Today I want to talk to you about freedom. Partly because the the freedom of speech has been on the news lately because of Charlie Hebdo and Copenhagen, but mostly because it's an interesting and complicated topic.
It doesn't make it any less complicated that the very beginning, the basic definition of freedom is tricky. This is what Google gives as a definition for freedom:
1. the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants.
2. the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.
However, this definition is quite not what people usually mean. In general people in the western countries at least see themselves and each other as free beings. But if you really think about it, you can't really act as you want. You're not free to go around killing people for example. If you do, you will be locked up. And then you won't bee free by any definition.
Even if you ignore that and think that technically you can go around killing people, you still can't go around flying. It's simply not physically possible. So you can't do what ever you want. Does that mean you're not free?
Even trickier the definition is made by the fact that freedom has slightly different definitions in different languages. I ran into this column a few weeks back. It talks about how our understanding of the world is shaped by the words we have to describe it. Basically what it says about freedom is that in Russian, for example, the word for freedom includes the meanings of anarchy and chaos alongside freedom as we understand it. They don't even have a word for freedom as we understand it. That means they don't understand freedom the way we do.
So which one of the definitions is what freedom actually is? The Russian version of freedom does have a point. If everyone really did what ever they wanted it would be pretty chaotic.
So is it freedom enough to call it freedom if people can do what ever they want to as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else? If you want to have a working society, it's really the best you can get without it being unfair in some other way.
Assuming not letting people be free is unfair, which people generally it is.
Even if people were free in a society in the way we understand it, I still wonder if people are actually free. There are so many things keeping us either doing something or from doing something. You have to keep working. You can't go on a trip around the world when ever you want. If you do want to, you need a lot of time to plan and save money. There's no one stopping you from doing it, but the society doesn't work in a way that would let you do it.
People take responsibilities at work, in school, in hobbies. You have to be in places when you've said you'd be in places even if you wanted to not get out of the bed that day. Again you can not do the things you've agreed to do, but the social construction makes it that people feel like they have to do it. Of course a lot of the responsibilities you take up you take family because you want to, in which case you're free to choose to either take them or don't, and then you just have to live according to what you chose. But once you've taken something up you're that much less free to do what you want.
And how about family? You can mostly nowadays decide to have or not to have kids, that will be a responsibility for probably the rest of your life. Kids are even more difficult to get rid of than responsibilities in the workplace, though I don't know how many people just get tired of taking care of their kids after a few years. Even if people liked it and made the decision to have kids, they will have a huge difference in what you can and can't do and when. They restrict your freedom. So does getting a kid mean that you're no more really free? And is that bad?
The rest of the family you can't even choose yourself. You can't choose if you'll have parents (which, well, you have to have), or siblings or aunts or cousins. Someone else makes that choice for you. How much does family limit one's freedom? Of course it depends on how close you are to that family. This is actually something that a couple of my characters battle with for most of the book. Whether to stay in the village with your family and chance getting killed, or go and leave behind everything and everyone you know, but stay alive.
If you feel obligated to do something for your family, then are you really free?
And, again, does it matter if you're not free, if you yourself prioritize your family over your own freedom?
I guess, like with many other things, the line between free and not free is just about how you define it. Of course, there are the clearly not-free people in the world, like all the people in prisons, or slaves, or people living in countries where freedom of speech and thought and acts is practically non existent.
But I guess who is free is completely up to the definition. If anyone is.
I'll hear from you on Friday.
~matu
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