Real Freedom

The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self[1]limitation. It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life. This is not only real freedom, this is the only freedom. Diversions come and go. Pleasure never lasts. Variety loses its meaning. But you will always be able to choose what you are willing to sacrifice, what you are willing to give up. This sort of self-denial is paradoxically the only thing that expands real freedom in life. The pain of regular physical exercise ultimately enhances your physical freedom — your strength, mobility, endurance, and stamina. The sacrifice of a strong work ethic gives you the freedom to pursue more job opportunities, to steer your own career trajectory, to earn more money and the benefits that come with it. The willingness to engage in conflict with others will free you to talk to anyone, to see if they share your values and beliefs, to discover what they can add to your life and what you can add to theirs. You can become freer right now simply by choosing the limitations you want to impose on yourself. You can choose to wake up earlier each morning, to block your email until midafternoon each day, to delete social media apps from your phone. These limitations will free you because they will liberate your time, attention, and power of choice. They treat your consciousness as an end in itself. If you struggle to go to the gym, then rent a locker and leave all your work clothes there so you have to go each morning. Limit yourself to two to three social events each week, so you are forced to spend time with the people you care about most. Write a check to a close friend or family member for three thousand dollars and tell them that if you ever smoke a cigarette again, they get to cash it. Ultimately, the most meaningful freedom in your life comes from your commitments, the things in life for which you have chosen to sacrifice. There is emotional freedom in my relationship with my wife that I would never be able to reproduce even if I dated a thousand other women. There is freedom in my having played guitar for twenty years — a deeply artistic expression — that I could not get if I just memorized dozens of songs. There is freedom in having lived in one place for fifty years — an intimacy and familiarity with the community and culture — that you cannot replicate no matter how much of the world you’ve seen. Greater commitment allows for greater depth. A lack of commitment requires superficiality. In the last ten years, there has been a trend toward “life hacking.” People want to learn a language in a month, to visit fifteen countries in a month, to become a champion martial artist in a week, and they come up with all sorts of “hacks” to do it. You see it all the time on YouTube and social media these days: people undertaking ridiculous challenges just to show it can be done. This “hacking” of life, though, simply amounts to trying to reap the rewards of commitment without actually making a commitment. It’s another sad form of fake freedom. It’s empty calories for the soul. I recently read about a guy who memorized moves from a chess program to prove he could “master” chess in a month. He didn’t learn anything about chess, didn’t engage with the strategy, develop a style, learn tactics. Nope, he approached it like a gigantic homework assignment: memorize the moves, win once against some highly ranked player, then declare mastery for yourself. This is not winning anything. This is merely the appearance of winning something. It is the appearance of commitment and sacrifice without the commitment and sacrifice. It is the appearance of meaning where there is none. Fake freedom puts us on the treadmill toward chasing more, whereas real freedom is the conscious decision to live with less. Fake freedom is addictive: no matter how much you have, you always feel as though it’s not enough. Real freedom is repetitive, predictable, and sometimes dull. Fake freedom has diminishing returns: it requires greater and greater amounts of energy to achieve the same joy and meaning. Real freedom has increasing returns: it requires less and less energy to achieve the same joy and meaning. Fake freedom is seeing the world as an endless series of transactions and bargains which you feel you’re winning. Real freedom is seeing the world unconditionally, with the only victory being over your own desires. Fake freedom requires the world to conform to your will. Real freedom requires nothing of the world. It is only your will. Ultimately, the overabundance of diversion and the fake freedom it produces limits our ability to experience real freedom. The more options we have, the more variety before us, the more difficult it becomes to choose, sacrifice, and focus. And we are seeing this conundrum play out across our culture today. In 2000, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published his seminal book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In it, he documents the decline of civic participation across the United States, arguing that people are joining and participating less in groups, instead preferring to do their activities alone, hence the title of the book: More people bowl today than before, yet bowling leagues are going extinct. People are bowling alone. Putnam wrote about the United States, but this not merely an American phenomenon. Throughout the article, Putnam shows that this is not limited to recreational groups but is affecting everything from labor unions to parent-teacher associations to Rotary clubs to churches to bridge clubs. This atomization of society has significant effects, he argues: social trust has declined, with people becoming more isolated, less politically engaged, and all-around more paranoid about their neighbors. 18 Loneliness is also a growing issue. Last year, for the first time, a majority of Americans said they were lonely, and new research is suggesting that we’re replacing a few high-quality relationships in our lives with a large number of superficial and temporary relationships. According to Putnam, the social connective tissue in the country is being destroyed by the overabundance of diversions. He argued that people were choosing to stay home and watch TV, surf the internet, or play video games rather than commit themselves to some local organization or group. He also predicts the situation will likely only get worse. Historically, when Westerners have looked at all the oppressed people throughout the world, we’ve lamented their lack of fake freedom, their lack of diversion. People in North Korea can’t read the news or shop for clothes they like or listen to music that isn’t state sponsored. But this is not why North Koreans are not free. They lack freedom not because they are unable to choose their pleasures, but because they are not allowed to choose their pain. They are not allowed to choose their commitments freely. They are forced into sacrifices they would not otherwise want or do not deserve. Pleasure is beside the point — their lack of pleasure is a mere side effect of their real oppression: their enforced pain. Because, today, in most parts of the world, people are now able to choose their pleasures. They are able to choose what to read and what games to play and what to wear. Modern diversions are everywhere. But the tyranny of a new age is achieved not by depriving people of diversions and commitments. Today’s tyranny is achieved by flooding people with so much diversion, so much bullshit information and frivolous distraction, that they are unable to make smart commitments. It’s Bernays’s prediction come true, just a few generations later than he expected. It took the breadth and power of the internet to make his vision of global propaganda campaigns, of governments and corporations silently steering the desires and wishes of the masses, a reality. But let’s not give Bernays too much credit. After all, he did seem like kind of a douche balloon. Besides, there was a man who saw all this coming way before Bernays, a man who saw the dangers of fake freedom, who saw the proliferation of diversions and the myopic effect they would have on people’s values, how too much pleasure makes everyone childish and selfish and entitled and totally narcissistic and unbearable on Twitter. This man was far wiser and more influential than anyone you would ever see on a news channel or a TED Talk stage or a political soapbox, for that matter. This guy was the OG of political philosophy. Forget the “Godfather of Soul,” this guy literally invented the idea of the soul. And he (arguably) saw this whole shitstorm brewing multiple millennia before anyone else did.