Faux Freedom Part 1

Our entire lives are formed by “choices” we make that we are not really free to make.

STAND BY ME (1986) Based on Stephen King's short story 'The Body,' Stand by Me is a lesson in male bonding and growing up: Four friends played by Corey Feldman, Wil Wheaton, Jerry O'Connell, and the late River Phoenix go on an adventure and find the body of a kid their age who was presumed dead. Courtesy: timeinc.net

(CALGARY, Alberta) - We all believe we’re free. But here’s a simple test to find out if we really are. The next time you’re at a mall or some open public space with lots of people around, move into a corner or against a wall and begin a full-throated rendition of one of your favorite songs. Don’t hold anything back. You’re free, right?

And don’t fall for the self-deluding rationalization that you could if you wanted to, but you just don’t want to. Prove to yourself that you are really free instead of just a puppet of unseen, unknown, unconscious forces.

I first came to the idea that we are not really free in the early 1980s after reading Stephen King’s novella “The Body” (which became the movie Stand by Me). It’s about four young friends near the end of a summer and two are talking about school. Gordie says to Chris: “Why don’t you go into the college courses? You’re smart enough.”

Chris replies that “people drag you down.” By this he meant, not the teachers, but your friends. On reading this I had the stunning revelation that we are not really free to do as we wish. I wish someone had been able to tell me this when I was in junior high school. But sociability was more important than a future life. We wanted to be popular and have friends, but doing well in school, excelling in your grades was, and is definitely not the way, to achieve and maintain that short-term condition—keeping your friends and staying in your safe social milieu.

Those few short sentences in King’s book made me realize how we are all trapped in social realities with little or no freedom at all about how our lives will play out. Think back to your own middle years in school. You probably could have done better than you did. If so, why didn’t you? You know the answer—you wanted to keep your friends. As Chris says in the story:

“Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don’t you know that? They’re like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown with them.”

So our entire lives are formed by “choices” we make that we are not really free to make.

For the rest of our lives the “choices” we make are directly or indirectly influenced, even controlled, by our social circumstances. To do things significantly differently would require us to risk losing, or even needing to lose our friends.

But there is more.

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines freedom this way:

“Narrowly, or negatively, freedom is thought of as the absence of restraint: ‘Freedom,’ said [17th century philosopher Thomas] Hobbes, ‘is the silence of the law.’ Positively, freedom is a condition of liberation from social and cultural forces that are perceived as impeding full self-realization. To become free is therefore a challenge that is only met by personal transformation, in Romantic and individualistic thought, or by social transformation, for instance in Hegel.”

The key to this concept of freedom is “liberation from social and cultural forces” that hold you back. Singing out loud at the mall is a positive freedom; if, indeed, you actually have such a freedom.

Dictionary.com (based on Random House Dictionary) gives seventeen definitions, all but the last being negative. The third and seventh may be positive if we allow that “without restraint” and “ties, obligations” include inner restraint.

1. the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint: He won his freedom after a retrial
2. exemption from external control, interference, regulation, etc.
3. the power to determine action without restraint
4. political or national independence.
5. personal liberty, as opposed to bondage or slavery: a slave who bought his freedom.
6. exemption from the presence of anything specified (usually fol. by from): freedom from fear.
7. the absence of or release from ties, obligations, etc.
8. ease or facility of movement or action: to enjoy the freedom of living in the country.
9. frankness of manner or speech.
10. general exemption or immunity: freedom from taxation.
11. the absence of ceremony or reserve.
12. a liberty taken
13. a particular immunity or privilege enjoyed, as by a city or corporation: freedom to levy taxes
14. civil liberty, as opposed to subjection to an arbitrary or despotic government
15. the right to enjoy all the privileges or special rights of citizenship, membership, etc., in a community or the like
16. the right to frequent, enjoy, or use at will: to have the freedom of a friend's library
17. Philosophy. the power to exercise choice and make decisions without constraint from within or without; autonomy; self-determination

Freedom of constraint from within is the key definition for our purposes here.

Spinoza and Freedom

Baruch Spinoza, the great 17th century philosopher argued that “men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires”; it is as if a stone flung through the air should think it is moving and falling of its own free will.

In this sense, humans move through society and the world, believing they are consciously in control of what they do. But, from King’s story…

In 1851 philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

“No child under the age of fifteen should receive instruction in subjects which may possibly be the vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy or religion, for wrong notions imbibed early can seldom be rooted out, and of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to arrive at maturity.”

Well said, but virtually impossible to enact. Are devout Christians going to allow or encourage their children to be free-thinkers? We are, first of all, unconscious captives of our upbringing.

Albert Einstein, is a good example. He is recognized as one of the founders of quantum physics. But, as the new science became one where clearly chance ruled, he could not accept it, even though most of his fellow physicists embraced the new physics. For all his genius, Einstein maintained some rigid ideas that were formed in his childhood. He was not free to change to a new way of thinking about he world.

Or consider why Stephen Hawking became a cosmologist. When he started his PhD program, the two alternatives were cosmology and particle physics.

