A few discussions and movies that I've seen recently led me to revisit this.
Freedom is a problem as old as time, but now, freedom is facing new challenges.
Where freedom comes fromJean-Paul Sartre wrote that we have a nearly unlimited ability to create our lives for ourselves based on our creativity. The only thing that hinders us is the "facticity" of life. Facticity includes such things as - if I jump off a building I can't fly, I can't hold my breath for an hour, and so forth. This doesn't mean that I can't create or buy something that helps me fly or breathe underwater. This also does not mean that I can't attempt to fly without the ability to do so - I have the freedom to try, even if its likely that I'll kill myself.
The unlimited freedom that we possess starts with the basic reality of existence: we are born without an "essence" - that is, there is no ultimate meaning to life that we are born with knowing. As we grow up we can believe that we know what these things are, but they are either instilled in us or things that we choose on our own later in life. These overarching quests for meaning often manifest in religious and spiritual beliefs - Christianity, humanism, or the simple drive for wealth and power consume people.
Regardless of how individuals find their values, fundamentally, the values that humans have are choices unless they have been put in some sort of total environment - like a cult. Unfortunately, all of these choices are hindered by a simple problem - despite everything, humans have no access to the mind of God or the intention of the universe. We're guessing, or, at best, throwing our lots in with who we've think have figured it out.
I find that using religion as a means to the fundamental answers is a bad faith approach to life. We simply cannot know why we exist, and I am comfortable with that problem. The freedom of not knowing is easier than pretending that we do know, when we really don't.
Albert Camus gives us the metaphor of Sisyphus pushing a boulder for all eternity up a mountain as punishment from Hades to describe the human condition. Sisyphus, in greeting his challenge with defiance, gains a sense of meaning out of the most meaningless action imaginable by gritting his teeth and making the rock his. In my opinion, that is the best we can hope for. Living in defiance of the absurdity of not knowing why we exist. But there are further problems...
Modernity and the radical restructuring of human lifeLiving in the media age, even the most sheltered of us are dictated by the structure of social forces. The history of the last several hundred years explains this.
With the dawn of the industrial age, humans in developing countries were given a gift - the ability to make anything. The cost was reducing the lives of everyone in an industrialized society to laborers, and further reducing all time spent working or not working to be related to cost.
Henry David Thoreau and Friedrich Nietzsche realized some significant things at the beginning of this period of the 1800s.
First, Thoreau noticed that humans were experiencing more and more alienation between themselves and the things in their lives. Clothes, food, furniture, and everything else the occupies our lives were increasingly being created away from the individual that used these things. We have become alienated from the things that fill our lives. Regardless of the increased effort it takes to grow your own food than to buy it in a store, you have a connection to it. There is a fundamental sense of meaning - accomplishment when reaping the rewards of your own labor.
Nietzsche noticed as the Industrial Revolution took off that religion had "killed God". Often misinterpreted, this merely means that the meaning of God was collapsing in the face of a society that was becoming more disconnected and alienated from itself. Religion was becoming more and more self-serving and myopic and empty of rich metaphors to give life a sense of wonder. His complaints of the systems of morality that governed our lives were large and encompassed several books.
Alienation, a sense of separateness and radical aloneness, has emerged as the key experience dictating life in the industrialized world. The advent of new and more destructive weapons did not help. World War I not only was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, but the landscape of Europe was completely changed. The destruction was total. Where was God in a world such as this? Was there room for one anymore?
World War II was worse as the amount of human life lost was even greater, and the atrocities of Hitler's followers have been permanently etched into the Western World's psyche. But just as important as the Holocaust was as a marker of the absurdity of human destruction toward one another was, the unbelievable destruction caused by the use of two nuclear weapons in Japan left an even bigger mark on the world's psyche. It was now within our reach to destroy everything.
Postmodernity and the confluence of social forcesThe media has structured everything for us. We are locked in a feedback loop with our own history and the images presented to us of ourselves.
Digitized information is the marker of power. With the connectivity of the internet, there is an allure to bridge the gaps of alienation, but this is a very limited scope.
The "real" has been lost. Everything has become reproducible. If everything is reproducible, then individuality is fundamentally threatened. Additionally, our lives are filled with copies - most of what I own has been made in factories and thousands if not millions of other copies have been made for other people to own. I can relate to people based on my shared cultural experiences. Driving cars, watching TV shows and movies, listening to music, and partaking in the same activities as others have come to mean so much. But, on a deeper level, the meaning (as hollow as it is) of these things relates to a bigger problem: the fundamental struggle in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States over economic systems both missed the mark -
people have been fundamentally reduced to producers and consumers.
Marketing and social pressure have urged us into this strange position to understand ourselves primarily as consumers. Meaning in life is dependent on what you have, what you don't have, what you refuse to have, and so forth. Meaning is irrevocably tied to choices related to how money is earned and how money is spent. A rejection of this system is impossible, as the rejection just shows that the system exists and does nothing to get rid of it.
So where does freedom live in a world that has been mechanized, digitized, and that has reduced individuals to consumers? The facticity of this system troubles me greatly. I feel that it is bad faith to "opt out" and pull my plug from society and to suddenly live off of the land. Society continues to exist and evolve with or without me.
I have made some clear choices in my life that relate to my understanding of the systems I live in. I try to direct my spending to aid with my personal creativity as much as possible. Books, music, musical equipment, and movies fill my life. These are small choices, but they can feel large. Alienation is a clear problem still, all of the time, and it makes the connection between myself and others come and go - often feeling like a mirage in the desert coming in and out of sight under the sun.
Freedom now is more about the
knowledge of the system and the self than what actions can be made within the system. This maybe the most important aspect of living in our times now.
I think of myself as one may think of their self on a profile page listing out their interests. I'm overly invested in my sexuality, and yet despite my investment have done little to push boundaries with it. I fight every day to find something new, something that feels real before fading to dust or randomly replicating to its own death. The absurd, the avant-garde, the ironic, and the over-intellectualized milieu fuel me. Everything which places doubt into the nature of everything is something that I value. The more uncertain of my own existence I am, the more grounded I feel. The more I can unhinge those around me with these same ideas, the more I feel that I'm doing a service to the world. I don't feel that I am uncovering the "real" from the desert its been hiding in, just that I'm showing that the desert is vast and endless.
It is romantic and delicious, but soon feels bleak and tasteless. And somehow I love the waves as they wash over me.
