Freedoms
I’ve continued to think about this idea of choice and freedom, especially with regard to modern America — people like me and people I know. I’m more convinced than ever that choice is the most important part of human consciousness. But my contention is that while modern America celebrates choice, and mistakenly believes that the only thought we must give to choice is how to multiply our choices, we by and large miss the real freedom- and happiness-producing aspects of choice. Because while Americans are very familiar with negative freedoms, we rarely, if ever, speak of positive freedoms, to borrow a bifurcation from Isiah Berlin.
On the one hand, we’re very familiar with negative freedoms, and we believe that negative freedoms multiply choice, therefore eo ipso produce human happiness. These negative freedoms are “freedoms from,” whether they are freedom from government oppression or censorship, freedom from other people’s interference in our lives, or generally freedom from being told what to do. Americans believe here is where freedom ends: as long as we maximize negative freedoms, we will eliminate the cage.
This is not the case. There is the more important kind of freedom, the freedom that is all but impossible for any person or government to abridge: positive freedom, or the “freedom to.” This type of freedom is about freedom to decide for oneself, and, at its most basic formulation, is the freedom of a person to choose how he or she responds to the world. Viktor Frankl saw people in the concentration camps with him who recognized this basic human freedom that modern America forgets, we who believe we are owed something.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. (Man’s Search for Meaning)
This is the really insidious thing about modern America’s negative-only conception of freedom: no one is ever taught how we choose; we are not given the tools to make the choices that will lead us to happiness: we’re never expected to obtain happiness, only pursue it mindlessly. Back when smartphones first came out, and it was pretty clear these things were going to be pretty addictive, I wondered if Americans, were they suddenly told these things unequivocally caused, say, brain cancer, would have the strength to put them down. This would be a positive freedom: making a choice under no compulsion. Now, of course, there are countless studies about the degenerative effects of cellphone and screen use on children and adult attention, with symptoms as vicious and obvious as alcohol addiction, but we show no sign of putting the things down. We celebrate not having bars on our cage with “Property of the USG” written on them, but instead we prefer bars of our own making — a prison so complete the prisoner doesn’t even realize he’s locked up.
This is how people can see problems like racism or climate change, both of which large majorities of American adults will claim are problems needing attention, but when you ask what they themselves are doing about it, in the day-to-day trenches of boring adult existence, they’ll sort of just stare blankly at you, or else cite various governmental or NGO-type programs other people should be doing about it. The uber-woke may say they only eat non-GMO foods or something (transported to market by plane, train, and 18-wheeler, placed on shelves by the low-wage clerks whose daily meaninglessness far surpasses any evilness a woke suburbanite can imagine). But ultimately, there is very little that changes in how your average adult American lives his or her life.
Like all ideas, a great author beat me to it, this time again David Foster Wallace. In an iconic scene from Infinite Jest, Office of Unspecified Services (OUS) agent Hugh/Helen Steeply (a deeply undercover cross dresser) debriefs Remy Marathe, a wheelchair assassin from Quebec and likely quadruple agent, whose terrorist cell wants to deliver retribution for the U.S.’ recent realignment of North America and the use of New England/Southern Quebec as a mass trash dump. Marathe’s cell want to get their hands on a movie reportedly so entertaining that anyone who watches it wants nothing other than to watch it over and over, until they die presumably of dehydration or starvation. Once it’s in their hands, the Quebecois terrorists want to make it widely available to all Americans to kill on a massive scale. The OUS wants to obviously get their hands on the entertainment first, because they know people won’t be able to resist watching the entertainment if they hear it’s the best entertainment ever, even if it means killing them. Steeply claims this is true blue American freedom: nothing should stop the Americans from watching it if they want to. Marathe is trying to open Steeply’s eyes to this other type of freedom, but Steeply says back:
‘Does this sound a little familiar, Remy? The National Socialist Neofascist State of Separate Quebec?… Totalitarity. Cuba with snow. Ski immediately to your nearest reeducation camp, for instructions on choosing. Moral eugenics. China. Cambodia. Chad. Unfree.”
‘Unhappy,’ [Marathe replied].
‘There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It’s not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us — these are just the hazards of being free.’
