Lately I have been thinking about the concept of freedom and just how free we actually are. I remember talking in a previous post about Jean Paul Sartre and how he says that men are free and that freedom is their burden. In a sense that is true. We do always have a choice, even a slave that works on a sugar cane plantation. He can choose to obey his master or to rebel. What limits our freedom are the consequences of our choices which are not the same for everybody. But in a way you could say that the bigger the consequences, the more important are our choices because they reveal our true nature and how much we are willing to sacrifice.
However, that aspect of freedom is not really what I want to talk about. This post is not dedicated to freedom of action or freedom of speech, but to the freedom of thought. And the limits here are more subtle and much more insidious because most of the time we are not even conscious of them. What I'm trying to say is that without even realizing it, we are the ones who limit our freedom of thought, firstly, through our personality and who we are and, secondly, through socialization and our adhesion to social norms and values. No man is born free for the simple reason that we come into this world in already made cages that we spend our entire life refining. We are trapped by our perception of the world and it is very difficult to extend ourselves beyond our boundaries when each new day that we are alive and that we come into contact with society we only add new bars to our mental prisons. In a way, we are all chained in Plato's Cave but none of us will ever be able to break free and see the Sun.
An atheist who cannot find within him the power to believe in God, how can he fully comprehend a christian who would give his life away for his beliefs? How could one walk in the shoes of the other when, in order to do that, he would have to change his beliefs, thus changing who he is. Aristotle said that "it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it". True. You need to be open minded in order to be able to reflect upon points of view with which you disagree. But can you fully comprehend them in that case?
No matter what we do, we are always biased. And ironically, as we grow older, we accumulate more and more biases. Which leads me to ask myself. Traditionally we see old people as being wise due to their life experience. But what is wisdom? Is it real knowledge, or is it just an extensive accumulation of societal norms and values which have been embedded in rational and empirical arguments? Because our culture, our society, our friends, our parents, our idols, our experiences, our hobbies, they all limit our ability to think freely and creatively. In 1984, George Orwell even explores the idea that language can limit our thoughts and therefore our freedom. Of course, some people and some experiences can on the contrary broaden our horizons, but that is only possible because our mind is so closed to the real world to begin with.
And what's more, what is the real world anyway? Is there such a thing as absolute truth when there is not one single person alive or dead who is able to perceive it in its entirety? No matter what we do, from the instant we are born, we will always be closed to certain aspects of the world. And therefore, if we are limited in that which we believe in, we are limited in our actions. So even in the purest anarchy, which Proudhon considered to be the epitome of liberty, there is no true liberty. And the irony is that it is not another human being who cuts our ability to act, but we ourselves who set limits on our liberty. Of course, in that case, one might wonder if it can still be considered lack of freedom when we are not conscious of it. But then we fall into a question of semantics and I really don't want to get into that.
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