“I thought that elementary particles were less attractive, because, although they were finding lots of new particles, there was no proper theory of elementary particles. All they could do was arrange the particles in families, like in botany. In cosmology, on the other hand, there was a well defined theory—Einstein’s general theory of relativity.”

It was part of his personality to seek the “well defined” route as opposed to particle physics which were “disorganized” in comparison and untamed. There’s no judgment about choosing either physics path, but Hawking’s personality guided his choice.

The same social/psychological dynamic exists in our ordinary lives. In grade eight Mr. Evans, our science teacher, stood in front of my class and said: “I don’t want any of you to set your sights too high, because most of you aren’t going anywhere, anyway.” It’s true that the school was in a working class neighborhood—probably 90 percent of the parents worked either for the Brewery or the Railroad.

It’s also true that only a minority would have had the intelligence or aptitude to become a doctor, lawyer or airline pilot. Still, how many students had their sights set artificially low, and so lived lives of frustrated aspirations?

We can also compare the two contrasting psychologies of Charles Templeton and Billy Graham from Cosmology of the Ants 2. Templeton renounced Christianity, becoming an agnostic. Of Graham he writes:

“He has given up the life of unrestricted thought. I occasionally watch Billy in his televised campaigns. Forty years after our working together he is saying the same things, using the same phrases, following the same pattern. When he gives the invitation to come forward, the sequence, even the words, are the same....I think Billy is what he has to be. I disagree with him at almost every point in his views on God and Christianity and think that much of what he says in the pulpit is puerile, archaic nonsense. But there is no feigning in Billy Graham: he believes what he believes with an invincible innocence. He is the only mass-evangelist I would trust.”

In return Graham is quoted as saying this of Templeton:

“I love Chuck to this very day. He’s one of the few men I have ever loved in my life. He and I had been so close. But then, all of a sudden, our paths were parting. He began to be a little cool to me then. I think...I think that Chuck felt sorry for me.” Graham knew that he had artificially restricted his life choices. When Templeton went on to get higher university education, Graham declined Templeton’s encouragement, saying that he was okay with what he had.

Their irreconcilable differences can be examined in a larger context. Neither man shows any hostility toward the other. But they came from such differing backgrounds that the later results are, if not predictable, at least not surprising.

Templeton became a born-again at 19, through a feeling of revelation following an emotional crisis. It was as “easy” for him to give it up later as it was to embrace it as a young man.

Graham, on the other hand, came from a deeply religious, rural background. He had fundamentalism bred into his bones. For Graham to reject his Christianity would have meant that he would have to repudiate his entire family, his entire personal history. So, with relatively little analysis, we can see that Graham was and remained a fundamentalist because, for unconscious reasons, it was all he could do. As Templeton put it: “I think Billy is what he has to be.” The same applies to Templeton, and to you or me.

Templeton did make an interesting assessment. He said:

“There is, however, little likelihood that the fundamentalists will become a major influence in Western society. Their members are mostly working men and women—earnest, zealous, and well-intentioned—but their simplistic theology and their essentially emotional response to public worship limit their opportunity.”

Jonathon Chait, writing in 2005 in The New Republic agrees with Templeton:

“It's hard not to suspect that a good number of social conservatives have simply been co-opted by the Republican establishment. That would explain why, while social conservative intellectuals and commentators have almost unanimously rejected [Harriet] Miers, social conservative organizations have had a far more mixed reaction. While some criticized Miers, Dobson praised her, and she won unqualified endorsements from Jerry Falwell and groups like the Christian Coalition and the American Center for Law and Justice. With allies like these, Bush doesn't have much incentive to work harder to reward his social conservative base. No wonder the poor, nutty bastards got hosed again”.

Money as freedom

There’s hardly a person alive (except maybe Bill Gates) who doesn’t occasionally dream of what they would do if they won a lottery. If it comes to you suddenly, you may have an opportunity to exercise some freedom of choice. But earning enough money to be free is a life-long effort. And, as Peter C. Newman, chronicler of The Canadian Establishment observed:

“Too often the years of self-repression in the cause of corporate advancement sap humanity’s juices in a man. When the bottle is uncorked, its content has evaporated. There is no one left inside.”

Too often, the effort put into acquiring money, is not worth the limited spiritual return. As forty-two year old freelance writer Brennan Clarke wrote in 2008: “As the holder of not one but two undergraduate arts degrees…I am quickly reminded by the working world that being intelligent and capable is no longer enough. You have to do something that makes somebody money.”

The only other realistic choice is to aim for a relatively small amount of money or find some satisfactory “survival job”, if your material needs are modest. Then you can live quietly and probably quite happily out of the mainstream. That’s a Buddhist approach to money and material wealth.

I was fortunate in that I was able to do that for nearly four years. I worked midnight to eight as a security guard in large downtown building. My duties overnight were minimal and I brought in my laptop and current books and spent a minimum of five hours per shift reading and writing. I was laid off, unfortunately, when the company decided to outsource the security positions.

Continued in Part 2

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class — a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably on a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves — writing and trying to make the world a better place