‘But what does this U.S.A. expression want to mean, this Buckeroo?’
Steeply turned to face away into the space they were above. ‘And now here we go. Now you will say how free are we if you dangle fatal fruit before us and we cannot help ourselves from temptation. And we say “human” to you. We say that one cannot be human without freedom.’
Marathe’s chair squeaked slightly as his weight shifted. ‘Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout “Freedom! Freedom!” as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress…. But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to? How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child’s greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?…
The rich father who can afford the cost of candy as well as food for his children: but if he cries out “Freedom!” and allows his child to choose only what is sweet, eating only candy, not pea soup and bread and eggs, so his child becomes weak and sick: is the rich man who cries “Freedom!” the good father?’ (Infinite Jest, 320-321)
This idea is nothing new, it goes all the way back to Aristotle.
κακῶς ὁρίζονται τὸ ἐλεύθερον. δύο γάρ ἐστιν οἷς ἡ δημοκρατία δοκεῖ ὡρίσθαι, τῷ τὸ πλεῖον εἶναι κύριον καὶ τῇ ἐλευθερίᾳ: τὸ μὲν γὰρ δίκαιον ἴσον δοκεῖ εἶναι, ἴσον δ᾽ ὅ τι ἂν δόξῃ τῷ πλήθει, τοῦτ᾽ εἶναι κύριον, ἐλεύθερον δὲ καὶ ἴσον τὸ ὅ τι ἂν βούληταί τις ποιεῖν: ὥστε ζῇ ἐν ταῖς τοιαύταις δημοκρατίαις ἕκαστος ὡς βούλεται, καὶ εἰς ὃ χρῄζων, ὡς φησὶν Εὐριπίδης: τοῦτο δ᾽ ἐστὶ φαῦλον: οὐ γὰρ δεῖ οἴεσθαι δουλείαν εἶναι τὸ ζῆν πρὸς τὴν πολιτείαν, ἀλλὰ σωτηρίαν. (Politics, 1310a25 ff)
They [i.e. those in democracies] badly define freedom. For these are the things by which democracy is defined: rule of the majority and freedom. For it is believed that the just is equality, that equality is whatever is right to the majority, and that freedom is doing whatever one wishes. Just so in such democracies man may live as he wishes and for whatever, as Euripides said, he happens to crave. This is cheap living [often translated as “This is bad.”], for one should not think it slavery to live according to the rights and conditions of a citizen [often translated simply as “according to a constitution”], but deliverance [often translated as “safety”].
These marches and demonstrations are as bound to fizzle as the ones back in 2015 after Mike Brown, because we all expect other people to be the ones to make these changes. There’s something creepily David Lynchian about people calling for social justice while they order more Amazon packages during a pandemic, putting at risk people they claim are down-trodden by the system, while they themselves hope these soon-discarded online-ordered widgets will bring them happiness (which they won’t, again by definition), and thus perpetuate the system they claim to abhor. When maybe, again just maybe, the real joke in all this is the fact that if everyone focused on the stupidly insignificant, unsexy little things the average adult really has any control over, then these changes they shout for at the Mall for a few weeks might start to come around, not in a flash, but with the inevitable momentum of a freight train over the mountain. But we have been conditioned to search for the easy, user-friendly, and cheap. Why pay twice as much for a piece of local, homemade artisanal crap when we can buy the same other crap on Amazon for half the price? Why go to the plumber you’ve known since high school (this is a counterfactual, since I don’t think people who become plumbers go to the same high schools as the people needing plumbers anymore) when you can use Angie’s List to compare one anonymous guy to another and save a couple bucks? When the cosmic irony of it all is human beings usually get more happiness from giving gifts than receiving (in this example, supporting someone’s passion, even if it is kitschy), and we usually get better work and a better deal from someone we’ve known for 20 years than some guy we found in the Yellow Pages. We deep down know these things to be true, but we’ve convinced ourselves this isn’t the case, and that instead, freedom and happiness is all about me. But all this pursuit of happiness and freedom produces is more pursuit: there can be no climax or resolution. It’s a diet of candy that will only leave us with a stomach ache and malnourished bones.