none are more hopelessly enslaved
Lately I've been thinking a lot about freedom, seeing as how I have none of it. Not that I'm complaining, because that would make me one of those people who pile their days with activities and then whine that they have no time. Nor am I boasting about my important busyness, which is what the whiny people are actually doing, of course.
What I'm doing is wondering why I don't want to be free.
Because we all have a choice, really. Every day we trade in some freedoms for others - the freedom to wake up at noon, for instance, for the freedom to have money to spend. The freedom to say anything you want for the freedom to go about your business with no one whispering behind your back. The freedom to eat uninhibitedly for the freedom of being skinny. Those are the primary tradeoffs - so mandatory, so easily rationalised, you forget you ever had a choice.
What about the smaller ones? The freedom of underperformance forfeited for the impossible satisfaction of being a perfectionist. The freedom of anonymity given up for the desire to stand out. The freedom of ignorance lost in the compulsion to have an opinion.
(My fiance believes that only the Joker, with his unencumbered ways and unhinged mind, is truly free. But is even that true? People who are genuinely mad are trapped in a world that makes no sense to normal people. Those who pretend to be mad already admit their constraints with their facepaint and oversized personalities. The Joker exists only because Batman does; his explosion on the scene is permitted because Gotham "deserves a better class of criminal" to offset the better class of law enforcement. His self-identification as Batman's nemesis is his biggest limitation - if Batman were to disappear off the edge of the earth, the Joker's licentiousness would lose its meaning.)
Obviously, very few of us are free. (I won't say "none", curbed as I am by my need to maximise accuracy.) We're afraid of what we would do if we were really free to do anything we wanted; or worse, of realising that we really have nothing better to do after all. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a person, or a place, or an activity, that lets us act as freely as we want to. It could be, after all, that only by sensing our boundaries can we know what it's like to be free.
posted by zyn ::
9:41 PM ::
6 Comments ::
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