I don’t watch reality TV to be entertained or aroused, I watch to see the opposition to Maslow’s actualisation. These people have become culture, and willingly, they run towards it arms wide open, they are utterly unfree as far as I am concerned because they wish to be adored, admired, and inspirational for no other reason than their own validity, which is gained by being relevant to other people who are equally as imprisoned by culture. To win a prize for being the very most enculturated person of a group of people who all wish to be that. This is not to know the self and its inner desires, this is to become the expected self, as Freud described it, the garrison under siege is the self, the troops besieging it is culture. These folks are a capitulating garrison that has forgotten its cause and gladly opened the gates.

What is freedom? It is to be unaffected by the pressures that try to tell you who you are? Freud described this as ego, Baudrillard described it as a hyper-reality, Plato tries to explain it in the cave, Locke talked of perceptual reality, Aristotle eluded to it with his banner “know thyself”, Marcuse describes the One-Dimensional human that needs what they are told to want, Guy Debord wrote of a society that is won over by spectacle, Renton’s “Choose Life” speech from Trainspotting is a direct attack on societal hegemony though it offers little alternative, Marx described the person lost in believing that they are their role, Confucius encouraged people to be excellent drones, many spiritual disciplines try to capture the sentiment in their ideas on contemplation and introspection. Whatever way we describe it it turns out to be the same thing, people wish to be free, but freedom as a real thing is not easy to define. Sure Donald Trump will sell you the idea of a government that makes you free, many of his predecessors sold the idea of their actions preserving your freedom, but what is it, and what are you free to do or free from?

I might give you my take on what it is not….

You are not free if you are expressing your individuality by picking a look, selecting a musical genre to confirm to, or getting on the property ladder as soon as possible. You are not free if what is popular to most people is popular to you if you feel compelled to it because it is popular. Equally you are not free if you oppose popularity and join a movement against what is popular, you are not even free if you try to find a way to live that nobody has lived before. You are not free if you wear fashionable clothes, but you are also not free if you join a nudist colony to be occasionally rid of clothes. You are only free if you happen to wear clothes, but don’t care what clothes they are or what they say about you. The freedom is to not care, the freedom is in the NOT. Free from constraint though, if granted by governance, is a dangerous sort of freedom because it enables nothing. If objects in the world are owned then being free from is of no use unless those objects are also free from ownership.

Sue Pollard is not free or unique, she may think she is being an individual, but she is wearing uniform of her own making so as to open a door to the notoriety and popularity she wishes to achieve, it looks like individuality but it is cultural because it is an effort to be accepted as a poke in the eye, just like shaving your head or dying your eyebrows green is. Expressing individuality is not found in the art form that is our look, being free is becoming free of the burden of doing that and other things. Being free is to not be what you are paid to do, just happening to do it whether you are free or not to. We express our freedom through what we choose when that choice has no burden or influence put upon it. This makes it very difficult to be free in a consumer society that expends a dreadful amount of resources just to convince the susceptible psyche what freedom they enable by their toothpaste, clothing, and vehicle choices. To be driven to a task, pass time, or endeavour because you are so impressed by someone who does that, is to be baited or manipulated into wanting to participate as if that participation would then allow you to be accepted by those people to do that thing, so that is not freedom either really.

To be free you’d have to be free in your mind first, free enough in thought to be able to see the falseness in cultural things and needs. Culture being that which we build and nurture mainly as a product. One might argue that the pioneers of art forms are free because they are the first to do what they do. You are not free if you are influenced, but equally unfree if you consciously resist influence. Maybe it is impossible to be free, yet attainable to achieve freedom enough in some small aspects. I recently commented to a friend that people who choose not to think are no better than ants, but I may have been wrong. Maybe these non-thinkers are free in that they do not know what constrains or drives them, like when stupid people do not realise that they do not know things so assume the little they do know is all that can be known? Is to be free just to feel free? I suppose it’s possible that being free of worry is the closest thing to being free in reality.

Paul S Wilson