I love writing. I had a “thing” for essays and such works, where I present, talk about, describe an idea and dissect it to make a point. It’s an incredibly satisfying and fun proccess for me. It’s how I learned to present myself and my ideas and make them “stick” and stand out. That’s the kind of introduction I wanted to make. Because it plays into my later point(s). And it’s not just wordplay. Writing, expressing myself makes me…free
The word itself can be…problematic. Freedom. Everyone has their own way of perceiving freedom, and their own way to interpret the meaning of freedom, how it should look like, what it should be. Everyone. Dangerous people. Even more dangerous people. And (I hope) the rest of us… “normal” people, living in society, “doing their thing”. I think everyone already understands the dilemma when it’s put like that. It’s when the dangerous people start thinking their freedom, or rights, just aren’t enough. Some were undoubtedly “failed” by society, mostly because their expectations were perhaps too high. No system is without its flaws, no government is perfect in the sense that no one particular system provides everything we’d want or need, and also no particular system is without its “exploits” or flaws, which these dangerous people could use in relation to their unhappiness, because the system doesn’t work how they’d imagine in the first place. It’s a hot mess, really. All of these are perhaps things we already know or realize, the question is, just how good is our knowledge of “the way things work” and how deep and detailed is the knowledge we have about ourselves? We tend to think that these dangerous people, which I have already established, so let’s continue calling them that, are something foreign, alien, completely unrelated to us. That’s a slippery slope. When we tend to refuse to take responsibility, or even realize how we act sometimes (or all the time), that’s when we ourselves have these characteristics, not necessarily criminal, or atleast not the “traditional” makings of the varsity athlete (I just had to use this reference, please forgive), but the mentality of thought that that doesn’t involve us, or better yet and more likely exactly how these things happen, “this is our idea of freedom and this is how we are gonna do it”. The problems with that are hopefully rather obvious. This is how secret societies happen, how mafia works. Italian La Cosa Nostra, japanese Yakuza or russian Vory v zakone. All of these criminal organizations happened because dangerous people but even people like you and I, decided that poverty just ain’t gonna cut it. And finally, decided that their freedom just wasn’t enough. Freedom for these big shot gangsters was doing whatever they pleased. But ask yourself a question. People joining these gangs aren’t just bad, evil people,wanting to do bad,evil things. I’d go as far as to say, that poverty breeds desperation, and desperate people join the ranks of such organizations. I’m gonna repeat myself again, it’s not nice to live in poverty. And ultimately the biggest freedom in such a world is having money. Money in some cases really only comes with certain groups of people. Instead of sweeping the floors, you’d be doing other kinds of dirty work…
Relating to such people then really isn’t hard. However. These gangsters might have formed secret underground societies, but they exploit the majority of casual people who have nothing to do with their bussiness. Thus such behavior is simply unacceptable. It’s one thing to have freedom to express yourself and grow as an individual (and also not starve) but it’s another to crave power, and have “too much” freedom. I think that too much freedom, too much power, in paradox, limits your mental freedom and control over yourself and your own actions, and too much of such “freedom” produces antisocial behavior. It’s actually really easy to see why it’s a problem but it’s way harder to not fall to such tendencies, we all, as humans share. We all have the tendency to preserve ourselves and live the best way we can. Natural greed. Probably the biggest problem is not enough resources on the planet to just have whatever we want, build whatever we want, because there’s just not enough to go on and we severely damage our environment.
With Covid-19 also rampaging through our world right now, people refusing to wear masks, there are just too many examples on this. But pick one and you arrive at the conclusion that inevitably, the illusion of having freedom to do whatever we want ultimately restricts one’s self in the grip of the worst parts of themselves.
That being said, the lenghty discussion on where we draw the line for an individual’s freedom could truly go on for hours. But humility and an expression of yourself, where you have control over yourself, ultimately leads to a much more free experience of life. One where you can limit your greed and bad tendencies so you don’t delve into rabbit holes that are very hard to climb back up. You’re free from your consciousness as you haven’t had to do genuinely bad things to seemingly get on top, only to fall.
I think that’s my understanding of freedom, and how I could see myself, becoming free.