Cage of freedom

None is more hopelessly enslaved than he who falsely believes he is free. – Goethe

If you insist on freedom, you can become a prisoner to it as incorruptible principle. This is also the character of fanaticism; you are a prisoner to those principles you will not compromise. Calling them “red lines” is quite revealing. 

Is this the character of human existence? A religious man submits to God. A spiritual woman submits to Love. A corporate creature submits to The Company. A political beast submits to The Party. A rugged individualist submits to The Wild. 

The ego casts submission as slavery. It tempts us away from the slavery it fears to ‘freedom’ from interference, ‘freedom’ from constraint. But this also becomes that to which you then submit, and you begin your journey as a prisoner of that particular story. 

One way or another, we will face the endless tensions that must arise between the group/environment and the individual. In response to this, Jung wrote, “Free will is doing gladly that which one must do.”

What is love (“gladly”), and what is free will?

I can’t define pornography, but “I know it when I see it” (Potter Stewart). I believe the same is true of free will, love, wisdom, health, grace… The academic process teases out clear distinctions in an attempt to produce watertight definitions of some phenomenon. This also applies to the legal world, and to science of course, but much escapes such definition, pornography being but one infamous example from a very large set. 

Furthermore, there is no escaping the fact that any definition, no matter how rigorously established, buckles when it meets the mess of Reality Out There. Even the constant of light’s speed gets tweaked. But more important than tiny wiggle-room uncertainties is how such constants, consensus pronouncements and verifiable results are wielded and turned into policy, or into machinery, or how they influence parenting or educational systems. As soon as something seemingly neat and tidy leaves the desk, laboratory or think tank, the rubber meets the road of unintended consequences.

Yes, control is an integral part of life. So is grace. 

Walking is a matter of control, but in cooperative balance with gravity and other physical forces. Free will is like this, like a dance. It is not solipsistic, is not completely free, is impossible in an infinite void. It is only meaningful in some constraining context that has structure, which is thus useful. What is the meaning of ‘individual’ (will) if there is no group (structure)? It is precisely the constraints of the specific context (group, culture, setting, situation) that give the individual something to do, something to react to, a ‘backdrop’ against which to discern and experience self. Reliable, discernible contrast to self is required for free will to be able to make choices. Free will is thus ‘free’ only in the sense of being unpredictable at some very fine granularity, and is ‘will’ in the sense of experienced preference.

None is more hopelessly enslaved than he who misunderstands freedom. I think we Westerners misunderstand. And I believe we owe this subject matter, this humanist/ontological topography ruthless reexamination. For that, we need freedom to discuss (o sweet irony!). For discussion to be richly valuable, we need to be mature – another undefinable – about listening to each other and taking the uniqueness of each perspective into account. 

Love is the fruit of the maturity we must earn before we can respond with grace to that which constrains us into ever-evolving being. And it holds free will sacred.

As the West sinks into its moral quagmire, will it see the treasure hidden in its muck?

What are the costs of low-wisdom, and thus inflexible, moral conviction? Put differently, can a truly wise person be morally inflexible?

Argument 1

If someone were superior to you in every way, would that grant them the right to abuse you?

Can an entity’s inferiority be such that its mere existence endangers yours? If yes, if you find someone’s ‘savage’ inferiority threatening, do you then have a moral obligation to make them like you, so much so that if they refuse to comply, you become obliged to kill them to preemptively preserve your superior self and ways?

Perhaps that sounds offensive. Perhaps this moral logic is only valid at the scale of tribes, or nation states, or when directed at viruses, pests, climate change, ignorance, terrorism. For example, nobody weeps today over the destroyed peoples of antiquity, or would weep if we, The Good Guys, defeated The Bad Guys. But does humanity really want to remain mired in the perma-enmity that Might Makes Right feeds and sustains? If we do, is it a wise desire? Can perma-enmity one day produce the fittest of all possible worlds, accomplish the end of savagery? Or are enmity-means in fact enmity-ends, perpetually?

If you trap an animal, it seeks escape. Life wills to survive, to live unmolested. A living system has a very hard time seeing itself as The Problem, as fundamentally wrong. If it does, it starts malfunctioning and often wants to die.

Though I’m singling out The West, it hardly matters which culture we put under the microscope. “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Some literature examines the sad human longing for the Final Triumph of the Familiar over the Weird. In European history, this longing famously manifested in 1930s and ‘40s Germany, Austria, Japan, etc. But no matter where it manifests, it always does so fuelled by sophomoric and brutish logic: 

‘We are best because we know ourselves and our culture best. Those people who differ from us are Weird and thus inferior. Behold! The things we excel at are the best things! Marvel at our neatly built roads, bureaucracies and machines! To excel at anything else is uninteresting at best, savage at worst. Because we are best, we are morally obliged to refashion the rest of the world in our image. There can be only one! Evolution mercilessly sorts the wheat from the chaff. Only the fittest survive. There is the Garden (familiar), and the Jungle (weird). We are the Garden, which is self-evidently the best possible thing because it is what we know. Destiny demands we transform the Jungle into the Garden!’

To itself, the condemned Jungle is a Garden of the familiar, and our civilised Garden is a weird and savage Jungle. Following the above logic, the Jungle is morally obliged to recreate our Garden in its image.

More importantly still, if you do not understand a thing intimately, your ability to assess its value is poor. Today, for example, we are aware that rain forests are miracles of biodiversity and self-regulation, a slow-burn accomplishment civilisation cannot even dream of matching. And yet our Western institutions and their managers still propagate the threadbare Jungle-Garden dichotomy first expressed, I believe by Rudyard Kipling, to justify Great Britain’s haughty mission.

