The end of freedom

[coberst]

The end of freedom

 

I am shackled hand and foot spread eagle on the floor of my cell. I ask my jailer everyday to set me free. Finally he compassionately sets me free.

 

For days I am exhilarated with the ability to freely pace about my cell. After a few weeks I begin to beg my jailer to set me free. After weeks he, being a compassionate man, sets me free from my cell.

 

For days I am exhilarated at the freedom to wonder about and speak with other inmates. After several weeks I begin to beg my jailer to free me and finally he relents and releases me from jail. I am overwhelmed with the sense of freedom until I, overcome with hunger and basic needs, seek some work so as to feed myself.

 

I find a job working on an assembly line and am exhilarated at the new found freedom. After a year I begin to seek other less strenuous and repetitive assembly line work. I wish to free myself from this robotic work I do everyday.

 

What is the ‘telos’ (ultimate end) of this series of ever persistent desire for freedom? Is hunger for freedom similar to hunger for food, never satiated? I don’t think so. I think the search for freedom can culminate in an ultimate and satisfying end.

 

Freedom, I suspect, is a search for self-determination. When we feel that we are master of our domain, when we are free to determine who we are and what we need to be our self we will have reached that ‘telos’ of freedom. I suspect this end is as unique as a finger print, it is an act of creation and can be made conscious to me only by me.

 

I think each of us must learn for our self what we need to secure freedom’s ‘telos’. Probably most of us find only a degree of freedom, but if we never stop looking we may continue finding more of it.

[Kriminal99]

I appreciate your attempt to relate freedom to its contextual definition...

 

I would say that freedom in this sense occurs when a person realizes that they there is not some person with a personality dictating the outcome of their life, but rather a faceless system which the person in question can influence to achieve their goals.

 

Someone on this board earlier brought up writings by Covey and I was told about a story in one of his book that illustrates this point.

 

There was a battleship captain on the seas that saw the light of another boat. He signals to the other boat to change heading by X degrees to avoid collision. The other person responds that the captain should change his own heading. The captain attempts to pull rank and yells at the other ship to change their heading. The other person responds with their lower rank as if it were irrelevant or to allude to something else. The captain becomes furious and demands the other person change course as the captain is on a battleship. The other person responds that they are in a lighthouse. So the battleship changes course.

 

The point here is that rather than always trying to attribute everything that goes wrong in life to the free will of others you need to recognize how to influence the deterministic system that governs what happens.

 

The more you are able to look at the world in this manner rather than just internally blaming everyone else's free will for everything that goes wrong, the more you are able to accomplish.

 

You may use angry behavior to influence the other people that are part of that system, but only when it makes sense given the current situation and the attributes of the system. People who just always blame the free will of others are just trying to mimic the behavior of those successful individuals without any understanding of what drives their behavior.

[coberst]

kriminal

 

I think our degree of possible freedom is directly proportional to our degree of self-actualization. Self-actualization is a process of extending our horizons based upon our own unique potential. The further we can see the greater is our horizon for freedom.

[CraigD]

In the most common usage, the word “freedom” describes an emotional state – note coberst’s repeated use of the clearly emotion-describing word “exhilarated” to describe perception of freedom in the narrative in post #1. To answer the question of where freedom ultimately leads (its telos, or final cause), we must first address the question of what it is (its essence, or formal cause, which necessarily involves its “how”, or efficient cause).

 

I propose that, like many human emotions, freedom is one involving our strong senses of social hierarchy. I agree with coberst’s suspicion that freedom is strongly related to self-determination, but further, think that it’s most strongly related to our sense of our own role in determining the course of ourselves and others. The desire for freedom ends, I think, when an individual’s perception of their place in the social hierarchy matches their self-image in terms of this place.

 

For one, this state may be a life of employment at a secure but monotonous job on an assembly line. For another, it may be a life allowing access to every pastime known to him. For another, it may be a damp cave in a game and forage-rich woods. For many, it’s access to the internet. For a few (though no one I’ve yet met), it can even be life in a literal prison.

 

Social hierarchy-sensitive creatures that we are, a lot of our sense of freedom is relative to our perception of our relationship to those around us. Thus, in the prison metaphor – for illustrative purposes, let’s make this a remote island prison in the late 18th century - a prison trustee is likely to feel more free than a regular inmate, a guard more free still, and the warden most free of all, even though all share roughly the same space and conditions.

 

Freedom is not, I think, the foremost want of most people. History and individual cases have shown that, offered a fully informed choice of a less certain but more free future or a certain, secure one with less freedom, most people opt for the latter. Nor is the want of freedom constant from moment to moment and year to year for a particular individual.

 

The want of freedom that coberst describes in his final paragraph can, I think, be placed toward the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, with self-actualization and other “growth needs”, which according to the theory, cannot be satisfied, while the desire of a prisoner for greater freedom described earlier can be placed toward the middle with the “deficiency needs”, which can be. Although I personally doubt that Maslow’s hierarchy is a very accurate description of objectively real human psychology, or a good detailed predictor of human behavior, it does, I think, offer a useful metaphor for common perceptions of needs and wants of many kinds.

[coberst]

Self knowledge is the essence of self-actualization. Freedom and self-actualization feed upon one another. The more freedom we have the more likely we are to self-actualize and as we do we gain more freedom. They share a symbiotic relationship.