Freedom

by Sebastian Junger

the inside joke about freedom—he would have found out soon enough—is that you’re always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another. Whatever the man was fleeing, it couldn’t have been more onerous than living outside in the middle of winter, but he clearly didn’t care. The tasks we gave each other were minor—collect firewood, scrub the cookpots—but they were crucial to our existence and utterly nonnegotiable. Doing them meant you were one of us. Not doing them meant you were on your own. The choice was yours.

!!!!!

The freedom that comes from being feared is tempting for people who have suffered that fear themselves, as many one-percenters probably have. For people raised in safety, freedom can seem like a luxury, like money or good health, but first and foremost, it’s the absence of threat. A person who can be killed without any consequences for the killers is not free in the most important sense of the word, and imagining otherwise probably means that the systems that keep you safe in your life—the armies, the police officers, the laws—are so unobtrusive, you’ve simply stopped noticing them.

But one can also imagine—easily imagine—hunters and shepherds watching men plow fields in the hot sun and thinking that such a life was a kind of servitude, and that it was better to risk starving in the mountains than to eat well on the plains. “Nomadic movement of all types… is apparently not seen as a burdensome necessity but positively as something healthy and desirable in itself,” writes anthropologist James Woodburn of hunter-gatherers. “Most important… is the way that such arrangements are subversive for the development of authority. Individuals are not bound to fixed areas… They are able to move away without difficulty and at a moment’s notice. Adults of either sex can readily, if they choose, obtain enough food to feed themselves and are potentially autonomous.”

I wonder what the modern equivalent is? Surveillance in exchange for the benefits of automation vs those who insist on privacy?

Mass societies have come to dominate the world by virtually every measure, but they require such high levels of obedience that sometimes even their own citizens balk. Once you have spent years digging irrigation ditches or picking stones out of a wheat field—or working at a law firm—you have almost no leverage with which to insist on your autonomy, or anyone else’s. The choice is to either rise up or submit, and many hardworking people understandably choose to submit.

The challenge of submission and obedience in modern life

For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for, if not died for, and that raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all—rationing water during a drought, for example—are forms of government tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing. To be fair, it’s hard to feel loyalty to a society that is so huge it hardly even knows we’re here and yet makes sure we are completely dependent on it. That’s not a strong bargaining position for the individual to be in. Wealth is supposed to liberate us from the dangers of dependency but quickly becomes a dependency in its own right.

So much wisdom