Part one: Unfreedoms

Imagine you are living in an authoritarian, dystopian society. You are watched around the clock. Any information you have access to has been carefully curated and cataloged. You live in dreary, run-down places, and are accustomed to the feeling of hunger in your stomach. You work hard and keep your head down, living the same monotonous day over and over and over again. To you, it has always been this way. You have no memories of a time where conditions were any different. You see no people from another, outside place. The people you do see live similar lives, isolated from your own, hardly exchanging even a sideways glance at one another. You are fearful of doing anything unusual, anything that would break the pattern, because you know it would only lead to bad if you did. You are contained, a shell of a person, existing but not quite alive. The only evidence you have that this is not the way things ought to be is this gut feeling, subdued and numbed deep within you, calling out. So weakened that you can’t even piece together its message, all you can decipher from it is that maybe this life you are living is ‘off’. 

It’s impossible for you to dream clearly of a better existence, with no comparison to hold your own life against. You might hate your job or the smell of your home, or the way your bones ache, but you can’t picture anything different. The question of ‘what if things were different?’ is too cloudy to bring any meaningful hope of change. 

This is what harsh unfreedom may look like. No autonomy over your life. No ability to change your position, or gather information. If you are not even aware of the concepts of freedom, liberty, autonomy, or choice, is it even possible to recognize your own unfreedoms? If you can’t put that uneasy feeling into words, how can you recognize what's causing it?

This article is about freedom, the vague concept that plays a role in our lives and hopes and dreams, and the ways it can be taken away from us. The ways it can be distorted and altered so that we can be controlled, and someone else can keep hold of their power. 

There are many ways to control a society. Most examples from history use fear and violence as a method for control, but there are other aspects that must be considered as well. 

One aspect is information. Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 sought to destroy all information, which has the effect of limiting the thought of the society and removing any external comparisons which allows for any state of the world to be perpetually perceived as normal. In Orwell’s 1984, the ministry of truth controlled all media and information such that the truth was impossible to discover, and any evidence of it non-existent. With no ground truth, both the past and present become a mystery, and even the most obvious statements become impossible to prove.

Another aspect of control lies in the norms and ideology that surround a society. The often unspoken rules about what you’re supposed to believe and how you’re supposed to act. The Catholic church is a great example to investigate. It held power and controlled a population with religious doctrine and ideology for millenia. Using the threats of eternal damnation and social ostracization, it controlled people's behaviour, and encouraged self-policing of ‘sins’ to further keep people in line. In Europe, it was heavily intertwined with the monarchical power structure as well, with leaders being given their title ‘from God’ with the church acting as the only authoritative intermediary between God and the people. No king could be anointed without the Pope’s approval in Rome. If leaders acted differently to how the church willed, it could wield the threat of excommunication and remove their ‘God given legitimacy’ in the eyes of the church, where public opinion would quickly follow. Using the stick of hell and carrot of heaven, they ensured behavior remained Orthodox - a non-threat to the Clergy power structure. 

Its ideology was ingrained in every stage of life from baptism to marriage to burial. The calendar was filled with religious days and festivals and time-keeping marked by church bells. Knowledge and teaching always centered around lessons approved by the Clergy, and literacy was only common within the church to prevent any spread of heretic ideas.

 There are many contributing factors to explain their eventual fall from total control, but one of the three primary ones was the Black Death, a plague which shook the papacy just as much as the rest of the populous, leading to skepticism over its legitimacy. The invention of the printing press (the second primary factor) allowed for the first alternative religious texts to be distributed by figures such as Martin Luther, which split the papacy’s total control. Lastly there was the rise of empiricism and science during the Enlightenment periods and the French revolution, which allowed people to learn and think for themselves. This was the last piece to breaking down the dogmatic behavior by which people led their lives.

I think the important ways that ideology maintains the order of power and restricts individuals autonomy over their lives are through the spread of the definitions of normalcy and orthodoxy. Creating standards that dictate what is and isn't socially acceptable behavior and speech, with a constant threat of ostracization. Another way is by preventing individuals or groups from having real, deep, and meaningful conversation with one another; whether by limiting their intelligence (as the church did to a large degree), or by having social norms prevent any conversation deeper than surface level (as in the Huxleys’ Brave New World), or by keeping individuals isolated, unable to form and maintain any bonds with others (as in Orwells’ 1984). All of these methods seek to ensure you don't question the system you are in. They aid in maintaining their ideological authority and preventing the dissemination of alternative perspectives and ideas. You should do and think as expected, but never question those expectations. Certainly not out loud. 

Over long time spans, leaders can also use language itself to maintain their power, subtly changing the context of words and ideas, to make heretical ideas more difficult to spread.  Provided the relationships to spread them can be created in the first place. (1984’s Newspeak is a wonderful example of this). Fear and violence typically go hand in hand with all of the aspects mentioned above, but a truly controlled society will feel influence from all domains. 

Fear and violence are effective methods for control on their own, but they lack subtlety. The prisoner or member of this society will be quite aware of the control they are under. A more effective method for long term dominion over a people may be one that goes unnamed. For once named it becomes much easier to recognize the unfreedoms from within, and begin a search for change. Once we can see and label our experience as unfreedom, its antonym sits ready to be recognized, and ready to be fought for. 

