to crush (or buy) the competition and influence the government that oversees it all. So we will continue bailing out the GMs and the Fords rather than let anyone else try a hand at making our cars. In communism the government swallows up all enterprises and in capitalism the enterprises swallow up all government, but the end result is the same: plutocracy.

So Chesterton argues for a pastoral revolution known as distributism, a third way (neither Smith nor Marx) in which we reestablish an ethic of private land-ownership, anti-industrialism, and local control of everything, thus restoring our dignity, our souls, and our freedom.

Well, kind of. Google (all praise to our corporate overlords!) tells me that freedom means "the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint." If we are honest we will admit that this is entirely unachievable. Freedom is a pipe dream. It's the dangled carrot that keeps us in the game, but which we will never wholly grasp. If we burn down the factories and throw all the machines into a giant pit we will have more of some freedoms (like the freedom to get away from our work computers and justifiably spend time I don't know, whittling something) but less of others (like the freedom to buy a gallon of milk for a fraction of a percent of a day's wages). Some of us equate freedom with getting out of the office. Others equate freedom with unlimited discretionary spending. Whichever freedom we choose, we will still be in bondage to a million other restraints on what we can do, say, or think. By cosmic standards our bodies, voices, and brains are just too infinitesimal to ever do anything truly "without hindrance or restraint."

Freedom!

Yet, our desire for freedom and our struggle to achieve it are unrelenting. True freedom is a fundamental human desire which continues to span a wide range of human activities. Moses, Spartacus, and William Wallace aren't the only ones we remember for setting their people free. Plato led our souls out of a cave, Galileo turned our minds back from a dead end, and Dylan went electric. Isn't desire for freedom even at the root of drug addiction? People get high to escape vertically from the prison walls of their own minds.

Which leads to a deeper issue. It's not just that we want to jump higher, make more money, or have more time. We want to be transcendent. Though we are dazzlingly finite and contingent, we are still lamentably convinced that transcendence is within reach, and that hope keeps many of us going. But the truth is that we will never have the most fundamental freedom of them all, freedom from ourselves. Imagine, if you will, an existence in which you are truly free from obsessing over your appearance, your wittiness, your safety, your future, your happiness, or whatever. If we are honest I think we will all admit that we are very faithful slaves to one or more of these forms of narcissism. This, honestly, is one reason that I am a Christian. Though too rare an occurrence, it is through a trinitarian understanding of the universe that I can at times experience complete self-forgetfulness, the most glorious freedom imaginable.

"When the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed..." even from your own self. - cartoon stolen from xkcd