In the words of Alice Walker, “No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence or denies your right to grow.”
But what if that “friend” is your own mind? We want to live in a free world and fight for what we call a free world. Yet freedom is a complex idea, and its cultivation is an internal process laden with risk and discomfort.
Freedom is a holy word for any true American. It is the womb in which its very essence has been conceived, and yet, are we truly free? If we were to consciously practice freedom, where would we begin? Being a social animal entails a certain level of conformity.
We have institutionalized conformity through standardized public education, corporate protocols, judicial systems, and many other rules of engagement that structure our civilization. Buddha says, “No one outside ourselves can rule us inwardly. When we know this, we become free.” Yet the majority of people are plagued by what others think of them. Hence, if freedom begins within, we must ask ourselves: Are we freethinking?
Recently, I was listening to a podcast that discussed the issue of freedom in the context of social media. There, an interviewer had confessed that he had made a comment about something which, in his mind, was his own, only to realize later that he had made a verbatim quote of a meme he had read on social media.
How many thoughts and ideas that we take for our own are inserted without us even knowing? Minds are susceptible to influence. If this were not true, advertising would be a useless endeavor. In fact, minds are molded from the moment we are born by our parents and then systematically whipped into shape and conditioned by all external influences in our culture. In short, we are a product of our environment.
To what extent we are susceptible to conditioning depends on many variables, from trauma to temperament and genetics. But the most effective tool of restricting freedom is fear. Unfortunately, fear-inducing narratives are also most interesting to human beings.We like hearing horror stories, whether they are imagined or real. As a survival instinct, it behooves us to remember scary stories as cautionary tales.
However, scary stories also lead us into voluntary abdication of our freedoms, and in so doing, we not only acquiesce to conditioned existence, but we become mentally subordinate. This mental subordinance is achieved more insidiously when the source of bondage is not an externalized personification, such as a villain or a corrupt ruler against which one might revolt, but instead, a faceless system that we voluntarily elect as a collective.
Signs of internal bondage and subordinance manifest in various characteristics within individuals, some of which are welcomed and celebrated in society, such as people-pleasing and law obedience. Everyone likes friendly and considerate people. Underneath these traits, however, lies an internal torment of overthinking, anxiety, self-doubt, need for control, and judgments that thwart curiosity and exploration. When external pressure surpasses an individual’s capacity to withstand it, these symptoms of internalized fear begin to inhibit freedom of thought and block creativity and our ability to connect to our true selves. Inside such bondage, there is no true love, only a masquerade of submission in the name of safety. Freedom entails a level of responsibility without which it can quickly descend into chaos. Therefore, there is no such thing as institutionalized freedom; hence, we cannot rely on any external system to secure it. Whenever freedom is exercised, it is through the courage and passion of an individual with the internal vision to transcend these systems.
In most cases, the internal hold of the system over an individual is so strong that often, people who dare to venture beyond such boundaries are sociopathic. That is not to say that all free agents are sociopaths, but it takes a certain level of confidence to launch a flight. Balancing an existence on the edge of freedom and conformity is no easy task. To be a social animal is to relate with others in harmony. Achievement of such relative harmony entails inherent limitations. It is within the confines of its framework that we find balance with fellow men and safety in belonging. It can be lonely and scary up there in the vastness of what we call freedom. A free world only exists inside a free mind; it is a labor of heroic courage and tremendous responsibility. Even in the “free world,” masses consent to faceless bondage in exchange for security, and only the chosen fly on the wings of madness, some never returning.
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” – Charles Bukowski spt
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