The best prisoner is one who polices themself. 

An even better prisoner does not even see the cage.

Are we prisoners in a cage we cannot see? 

Sometimes I feel my own sense of unease when I consider our modern way of life. I think that maybe something is indeed ‘off’, and I don’t think I am alone in that feeling. 

I feel as if maybe we weren't meant to spend half of our waking hours doing tasks just to survive. That maybe we weren't meant to have an online world so full of information and content perfectly predictive of our psychology that it will show us exactly what will hold our attention the best. I feel as if we weren’t meant to have ads pop up in every single aspect of our lives, forcing us to put up defenses and stop ourselves from buying any assortment of goods or services. Especially when our lives would have been perfectly fine had we never known of their existence. I feel as if we’re being controlled in subtle ways that most won’t ever recognize.

I think there are many wonderful things about the world we live in, but that doesn’t necessitate that the message of the freedom we have been told we have was fully truthful. I find it interesting that everyone is quite aware of the inequalities in this world and is perfectly happy to talk shit about it, but has little to no power to create change in it. I think social norms make having real conversations harder, and make accepting our powerlessness in the world easier. It is expected that while we might all agree the system is broken, you should be participating in it. Once you do, your time and energy will be sapped, bringing the already remote possibility of escaping the system, changing the system, or fighting against your unspoken unfreedoms; next to zero. 

With an educational system virtually unchanged for decades, the norms of doing the task in front of you without questioning the task itself are still instilled. In the same way we accept the world we were born into, and are expected not to question why it is built the way that it is. 

I think the norms of politeness and small talk can be dangerous. They keep relationships surface level. They allow conversation to avoid difficult truths, and for individuals to avoid self-reflection and critical analysis of the world they see evolving around them. They play into the never satisfied desires for comfort in all aspects of life, even when detrimental to our growth.

 When we share difficult conversations and reflect critically about our roles in the world we live in and the landscape of it, we grow. Acutely naming the problems in the world has to come before solving them. 

Where is the cage? 

We think we are free. We are told we are free. We can vote, we can say what we please, we can move from place to place. But we have no autonomy over the system itself. We have the freedom to earn money as we like and spend it where we choose. But we have no choice whether we participate in the game. If we want to keep breathing and eating and socializing we are forced to play the game. While the game board remains fixed. We can talk all we want about the billionaires of the world and the handful of the powerful, we can even mock them - but it's just talk. 

“We are all free, but those with lots of money are more free.”  

Sound familiar? Here's a quote from another of Orwell's books Animal farm: 

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”

The cycles of power are predictable. Everyone always wants more of it, even those who have lots. Of course we all want the comfort and ‘extra’ freedom that comes with having lots of money, so we play the game trying to get it. Even though 99% of us will never be in that 1%. 

Instead of the usual authoritarian restriction of freedom by confining available information to what is acceptable, we are overwhelmed with information to the point that agreeing on even the simplest of shared truths becomes difficult. Social media bubbles create different sides of the internet, we each see different creators, genres, topics, cultures, movies, tv shows, and news. 

Before I was born, most people engaged with similar content, and watched the same news. Nowadays it is almost impossible to keep up with the news, and if we try, the headlines change so rapidly you quickly forget the important information. We're so busy running around like headless chickens at the blur of the news headlines that we can never remember where the real problems lie.

Our attention and critical thinking are also getting eroded as technology evolves. The world's gears are able to keep turning with less and less human involvement necessary as time goes on. If we don’t have to use our attention spans and critical thinking, the comfort seeking norms make it okay to hand off more and more of our tasks to AI, and our time to short-form content. It becomes harder and harder to have real deep and meaningful conversations, and it gets harder to have conversations about humanity's situation. The game everyone is forced to play keeps us so busy and tired that it seems inevitable that we will sink into the game, and accept our fate to play it until we die. 

We are told that our global capitalist system is a meritocracy. That if we simply work hard enough for long enough, then we too can become winners of the game. The few who do become winners usually did indeed work very hard for very long, but it leads to the false conclusion that anyone who works very hard for very long will win. This is not the case. Disproportionate odds are placed simply on where you were born and to whom. The starting points in this game are incredibly widely spread. 

The difference between our world and a classical dystopia or authoritarian regime is that this world relies on passive control and comfort more than direct force and violence. There is no clear dictator causing poverty and inequality in the world. There is no single face who can give us our freedoms back. Removing any one human, or even a select handful of them, would not change the game.

We must prioritize our freedom. We must fight tooth and nail for it when we have to. We must not allow ourselves to get comfortable doom scrolling our lives away - because that means we are distracted from changing the system. We must not allow ourselves to get comfortable allowing technology to stop us from learning and reflecting - because that makes us easier to control. We must name our unfreedoms and understand their sources as best we can. Only then can we find the target we must aim at to create change. Only then can we solve the puzzle of how we can get our freedoms. 

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." - Albert Camus 

This is part one of a two part exploration. The next article will dive deeper into the concept of freedom, modern sources of our unfreedoms and the nature of power.

 Stay tuned, and keep journeying.