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We think we are free because we recognize an impulse to do something and then choose whether or not to do it. If so, then we are choosing to fulfill our desire, which looks like a choice freely made.
Did we freely choose our desires?
If they are manipulated and controlled at a subconscious, libidinal level, to be truly free we must rewire our desire.
From Yuval Noah Harari
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You can find a type of freedom by exempting yourself from responsibility. By playing the victim, you can often convince others to release you of burdens. However, the ensuing trap is to lose agency.
In a reversal of freedom, this “outsourcing of obligation” binds you to the other: in a master/slave scenario, you lose the burden of responsibility by incurring a guardian.
The victim sees external circumstances align against them, which excuses them from fault and responsibility, but becomes deterministic in that they cannot control their fate.
Freedom is the ability to create your own prison of responsibilities.
This “frees you” from the need to heed the edicts of others but ensures you must vigilantly maintain your own dictates, and guard your own duties and virtues, which sounds not at all like freedom.
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Any system of dependencies limits independence by encouraging a replication of behaviors: the reliance of the parasite establishes it’s behavior pattern.
Be wary of your fixed pattern: when the host (or institution) fails so do you.
To reverse the point be wary of subduing the wild into the domestic: making it (or them) parasitically reliant drains resources from you.
(
"too long a parasite and one cannot exist without a host." ~ Frank Herbert)
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Without being pressured, one thinks they are free from being influenced.
However, the absence or negation of pressure creates a rut: a person who feels free freely pushes for autonomy. This is your rut.
This person tends to end up in the arts or media, arguing for their conception of life. Yet, they are often unable to reconcile their shaped role of opposition as the archetype of an outsider who is inside.
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Consider the censorship of literature: "fat" is replaced with "enormous" in Roald Dahl’s books for inclusivity.
While this feels like a restriction, it is an alteration. To alter (despite the insipid logic inspiring it) is simultaneously the "freedom" to generate or create, though censorship does so in a negative sense.
To amend or reshape as a tool of bland political correctness is a waste of existing freedoms; a folly which threatens future freedoms.
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To be united in wanting freedom has a paradoxical opposite where each free person wants something different from any other, creating disunity.
To champion individualism is to back “difference,” yet “individual freedom” often coalesces into herd mentality and similarity.
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To grow into the ideal state of autonomy (the robust individual), you must first participate in an ecology of growth and attentiveness.
You must first build the strength and skill to remain independent later.
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To give up order for chaos is to escape.
Our urge for freedom drives us from sanity (acceptance of normative order) towards psychopathy.
If all actions have a purpose (a motivating goal or utility, even if subliminal) then the rewards of psychosis are a less constrained individualism.
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When a troubling event keeps bobbing to the surface, your subconscious tells you something is unresolved: a lesson needs to be learned.
Often the event involves pain (being hurt or hurting). Caught on this hook, unwilling to let go, we have pierced ourselves and the other together in self-traumatizing rumination.
The problem with releasing the barb is we must approach and experience the pain without shying away. We must remain open-hearted to grieving and forgiving, allowing us to process the memory, remove the barb, and let the wound scar.
Otherwise, we risk pushing the pain under only to have it continually bob back to the surface, wounding us repeatedly.
