Freedom Isn't Free

But it is a product you shouldn't need to purchase.

“Make sure you put the word freedom in there a lot, so they know they are protected from us.”

About 20 years ago, a friend of mine and I were in a rental car driving to another friend's wedding in San Antonio. This was before Spotify, and iTunes had just come out, so we turned on the local radio station for our short ride from the airport to the hotel in town. A very old song came on the radio, the kind that I imagine was played in classrooms before I was born. The song was called, Freedom Isn’t Free, and the lyrics I remember were:

Freedom isn’t free! Freedom isn’t free!

You gotta pay a price…You’ve gotta sacrifice,

For your liberty.

My friend and I laughed at the anachronistic song on the radio, sang along for a while, and then went about our day.

But I always remembered that song, because the sentiment behind it is so woven into the American story. I don’t disagree with the song; I agree with the lyrics. Every generation needs to appreciate the freedoms and rights we have and fight for them. Otherwise, we don’t appreciate them and our appreciation of them atrophies. Some may argue that America today, and many countries in the West have taken their freedoms for granted, don’t properly value them and don’t really know how to fight for them. I think much of this is true - but it is beside the point.

Now that I am older and hopefully wiser, I better understand that the focus on “freedom” in America is a bit of a sleight of hand. It is something we are told we need to fight for, that we are raised to appreciate fighting for, and will gladly fight for. But for much of human history, the “freedom” that we fetishize today was something that the people of the day just wouldn’t understand.

People are freer today, because the concept didn’t really exist before.

On average, people on Earth are freer than they have ever been, but that is because for most of human history, the kind of freedom we understand as a right we have to fight for … just wasn’t a thing.

There was of course slavery throughout human history, and mistreatment of women, and minority groups, and war and thousands of other terrible things that people have done to each other throughout the ages, but there was no real concept of “freedom” as we think of it today.

After a little bit of research, I was surprised to find that the modern form of the word “freedom” - meaning exempt from slavery - didn’t really come about until the 14th century, because before then there wasn’t much tyranny to be free from. Sure, there was some tyranny. The Bible, Greek and Roman Myths, and myths and stories of most cultures contained stories of good and evil, heroes and villains.

The Bible Speaks of freedom. Indian myths speak of freedom. Talking about freedom is there. But is often not the same freedom we talk about today. The word in the Bible often translated as freedom is ἐλευθερία in the New Testament. This “freedom” emphasizes the liberation from the constraints of sin. In Hindu myths, the concept of freedom is often Moksha, which represents liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

These things are a kind of freedom, but not the “freedom” we associate with our lives today. The freedom we talk about most often today is a freedom from some kind of tyranny.

The individual freedom we are sold today can be seen as just another product. It isn’t a cheeseburger, or a car. It is an experience that connects us to an affinity group. It can be a cheeseburger if some environmentalist tells us to eat less beef. It can be a car if some tree hugger tells us to drive less. Freedom is vast, it contains multitudes.

The cheeseburger and the car aren’t freedoms as important as freedom from a tyrant that threatens our lives, but all three are products we are sold. To be free from tyranny, tyranny has to be around, and the freedom someone is selling you is telling you that “if you vote for me” I will protect you from tyranny.

But tyranny is a feature of the system. It isn’t a bug. And it isn’t just in “the other” political party. Wherever you have concentrated wealth and power, you will have tyranny.

Indigenous people had ways to deal with tyranny without having to advertise freedom. Many Native American communities were consensus democracies that survived for millennia because they actively balanced power. A tyrant would likely be banished, killed, or thrown out, because those societies were more communal, and knew that they needed each other to survive and thrive. If someone tried to put themselves above the group, they generally didn’t have the power to do so.

In our current society, we allow and encourage power and wealth to be concentrated in a very small part of society. Then we muse about how we got a tyrant and rally to fight for more freedom from that tyrant.

Here’s a thought. Design a society that doesn’t tolerate tyrants, and you will have less of them, and you won’t have to sell freedom. The need for individual freedoms we are being sold is a byproduct of valuing the individual over the group in our society.

Freedom is like many of the other commons that have been cordoned off by the powerful, and there is an artificial scarcity of freedom in our society, just as there is an artificial scarcity of housing, information, healthcare and so many other things that we feel we have to fight for.

If we lived in a more communal way, where power was adequately shared to avoid tyranny, we would still enjoy most of the freedoms we have today. But we wouldn’t make a big deal of them because they wouldn’t exist in opposition to any tyranny. You would eat your cheeseburger, but it wouldn’t ever be a political statement, it would just be lunch.

Hear what I’m saying - and not saying.

I’m not anti-freedom. I’m saying we focus so much on freedom in our society because we have built a society that is overly individualistic and places the wants and needs of the individual above the group. This is a bit insane. The freedoms we ensure everyone has include the freedom to destroy humanity because it is very profitable to shareholders.

That may indeed be a type of freedom but is also an utter lack of wisdom and moral purpose from the people in charge. Putting the needs of society above the individual isn’t communism or socialism, it is just a way to ensure survival. That’s it. There is no politics in that.

When a society values individual liberty over the basic survival of the society, those liberties will destroy the society.

That doesn’t mean I’m calling for a tyrant to rule over every aspect of your life. It means I’m calling for a society that values the survival of the group over the wants of the individual if those wants are harmful to society.

The goal should be to get back to a place where our descendants lose the common form of the word “freedom” from their vocabulary because it just isn’t meaningful in their world. In a world where the tyranny we see today isn’t tolerated and is therefore quite rare, “freedom” as we define it today won’t have much to oppose, and may evolve into a different meaning altogether, if the word is even used at all.

Hundreds of years in the future, we should hope our ancestors can have that cheeseburger whenever they want it, or take their horse, their car, or their hovercraft out for a drive whenever they want. But if those things threaten the survival of society, our ancestors may be shunned and banished, because they have confused their wants for needs in a way that harms society. Saying that individual wants are more important than the needs of society isn’t freedom, it’s suicide.

Pay attention to how freedom is sold to you.

The next time you see a politician screaming “freedom” at a rally, realize what they are really saying is:

“I don’t have any good ideas of how to help you or lead you, so I am going to just yell a word that 250 years of focus groups have told me that you like because you associate it with standing up to tyrants. Please don’t ask me any hard questions or expect any knowledge or wisdom from me. I am but a petty grifter, making my way through this world as best I can, exploiting my fellow man for my own personal gain to the detriment of society, not for its betterment. If you got rid of professional politicians and figured out a way to rule yourself more directly, by sortition for example, you wouldn’t need arguments over freedom, because you wouldn’t have any petty tyrants that are looking to limit your freedom for their own personal gain.”

FREEDOM!