How Our Understanding of Freedom Can Liberate or Imprison Us: The Illusions & Delusions in Our Understanding of Freedom

“The mind is the forerunner of all things,” said the Buddha in the collection of sayings called the Dhammapada. We are led by our ideas, not just our emotions. Our mind, our way of thinking guides every element of our lives, what we feel, what we value, what we imagine is possible, and how we relate with others.

 

One word or idea that is so important to understand in today’s world is freedom. The word and what it represents is at the heart of our national anthem; “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It reminds us of the sacrifices people made for freedom and for the survival of a nation, for resistance to an invader and the preservation of a freedom from external control over us.

 

But our understanding or misunderstanding of that word can cause us to lead a life that imprisons or liberates us; that hurts us and others or one that enriches us. And we see the hurtful way of understanding the word expressed daily by politicians and the news media in this country. Because the freedom from which the national anthem primarily expresses is what philosophers call negative freedom; this might be a necessary condition for us to have physical control over our lives but is not sufficient for us to feel liberated.

 

This was recently made so much clearer to me when I started reading a book by historian Timothy Snyder called On Freedom. The subject is one we have all probably thought about in different ways at different times in our lives.

 

Americans are told that freedom was given to us by the Founding Fathers. But freedom cannot be given, says Snyder. A country isn’t free; people are free. If we think of freedom as only freedom from outside sources of control or threat, then we can be convinced we need to sacrifice freedom for security. We can think the personal and political situation is always us separated from and against the world and we become habituated to always rating ourselves in opposition to others, instead of studying how we feel in ourselves. We reduce human beings, with inner lives not that different from our own, to things. Hitler called Jewish people “foreign bodies,” parasites, vermin infesting the German racial organism.

 

DT speaks in terms that are alarmingly like Hitler’s, dehumanizing immigrants of color, as well as Democrats and those who oppose him, calling them, us, “vermin.” Such thinking as DT illustrates makes us feel perpetually uneasy, insecure in ourselves and our world, isolated, suffering.

 

Such thinking leads us to feel that if we just remove obstacles, barriers, regulations, and, limit the reach of government we expand our freedom. That our freedom is opposed to that of others. That we know the truth, and that no other truth, no other facts, are real. And thus, opinions different from our own must be destroyed. Only leaders strong enough to assert their own truth with absolute conviction and power can save us. This misses the obvious; such an absolute leader negates our own power to lead⎼ or to have a meaningful vote. Negative freedom, says Snyder, is not a misunderstanding so much as a repressive idea.

 

He gives us examples from Ukraine and its struggle for life against Putin, an oppressive invader who wants to kill not only the Ukrainian nation but any of its people who would even consider opposing him. But Snyder reports that when Ukrainians remove Russian invaders from their villages, they don’t use the word freedom. They’re glad that “something terrible has been removed from their lives,” that the threat of imminent death or torture is ended. But the term they use for this is deoccupation. The occupier is gone.

 

They realize “freedom is not just an absence of evil, but a presence of good.”…

 

*To read the whole post, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Acting So We and Our World Awaken Together: Patience is Powerful

We all know we’re living through one of the craziest, most dangerous times in recent or maybe all of human history. I keep asking myself, what am I missing? What more could I do? Where is it all going?

 

We understand mostly by placing one moment in the context of time and memory, by discerning implications and possible futures. But so many of the possible futures being predicted by the news, social and intellectual media are too dismal to consciously consider. Maybe we can help change the future we are seeing by changing how we think about the   present we are living.

 

I am drawn here to a book I mentioned in an earlier blog, The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers, by Eric Weiner, and his chapters on two philosophers not often paired together: Simone Weil and Mahatma Gandhi.

 

The chapter on Simone Weil is about “How to Pay Attention.” Our culture is hooked on speed⎼ and speed, according to Weil, is the enemy of attention, careful consideration, and even joy. Due to the speedy pace of our lives, we can lose so much. We can get caught in, addicted to this repeating cycle, speeding up to catch what is speeding by. And what makes this even worse is the pandemic, added to the injustices, lies, shocks and constant chaos manipulated by DJT and his allies to undermine our sense of stability and our belief in democracy.

 

Desiring is not the problem. The problem with desire is that we can lose ourselves in it, lose even the object we desire in the desiring itself. It robs our attention. A heroin addict doesn’t crave heroin, Weil argues, but the experience of having it. Even more then heroin, the addict craves the relief of the mental and physical agony of not having it. Buddhist teacher, author, philosopher David Loy explained that desire, craving can cause us to feel we are lacking, wrong, powerless, or deficient.

 

The Latin roots of patient are suffering and endurance. When we are more patient, we feel stronger, more in control. We can endure even suffering, and find ourselves happier, clearer in mind, calmer in heart. We can be present in the moment, and thus feel more open to what might come.

 

And then we pay better attention to what or who happens. Weil shows us that inattention is in fact selfishness. When impatient, we reduce others to what we can get from them. When patient, others are fellow travelers who teach us about our own journey.

 

When impatient, we focus on the fruits and yoke action to results. When patient, we make progress even if there are no visible fruits.

 

And how do we fight, now, for our rights, our freedom, and our world?

Gandhi was the father of the movement to free India from British rule and establish an independent nation. He believed he must try to root out the disease of oppression even if it meant suffering hardship himself….

 

*To read the whole article, click on this link to The Good Men Project.