Freedom isn't slavery, but it's not the freedom you know.
That's a fancy headline you got there Enos. Can you back it up?
Freedom is slavery. That may be the most quotable line from Orwell's 1984.
I think about that line a lot. The identity statement is transitive, so it’s equally true to say “Slavery is freedom”. Your freedom enslaves you. The implication being that one is free only when in chains. To be enslaved is to be free. True freedom exists only in being subject to another.
A curious way of toying with the meanings. Orwell put some depth into the word-play behind this slogan.
The equivalence causes us glitches because we evaluate the words as moral and ethical opposites. Freedom is for the most part good, and slavery one of the worst sins.
The vagueness and ambiguity is all part of the process. When even basic words lack any determinate conditions of reference or truth, meaning is for the State to decide.
Here’s the question posed in my mind.
If slavery means living in chains (if only metaphorically), does the opposite of slavery mean the absence of chains?
In ancient times it was known for Greek or Roman slaves to have considerable latitude in household or even military matters. Many — by no means all, and I don’t mean to trivialize the practice — lived in well-off circumstances as compared to their nominally free counterparts.
Political philosophers talk of a distinction between interference and domination. A well-treated slave may live with minimal interference, though he is still a slave under the domination of the slave-owner. A free man under the domination of no king may be subjected to considerable interference, even from bodies where he has some say in self-determination. (Ask anyone subject to an HOA covenant.)
Dostoyevsky drives this point home in the Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov. The masses say they want freedom, but that’s hard. What people really want is comfort. The life of a comfy slave is, for most, superior to the hard life of the free. True freedom is a burden that most people happily flee.
This all depends on an ideal of freedom which became popular in the 19th century. The human condition can be described as radically free, each of us condemned to freedom, as Sartre would later put it. Whatever its political value, true freedom is at best a mixed blessing.
Yes, we may be able to choose and act on our decisions, but think of the price! When I watch the blackbirds and tui flit about out in my yard, it’s easy to envy them. The birds act from 98% instinct. They can learn a little bit, but most of their behavior springs from native organic drives. Birds don’t lie awake at night worrying about the mortgage, their jerk-wad boss, a flighty would-be romantic partner, some nonsense they read on the internet, or facing stone-cold terror of the knowledge of their own inevitable death.
That’s freedom. Freedom ain’t easy.
Orwell, so far as I understand, didn’t have any high-minded metaphysical matters in mind. The freedom assaulted in Big Brother’s slogan is the gritty, real, and familiar mode of political liberty.
But there is a common kernel of truth in both the metaphysical and the political ideas. I say it is this:
Whatever we mean by freedom, it cannot amount to absolute independence from all outside constraints.
Absolute freedom leaves real human beings alone, alienated, and overwhelmed by the sheer cognitive burden of choice. When any action is possible, all actions are equally meaningless. How could you begin to choose?
The answer is, you don’t.
Abstract ideals are great and all, but human beings are material, biological creatures with a finite stock of energy and attention. When the limits of material actualities confront desirable ideals, guess which one wins?
The psychological and social realities of human nature faced with absolute freedom leads to choice paralysis, followed by looking around at everybody else for cues. Call it herd behavior or mimetic desire or whatever you like, the conformist impulse is real.
The practical impossibility of absolute freedom one vehicle used by totalitarian “there is no truth but what we say” movements as a bludgeon against political liberty.
See, it’s not practical for human beings to live a life of real freedom. It’s better if the State steps in to keep everyone safe and happy.
People go along because, man, this is hard, and look, everybody else is doing it. Isolation, choice paralysis, and finally peer pressure to conform are the end result of absolute freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville anticipated this outcome back in the 1830s. He praised the dynamic energy unleashed by America’s spirit of democratic liberty. But he also found in it the seeds of its own downfall. To spoil it, the democratic part doesn't fit neatly with the part about liberty. The deep tensions between individual freedom and formal equality of persons can lead to explosive consequences.
The short story is that the free individual, alone and isolated from traditions of God, nature, and family bonds, becomes an easy victim for the twin threats of majority opinion and the unchecked State power that backs it up.
With no buffer between individuals and mass opinion, on one side, and the absolute State, on the other, the end (terminus) of freedom is the end (consequence) of freedom.
It reminds me of 20 years ago when every woman under 40 had a nearly identical lower-back tattoo so as to be a unique and authentic individual. Today with the social media, examples abound of mindless conformity justified as "authentic" and "unique" expressions of individuality.
This is how such assorted silliness as totalitarian states and physicists decreeing that "free will isn't real" get so much traction.1
While I take these criticisms seriously and think you should too, I don’t think it’s near as bleak as all that.
