You are not free. At the very least, you’re nowhere near as free as you like to think you are. What it even means to be free isn’t really all that clear. The things you are free to do depend to some extent on where you live. In today’s world, you live in a “nation” that has a “government,” which reserves a number of freedoms only for itself. Your government has the freedom to use violence and coercion, against you if it so decides. It has the freedom to exert a certain amount of control over the information you receive. That starts early. When you’re an infant, your parents sing you songs that they learned as young children. There are other songs, of course, but you and your parents weren’t taught them, and although it probably wasn’t overt, you weren’t allowed anywhere near them. Your information diet was directed during your education, too. In every nation (that I’m aware of) children are taught who the heroes and villains of history have been. That is overt, and children also learn early what the consequences of dissenting from the nationally sponsored information can be. Eventually these lessons calcify into beliefs that the adults in the nation find it very difficult to escape from.
You’re not free to disobey authority, either. When you’re given an order, you’re expected to comply. The freedom to use violence and coercion against you may come into play here.
Another thing you’re not free to do is change your position in regard to all the social relationships around you. You have some wiggle room here, but if you decide, one day, to walk away from your current life, identity, and situation, and reconstitute yourself as a different person in a different place, there are huge obstacles placed in your path.
In their bookThe Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow identified three freedoms as foundational, from which all other forms of human freedom extend. If you have the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create or transform your social relationships, only then are you really free, in their view. It’s a sort of declaration of human rights, and research in anthropology and archeology (Graeber’s and Wengrow’s fields) suggests that for vast stretches of human existence, individuals did have these rights. The modern state, though, eliminates or tightly circumscribes all of them.
The Dawn of Everything addresses the rise of governments and states as well, and theorizes that there are three areas of control that lead to the creation of modern-style states (which include monarchies, democracies, and the whole gamut of coercive government): control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma of leaders. Not all human societies have had “leaders” in the sense we reflexively think of them.
It’s food for thought, at the very least. Thought that might stray outside the boundaries of “acceptable” or “conventional” thought. But your mind is, for now, not subject to direct control. There’s plenty of control exerted over your thoughts; make no mistake about that. But none of it is exerted directly. At least not yet.
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