What does it mean to achieve freedom? When is a person free? Let’s break this down today. To understand what freedom is, let us first define freedom. Freedom is having autonomy to do whatever we wish. This is a very raw and broad definition of freedom. For some additional context, let’s define what is the opposite of freedom, or what does it mean to not be free? We could define it broadly as something controlling us; something hindering our autonomy. Now this “something” and “us” will also have to be defined, and that is what brings us to the main topic of this blog. We will consider several different definitions of “something” and “us” and this, in my opinion, will help us understand freedom in a much more nuanced way.
Let’s define the first tier of freedom which I like to call the “material freedom”. The “us” here is an individual, a person seeking fundamental rights and liberties. The “something” here could be anything external like governments or economic barriers like poverty. The lack of material freedom is in a way physically restrictive. If a person lives in an authoritarian regime that does not allow them freedoms like freedom to choose which language they can speak, what food they can eat, what clothes they can wear, what products they can buy, they are not materially free. This freedom is relatively straight forward to understand.
Now let’s move on to the second tier of freedom, the “temptational freedom”. The “us” here is our mind, specifically our emotional mind. The “something” is an external temptation that someone is trying to use to control us. An example of this could be marketing campaigns of a lot of companies. They try to tempt “us” by a lot of attractive colours and designs, or by hiring influencers and celebrities. We could also say that the “something” here is our temptations. One thing that is important to note here is, these temptations are not very deep in nature. These are fleeting, impulsive emotions that last for a very short time period. An example of people who are not temptationally free are impulsive shoppers.
The third one, “social freedom”, is where the line between “us” and “something” start to blur a little. The “us” here is again the emotional mind. The “something” is the deepest beliefs that the society has given us. It could be religious beliefs or even atheist beliefs. This is not just about religion, it includes anything you consider moral or immoral. Even the things like equality, democracy, justice, co-operation, global peace, secularism are all given to us by society. This does not mean that a person who attains social freedom becomes immoral. This means that they create their own path. This is where we start entering (at least a little bit) into superhuman category. This is similar to the philosophical concept of Übermensch developed by Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche, a socially free person as we just defined is someone who looks at the society and understands how the society has created things like religion to make life “meaningful” and escape the extremely scary reality of the inherent meaninglessness of life. He argues that true freedom is when a person rises beyond the societal constructs of good and evil and creates their own path. I had touched upon a similar topic in my blog Internalization of social morals.
The last one, which I like to call “ultimate freedom”, is God like characteristics. This freedom gives you literal superpowers. The “us” here is the consciousness. A lot of people call it the soul. It is called the ‘aatma’ in Hindu culture. There are many variations of the definition of ‘aatma’, but we can refer to all of them as consciousness since that is not our main concern here. Except the consciousness, everything else, our brain, our emotions, our instincts, our pleasures, our pains, our body, our hunger and anything else you can think of are the “something”. I am not claiming that the consciousness exists and I don’t think anybody can claim that because there is no fool proof evidence for that as of now. But a lot of people believe in it and I understand why that is the case. When you go deep into the question “who am I?”. This is what you get - “Am I my body? All the cells of my body are replaced every 7 years or so. Nothing physical in my body remains constant. If I am my body, which body am I? Am I my 25 year old body or 32 year old body or 18 year old body? Because all of them are different. So I may conclude that ‘I’ am not my body. Am I my emotions? Seems unlikely, because the emotions seem to come to me and I seem to react to them. I don’t seem to have control over every emotion. I seem to have control over my reaction to the emotion. Then I may conclude that I am not my emotions”. We can see how this inner dialogue can naturally lead to the conclusion that something non-physical called the consciousness exists. And if it exists, the ultimate freedom is when that consciousness is liberated from all the “somethings” outside the consciousness.
So what is the point of all of this? I have noticed a lot of over-emphasis on material freedom and a lot less emphasis on the rest of them. Material freedom is important in my opinion. People must have individual rights and we can’t have a handful of people controlling everybody. But the importance of the rest of the freedoms should not be overlooked. In my personal experience, being free from temptations is an extremely liberating experience and it feels better than getting every temptation fulfilled. We discussed something similar in the blog Achieve freedom by restricting yourself.
So what is your definition of freedom? Do you agree that we are extremely temptation driven people? Do let me know what you think. Thanks for reading, see you next time!