That Ain’t Freedom
I’ve been watching with curiosity and a level of disturbed detachment – equal parts of both disturbance and detachment with higher gusts of one or the other at any given moment – as the winds of opinion, waves of disinformation and heel-digging populate the news and social media spheres…
Some of what I see fascinates me.
Some provides amusement.
Some of it is, honestly, just plain terrifying.
Here in the US, there’s a whole lot of air – much of it hot – being blown around on the topic of “freedom” right now.
Freedom has inspired poets, songwriters, playwrights and other artists for as long as art has been around.
The desire for freedom has spawned movements and launched revolutions.
While I’ve written about freedom before, today I find myself noticing what may well be the wolf of control masquerading as freedom.
A word about control – the illusion of control, actually – first…
The human ego loves the idea of control. It’ll go to great lengths to cling to the notion that more control than could ever be possible… is possible.
Outcomes, systems, emotions, thoughts, animals, the environment, narratives, people (particularly those different from ourselves) – we just love the idea that, in some way, we can rest in being able to exert some control over them.
On the flip side, of course, is the terrifying prospect that any of those things might have (or take) control over us.
The ugly – or beautiful, depending on your point of view – fact is that we just don’t have the kind of power necessary to have the levels of control individual, to say nothing of collective, ego aspires to.
What that means, in a nutshell, is that freedom comes not from manipulating people or circumstances and demanding control, but from releasing the perceived need or desire to control…
And, like everything else, letting go starts with awareness – recognizing when one is reaching for control…
And then, of course, stopping.
In the list above I included narrative as one of the variables we humans like to have control over…
And while I know this isn’t solely an American thing, there is something peculiarly American in the very strange battles for control of facts – you know, facts at the level of “water is wet, rocks are hard and the sky is blue” – currently being waged.
I could go on at length about what facts are and how they function in building narratives for public consumption, but I’m going to leave that for another time or, perhaps, for another writer…
What I will say is this:
Knowledgeable experts are expert for a reason…
Full data sets often include snippets of data that, when isolated as if in a vacuum, no longer represent the broader picture or context the full set reveals…
And last but certainly not least, making things up to explain the world in a way that better suits one’s preferred narrative – or buying what someone else has made up because it does the same thing – doesn’t make it so.
And on the last point, if one’s freedom is built on a foundation of fictions, cherry-picked data and an outright denial of learned, studied and peer-reviewed expertise…
Well, that ain’t freedom.
That’s the ego’s attempt to willfully control through attachment, grasping, and desperate, painful resistance to the blue of the sky, the hardness of rocks and the wetness of water.
Don’t get me wrong, there are indeed worthy causes and good fights to be fought…
But in an environment in which facts – and truth itself – seem to be on the chopping block, take your time, listen well…
And perhaps most importantly, rather than following the polarized crowds into their online echo chambers, go inside and sit quietly with your spirit and soul, staying until your breathing slows down and deepens and your heart stops racing.
Because that’s where freedom lives.