Freedom: One of a few words which has become so powerful that it even dominates the meaning it denotes. It has become dangerously and dreadfully popular among those who are awed by the words and think in terms of words rather than ideas. I believe that this type of thinking is worse than not thinking at all. And I tell you that the people who want to display their cognitive muscles through swelling words constitute the majority! The word, the celibrity is leading the majority like a herd of lemmings are led for mass suicide. Credulity kills and so a blind devotion to this word will kill us. Do I sound skeptical? Perhaps I am. But perhaps I am just being careful and I have my reasons. This word has turned into a Frankestein. This word has started to hitler our thought process now, it has become the answer of every question asked, it is now an unfailing argument against every reason. It has grown cancerously in our system. And we are there intellectually prostrated, helplessly, cluelessly, before this enigmatically misunderstood monster, a hyped product of our own elusive, deceitful intellect.
What is freedom? Is it a means or an ends? That's the main question to answer. Do we ever care to think about it? I feel a splitting headache when people use this word as if it has outgrown every possible context, as if this word means something of its own, in isolation, without anything required before or after it! What a shameless submission before sheer nonsense! This is nothing but mental laziness!
For me this word means NOTHING if not followed by at least one of the prepositions 'from' or 'of/for'. Actually it makes sense only when 'freedom for' decides 'freedom from'. Let me elucidate my point.
Suppose I say I am free or I want freedom. What does it mean? It, the word freedom, often sounds intellectually intimidating to us but that's it. It is made to be arrogant like that because it has nothing else in it. It has no content at all. Ok man you are free. Free from what?? Space? Time? Death? Life? Gravity? Market? Media? Instincts? What??????
I can very well be thrown at escape velocity into the vast limitless boundless space but even THAT wouldnt make me ABSOLUTELY free. Yes I could say I am free of gravity but, speaking abstractly, there would be many other forces which would determine my trajectory and mock at my impossible and naive quest for an unlimited freedom. What does this mean anyway? To me its a farce, an intellectual waste, nothing else. How can we be absolutely free as long as I am spacially and temporarily bound. I can not be at two places at a time. And this binding dilimits me and defines me. It gives me my identity. It makes me what I am. At a particular space and particular time, here and now, I exist. I will be lost if I somehow get scattered in all the dimensions of space and time. I am when there is something else so this I becomes meaningful. I am only when I am finite. And finite is not free, for it is bound. So, theoritically speaking, it is this very lack of freedom that gives me my existence. Any false sense (or nonsense) of freedom can only mislead us and misguide us and this is precisely what it is doing. It is breaking relationships. This inordinate longing for freedom is bound to sever every thread we are tied with. It is doing this because we have lost our wisdom, our sense of balance. We have allowed ourselves to be led astray by it. I remember a picture from a story I read when I was a kid- 'The pied piper of Hamlin', a pictute of hundreds of rats following a piper. We are also following a few hip ideas, blindly, without proper examination, we have always done so. And we have suffered a lot.
The pursuit of freedom is like preparing for some admission test. You dont do it endlessly. You dont do it for its own sake. It is unthinkable to do so. Once you are through the test you study the subject you want to. Similarly the attainment of freedom enables us to do the thing we wanted to do. Otherwise freedom has no intrinsic value of its own. In 60s, the aimless youth of US attemped to find some inherent value in freedom per se but we all know that it was a failed experiment. The cool combo of six-string and cocaine could not procure salvation to them. The hippy culture is dead. Some of them burnt themselves out and others faded away.
But it is we who are responsible for it. We have placed disproportionate weightage to this cult word which had initially a beautiful meaning and a promising role to play in our society. Again and again I've been quoting the Greek philosopher Paracelsus who made a beautiful observation and highlighted the value of balance. Let me repeat it because it is germane to do so here: Every substance is a poison. There is none that is not. It is the dose which determines whether it is a poison or a medicine. Wisdom is nothing but a sense of proportion. We must not discard it if we are serious about ourselves. But here we have allowed ourselves to be awed and led by this word-freedom. It seems that freedom has outshined wisdom in terms of popularity.
We are being told, glibly and irrisponsibly, to break every bond. Man is so delighed with his discovery of challenging conventions is that he is not thinking twice before throwing the baby with the bath water. But is it not potentially devastating? It has to be. It is too convenient an idea to be making sense. Unless you know what freedom is for how would you know and why would you bother to know what it is from. It is the for which decides the from. If the from is decided without the knowledge of for then freedom becomes not just useless but a threat to one's well-being. Without this for, freedom is a mark of curse, it's an ill-omen which would bring doom in life. It makes us wander in the infinity like a dead leaf swayed by the most flippant gust of air. It strips us of our gravity, our roots.
Hermann Hesse says the first statue a child breaks is that of his father. This is how he comes out of the shadow of his father and becomes a man. How true! But it could be fathomlessly detrimental for the future of a child if he takes this at its face value. Talking personally, I am not an obedient son. I have never been perhaps. I have defied norms, stopped worshipping or participating in puja, threw my janeu and so on. I always strove for independence. But there was an unsaid conract between me and my parents. I never disobeyed them just for the sake of it, just to be different or just because it made me feel great. Never. I freed myself from these things for some reasons which appeared reasonable to me and then to my parents too. My parents could very well have been unreasonable. But in that case also I was doing it with a clear purpose and not because someone said so. I never fell in the traps set by those who define what is in for the youth. I have always been anachronistic in my own ways.
Finally, One needs to realize, very urgently, the poisonous side-effects of the gratuitous misuse of this word. Terms like free-trade, free-market, free-will etc are floating in air in such an abundance that it chokes our imagination. Half of them are quixotic and are used as a verbal trickery, as trump cards against every other argumant, and others are ridiculous. As ridiculous like a character in Crime and Punishment who wants his wife to indulge in adultery just because he is in love with his self-image of a progressive man who allows his wife to be free.
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