Part Two: A Close Look At The Cage

There are many definitions of freedom, some relating to liberty, autonomy, and justice. I however believe that the best definition of freedom is choice without restriction. This is the definition that will be used in this essay. 

We have come to believe that the world we live in is a free one, and in many ways our world is close, but we are not quite there. Throughout this essay, I will do my best to illustrate to you what a free world could (should) look like.

Imagine a Free World… 

You wake up in a comfortable bed, but you know the feeling of sleeping on rocks outside too. You find yourself looking through the window at the beach, but you have experienced cities and mountains too. In front of you lies a full scheduled day, but you have had hundreds of empty ones too. You eat fruit for breakfast from trees that line the pathways, there is an abundance of plant food steadily available. You walk into a park and see lively communities having coffees and conversations, some individuals are painting or knitting silently. Another park has loud music for the folks that never slept. You meet your neighbors to work on the construction of a new house for a friend who just married, there is no pay involved, you are merely looking out for one another. You have no duty to your community, but you like each other, and feel the urge to do your part regardless. It doesn’t feel like work anyways, as you laugh and build with people whose company you enjoy. Music plays from a speaker in the corner. 

Some find deep purpose in contributing and constantly make additions to the world around them. Some spend their time making art and crafts and sharing ideas. Some are just around for the conversation. Some just for the books from the library. There are automatic buses and trains for anyone to travel from place to place. Custom clothing centers where the fashionably inclined take great pride in making outfits uniquely suited to your style. You can only pay them by making full use out of their creations. Tools are widely shared in a large library of their own, but of course if you don't want to make the trip to this library every time you need them, you may keep them for as long as you like. The tools will find their return to the library when you pass. 

Many people spend their lives on the road, sightseeing as much as possible in their time on Earth, contributing wherever they go - through stories, ideas, experiences. Some choose to stay put and comfortable in what they know. They build strong, meaningful relations with a handful of individuals in their community.

Everyone can learn as much or as little as they please, following their curiosities wherever they lead for as long as they'd like. The world is not perfect. People still argue and disagree about all manner of opinions frequently. People still don't understand the vast range of cultures around the world, but they can’t force others to change either. Sometimes this conflict is resolved through conversation, gently easing each side to recognize the other. Sometimes people are stubborn, and they choose to simply avoid the other. That’s okay too, it's a big world. 

Anyone may choose to love anyone else. Anyone may choose to do any activity they want. Anyone can create whatever they want, however they want. Resources are not bought and sold, collection of them is mostly automated, save for a few collected by the handful who take pride in their collection. When an individual finds a resource unavailable, they find a way to not only source it, but automate its collection so that abundance can be shared. Again, most people simply spend their time creating, making art, and sharing conversation with a community they care about. 

You wake up excited to choose what to spend your time doing or creating today, but there is no pressure to decide. You might get scared or overwhelmed by the possibilities, and friends are right there to offer advice and encouragement. You can be scared together. 

Freedom doesn't necessarily mean happiness, it just means possibility. Through choice, people can learn what makes them happy, and build their lives around it, unrestricted. The search for happiness and peace remains personal. It remains a lifelong challenge. A human challenge.

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Now that you have read one description of what a free world might look like, ask yourself, does this seem like utopia? Is it a perfect society, or are there hidden downsides perhaps left out? What issues do you think might stop such a world from existing? Is it the lack of a power structure? That maybe someone in each community is going to declare themselves leader and seek to organize the lives of the others? Maybe you think it's not possible to automate the collection and distribution of resources? Or maybe people simply won't want to help the communities around them, and all public goods/services will fall into disarray as people only focus on themselves and neglect public resources. Maybe the tragedy of the commons will strike, and even with an abundance - more than enough resources to go around, a handful of greedy individuals will take in extreme excess, limiting the freedom of the rest. 

These questions are natural responses from the perspective of the reality we live in. A world where we do have the freedom to choose, but only as long as that choice is money. A world where every action and inaction has a financial undercurrent to it. In order to do as you please - or simply survive - you must first meet the bare minimum requirement of a constant secondary goal, money. We have plenty of choices, but these choices are bound by capitalism, restricted by how much money we have acquired.

This article explores some of the differences between the free world outlined and the world in which we live. It starts by outlining how capitalism is run off of morally misaligned incentives, and goes on to discuss how we trade away our freedoms within capitalism. It looks at the frightening trends that arise due to these misaligned incentives and breaks down what the barriers to our freedoms are, both internal and external. Ending with a note on how we can fight for our freedoms.