You can only get to totalitarian rejection of freedom if freedom is thought of as an absolute and radical ideal. (We can set aside for now the material, political, and economic factors that enable totalitarian regimes.)
Here’s the question. Do you only have freedom if you are absolutely independent of all outside constraints?
Is the opposite of freedom equivalent to a life in chains?
I’m going to answer “nope” to both.
Freedom — real freedom that is possible for beings like us — has little to do with the mere presence or absence of constraints.
Freedom requires boundaries.
What? Freedom is slavery after all?!?
Here's a tip for thinking deeply. If you only see two opposing sides to a debate, you're missing something important.
Boundaries enable freedom.
Here's an example to illustrate. Imagine Bob in a boring cubicle job for eight hours a day. Bob dreams of being a novelist. But his job is mentally taxing and stressful, leaving him wrung out at the end of each day. He has no energy left for his dream. On the weekends, he's got to catch up on all the chores he couldn't get done during the week (not to mention the dread of going back to work on Monday).
Pop Quiz: If Bob were to quit his job and pursue his dream, would Bob become free simply because he has nothing to hold him responsible and make demands on his free will?
Heck no. As any entrepreneur will tell you, working for yourself is often more difficult and limiting than working for The Man.
If you're only asking IF Bob has constraints, then he's arguably less free as an independent.
How does that work?
Interference and domination are two different sources of constraint.
Bob's now doing what Bob wants to do free from the domination of idiot corporate bureaucracy. That doesn't mean Bob's free from all interference in his life.
The constraints and limits of his new business, while more limiting in some respects, nevertheless add to his freedom.
Structures and functions in our physical environment can enable freedom by automating or eliminating the kinds of boring tedium that hold Bob in his unsatisfying job and keep him from pursuing his wishes.
And that's just the start. The general principle is that any constraints that make it more likely to succeed or more difficult to fail in your desired purpose will elevate freedom.
Without constraints and boundaries, there can be no practical exercise of freedom. The question now becomes, What constraints are worth wanting and caring about?
Entrepreneurs take up the more challenging life because they've learned to find value in the new and more demanding constraints that a life of independence creates.
I lift weights and have for a long time, so let me borrow a metaphor that comes easy to me. A key principle of resistance training is progressive overload. Muscles grow, strength builds, and fat burns in response to greater demands imposed over time. You push, your body responds, and you must then push harder to stimulate further change.
If you never attempt to lift more than on your first day, you're going to look the same in a year and in ten years. Without the constraint of a barbell loaded with a few hundred pounds, there would be no progress, no change, no growth. Confronting the challenge makes the thing work.
Do that long enough and you learn to love the self-imposed crisis of a heavy set. The challenge becomes its own perverse reward.
I propose to you that your freedom has much more in common with lifting than with a mythical ideal of absolute choice. Consider that freedom is:
Active. You don't have it when you slump on the couch and think hard. Freedom is realized through activity and the focusing of attention that action creates.
Embodied. You're a living being with a material body. Freedom involves using that body.
Realized in the world, not in your head. Your actions take place in a public world shared with others.
Iris Murdoch once wrote that our liberal tradition has drawn attention to the discontinuity of the self and the world. What ought concern us is how the self participates in the world.
We cannot escape all constraints. This is not possible for us. You require air, water, food, and shelter to survive. Material necessities make absolute metaphysical freedom impossible to realize.
Yes, human beings can choose to die for various, mostly sad and unfortunate, reasons. The point is that one who desires to continue living cannot "freely decide" to stop breathing or eating. Choice faces its ultimate barrier in firm material realities which cannot be chosen.
Of course there is always a choice of what to do. That banal psychological truth tells you nothing of interest about the concrete circumstances under which the choice is made.
A choice unto itself is no source of meaning or value.
This is why absolute freedom does not and cannot work as an ideal. The concept itself hides the constraints, limits, and boundaries within which free decision and action must happen.2
The problem is that we're often not allowed to ask the hard moral and ethical questions. That is the real issue confronting us.
Freedom can be understood as a search for kinds of boundaries and limitations that enable free action.
Our material existence as organic creatures precludes such high-flying abstractions as absolute freedom from constraint as real possibilities for us. This idea never existed outside of the imagination of religious and philosophical writers.
Beings like us have to think first about how we are and then address the question of what our freedom could mean.
To further complicate matters, this question cannot be settled. It must be asked and explored anew for each time and place. Freedom and its necessary opposites always evolve.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
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The connections between the I ❤️ Science cult and various totalitarians deserves a remark at a later date. The alliance between "objective science" of mind and the sorts of "anything goes" relativism that feeds in to the all-powerful state is a little-known but significant historical factor.
It's striking how close this brings the caricature of the ancap Libertarian to the caricature of the postmodern relativist. Both of them affirm the absolute power of individual will over reality.