Please Give Me Freedom From The Pursuit of Happiness

Politically speaking we might say that the goal we fight for is a world in which people are free to pursue their highest ambition. In practice this involves many difficult and complex debates concerning the freedoms of groups relative to the freedom of individuals as well as a host of practical limitations and cultural realities that make such a goal so elusive and difficult. However the type of freedom that I am interested in is not the freedom to pursue your highest ambition but rather the freedom from the pursuit of your highest ambition.

Something that I am exploring at the moment in my writing is the way that the pursuit of that thing which we believe will satisfy our soul is deeply destructive. It is a common belief that society will function best when its population is able to pursue what they desire. A pursuit that is constrained in only minimal ways (protecting others, making sure that contracts are honored etc.). The idea is that a happy society is one in which we have the ability, hypothetically at least, to gain the fame, money, relationship, creative venture, lover etc. that we seek. If these dreams are not even unlikely but practically impossible to achieve then, whether we realize it or not, we effectively live in a type of oppressive, totalitarian society that will lead to nothing but a discontented, depressed and angry population.

However the problem is that the drive to achieve what we believe will make us whole and complete is not, as most think, some self-interested, selfish act that can lead to happiness. If anything it manifests itself as a profoundly self-destructive, selfless venture not unlike the Zombie's pursuit of brains. Take the example of someone who is seeking fame and recognition above all else. The problem is that they allow everything else to suffer. One can see the negative effect of this drive in the broken relationships, the stress and the ill-health that results from the insatiable pursuit. If the person were to sit down and do a cost/benefit analysis of their drive in a dispassionate utilitarian manner they would likely see that their obsession is not enhancing their life but actually destroying it. Indeed often people who are driven to pursue something like wealth, money or fame are painfully aware of this reality. At certain points they will even, over a drink, confess that their desire is not liberating but rather oppressive and that they would like to be free of it so that they might be able to more fully enjoy the relationships, possessions and lifestyle they already have. Hence Freud's fascinating work on the Death Drive and the beyond of the Pleasure Principle (ideas that explain how we actually act in non-utilitarian ways, seeking something that is damaging to our self-interests – a subject I want to take up in future books).

What we see here is the way that the freedom to pursue our highest ambitions is not experienced as a freedom from some oppressive system but is itself often felt to be deeply oppressive. This is something that Mother Teresa noted when she visited the US. During her time she noted a poverty and oppression that hid in the material wealth and political freedom enjoyed here. For such political freedom often leads to a society with greater material wealth and better opportunities for the population. Things that are to be valued highly. However unless we also have the freedom from the pursuit of our highest ambition this political freedom, far from offering us an escape from oppression, can be experienced as one of the most psychologically powerful forms of oppression.

For the first type of oppression is one that is imposed upon us (the inability to pursue our happiness). It is then experienced as an external limit. This means that even if we cannot pursue what we desire we can maintain an inner protest, "I may not be allowed to get what I truly want but I don't accept it". This is somewhat similar to a child who is forced by their parents to go and visit a relative that they don't really like. The child is not given a choice, but is able to internally resist, maintaining a position in which they go to see the relative while imagining the freedom they might have if they were older and didn't have to.

However, in contrast to this, the type of oppression that comes from our ability to pursue what we want does not allow us to maintain this inner protest. For now there is no external constraint being impossed. The message one gets from society is, "there are no limits, go on, pursue whatever you like." The problem here is that we now have no-one to blame for our unhappiness. We cannot say to ourselves, "I would be happy if only this Government was overthrown." We are free to pursue what we want, indeed we are actively encouraged to do so everywhere we turn. Popular films, music and magazines all seem to be telling us the same thing, "Go for it." In this way we discover that the voice which tells us, "just do it," is actually more insidiously oppressive than the voice which says, "you can't do it." For one simple reason, the latter is an external constraint that allows us to maintain a small inner protest while the former gets under our skin. It is a voice that implicitly tells us that we can't blame anyone but ourselves for our enduring lack of fulfillment. It is this that Mother Teresa put her finger on when she saw all the depression and sadness of the developed world, something that she did not experience to the same degree in Calcutta at the time. For her it was more insidious because blatant poverty could be seen and addressed, but this psychological poverty was experienced from "within" the person as a demon dwelling beneath the surface of our skin. It was a poverty that had found a way to hide in the most unlikely of places: in wealth itself.

What if we had sites in our life where we could be free from the pursuit of our highest ambition? Places in our week were we can give up all the things we aim for and just embrace the friends we have, the beauty around us and the little moments of grace that we abide within? This is one of my visions for the reconfigured church – a community that is not a place where we go to pursue some highest pleasure (heaven, ecstatic experience, an escape from our everyday life) but rather the place where we lay all that down and learn how to smile deeply about the here and now.