Argument 2

If I couch the above logic in terms of ‘wisdom’, ‘love’ and ‘health’ as superior to “neatly built roads, bureaucracies and machines” – when I argue, in other words, that my favoured principles will ‘win’ in the ‘end’ – am I any different to the cultures I critique? Is my position fundamentally hypocritical?

It will not surprise you to learn my slippery response: Yes, but also no. One can understand principles from multiple perspectives without, I assert, being a moral relativist. The key is to understand, deeply, the dynamics of enmity. My position is that a proper and mature relationship with enmity is in fact a natural transcendence of the polarised morality expressed in Argument 1. If we do our work properly, with the right balance of humility and courage, our need, or even ability, to remain in enmity with others disappears.

I could oppose you in several ways, but I think they would all boil down to “cooperatively” or “competitively”. The former could be called humble opposition, the latter belligerent. We might also say loving or fearful opposition. 

If we were willingly and knowingly to choose love as a guiding principle for our new governance systems and institutions, we could only do so with a concomitant and deeply felt sense of our own frailty and ‘imperfection’. From this flows the knowing that those who oppose us are best placed to help us see where we are in error; opposition (a difference of perspective, aka diversity) is healthy for our evolution. This means that a healthy relationship with enmity (opposition, diversity) experiences ‘enmity’ as an opportunity to evolve, to improve. The result of this is that enmity itself ceases to be possible.

Can there be evolution without diversity, without opposition of some kind? The idea makes no sense to me.

If humans can learn to love their enemies, there would need to be no fear of being ‘wrong’, of losing face, especially if systems and institutions evolve to functioning maturity guided by love.

I could couch all this as “Love is mightier than fear and will win in the end!” I can also say “health will out” or “love will out”. Doing so, however, is an incomplete expression of the evolutionary process I am bringing into relief here when not qualified by additional observations about what evolution actually entails.

It is also true that we learn the health of love and wisdom by experiencing, again and again in a multitude of settings and contexts, the long-term dysfunction of embittered and entrenched enmity. The road to the hells we live through is also the road to heaven. Indeed, it is because we find the fruit of uncorrected fear and enmity hellish that we can know love is the healthier way to travel. So this is not competition in the belligerent, existential sense caricatured in Argument 1. Argument 2 is an attempt to describe the challenging process of increasingly complex cooperation that evolution is. It has as much to do with perspective (diversity) as it has to do with mechanical functionality.

Conclusion implied

This has not been a “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” article.

Alchemical economics

Dr Manhattan’s crystal lunar city, from The Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon

From the exchange, the poison will out. In the absence of exchange – the absence of relationship – nothing can happen; neither poison nor joy can come.

Imagine a wholly impervious being. It has not one need. It cannot be harmed, or indeed changed, in any way. It experiences no boredom, no curiosity, no appetite, no desire. What sort of being would it be? One incapable of exchange, one that could have no conception of risk. It could have no conception of anything. Perception changes the perceiver because perception entails exchange: the transmission of information from ‘object’ to ‘subject’, from perceived to perceiver. Is anything more fundamental?

Humans, and indeed all other things, are vulnerable. Our deeply experienced vulnerability is our womb of fear. Is the ‘solution’ absolute imperviousness? Is the desire for great wealth a misguided ambition that reduces down to a need to be safe from all harm? Is the desire for nirvana, for total peace, for freedom from all desire, a similarly misguided ambition?

Because we are not impervious, we can engage in exchange. From exchange the poison will out. 

What, then, is poison? Perhaps it is the exposure to that which is ‘weak’ in us, which means untested, which means immature. Perhaps exposure to these untested facets of our being is painful because our relationship with our vulnerability is shadowy, unexamined, buried. Perhaps pain is the consequence of the tightness and tension that grow from this unexamined relationship. Perhaps the poisons exposed by exchange are nothing more than the contents of our Maturation Todo List.

To avoid maturation is to seek the void of total imperviousness. There are many ways of being addicted to seeking the void, from materialistic to spiritual to emotional, and on. None of them are in themselves healthy, but the sickness they produce teaches us what health (wisdom, love) is. Sickness is kindling for soul growth.

Economics calls itself “the dismal science”. It studies exchange, which entails risk, which begets cost. Economics studies where the rubber meets the road. Life must be vulnerable to permit change. Without change there is nothingness, which is impossible. Economics embraces this ‘dismal’ truth. But it is only ‘dismal’ if the void of imperviousness is viable, or could have any value at all.

I have spent the last 15 years trying to understand a foundational assumption of economics – scarcity – as it pertains to the ‘problem’ of technological unemployment. The latter is, in my eyes, the progressive erosion of the economic value of human labour. What I am beginning to intuit is that economics has not dared deeply enough, that where it has dared to go it has travelled too cleanly, overly needy of the neatness it perceives in academic rigour. Has it wanted too much to stay true to certain unchanging fundamentals, not to be infected by nor to cross-infect with other aspects of exchange? I suspect so. Exchange, the process by which relationship happens, is a foundational feature of reality. Perhaps economics should concern itself more fluidly with this truth.

Does scarcity govern exchange? I argue for curiosity-driven expansion. I suspect technological unemployment is unearthing this poison, this ‘flaw’, this untested thing within economics, within modern thought.

We have a poor relationship with fear because it hurts; it costs us too much to tackle it. We have more profitable values to accumulate: measurable values that secure our position in a cruel and capricious world. This is our ‘dismal’ reality. 

We now confront the wasteland this perspective yields. The only way through is to reassess our understanding of exchange itself, which requires a reassessment of value – and thus cost – which will then lead to a reevaluation of everything else; what we value determines what we choose.

The prospect of this radical transformation terrifies us. But the alternative – an impervious void – is becoming more terrifying still.