Tragedy of the Commons and Climate Change 

One of the many problems within capitalism is how it deals with public goods. These are resources or services that are accessible to all members of society, yet no single individual is held directly accountable for their care or preservation. This leads to what is known as the Tragedy of the Commons: when a resource is freely available and responsibility to equitably share it lies among everyone, people tend to take more than what is fair, and the availability of the shared resource falls apart. For instance, consider a public park. Everyone enjoys them, but no single individual is obligated to clean or maintain them. Typically, we rely on governments to step in and maintain these resources (this is why taxes exist), precisely because individual action alone won’t reliably maintain them. On a global scale, the problem takes a step up. If every nation believes another country will take responsibility, then none may end up doing anything at all. 

This is why climate change is uniquely difficult to solve. Climate change is not only a global commons issue, it is also an intergenerational one. Its worst consequences lie primarily in the future, the brunt of its impact falling upon upcoming generations. With the effects more heavily weighing on future generations, each generation is tempted to defer action and push the responsibility forward indefinitely. It explains why, despite decades of clear warnings, humanity continues to overshoot its climate goals, steadily moving toward a future that might become completely unlivable in the future. 

Within capitalism the only way to solve the tragedy of the commons is to provide a monetary incentive towards the maintenance of the public resource. Since it is not possible to implement or enforce a global tax system, global commons problems will remain unsolved. The moral right course of action can be clear, but capitalism prioritizes monetary incentives over moral incentives. The right thing to do gets overruled, over and over again. 

Climate change is a problem that has the potential to lead to the extinction of the human race. We might be the only species to ever exist in this universe that had the capacity for intelligent or moral thought. How selfish would it be to allow ourselves to get run into the ground? Preventing a whole host of new life and millions of potential future generations from ever coming into being and having the chance of spreading life across this cold, dead, and distant cosmos. When all it might have taken would be a reorganisation of our actions and ideals. If we can't figure out how to work together as a species we might rob the whole universe from any good that could come from the only blink of time when morality was possible. That would be really sad.   

Capitalism vs. Freedom 

Maybe this is just my realization that the rose-colored glasses I looked at the world through when I was 5 years old have broken, but I am upset. I am angry that the system is messed up. I have some problems with the world, and the more I keep thinking about it, I can’t help but notice that most of them have to do with capitalism. There are two primary ways that capitalism restricts our freedoms. The first is that we trade our freedoms for money, and we use the striving for money as a form of self-policing to keep our freedoms restricted. The second is that we trade our freedom for distraction, giving up our attention to entertainment and comfort. Both enable society and the people in it to be controlled and manipulated. 

Trade #1: Freedom for Money & Self-policing 

One of the key ways that capitalism uniquely affects each individual's life is the extraordinary value that is placed on productivity and being a ‘useful’ cog in the machine. If you are not exhausted, you are lazy. You may create, but it must be of value so that you can make money off of it, and if you cannot sell your passion for a profit, then it must not be a worthy passion. Your hobbies feel like they should be side-hustles generating passive income. Your own enjoyment shifts from primary to secondary. In the strive for money, we willingly restrict our freedoms, we give up our time, our energy, and our happiness. We give up large swaths of control over our lives in the continual pursuit of money. Being busy keeps you away from silence - away from your thoughts - for the majority of your conscious existence. Not only do we give up our freedoms for money, we are proud to do it. We show off how hard we worked constantly, how little control we retained over our lives. The social norms of this acceptance have created millions of examples of those who willingly handed over the joys of their life to a system that does not care about how they feel. By the time they are finally old enough to escape the slog, most of them have begun to fall apart physically and mentally. If you are lucky, you have a small window of time to cross off that big bucket list of things you have been waiting your whole life to do before you become too old to do them anyway. Most 75 year-olds aren’t going skydiving for a reason.

''But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. We've been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don't have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.’’ - David Cain

Trade #2: Freedom for Distraction 

As every area of our lives becomes a chance to sell us some good or service, we ourselves are slowly trading our freedoms for an endless stream of distractions and comforts. By spending our attention, we allow corporations to collect data on us, which is used to further restrict our freedoms. 

The way we interact with both the online and physical world is tracked and used to make predictions. Whether through your clicks, locations, eye tracking, or cookies, your data is used to the end of getting you to buy more stuff you don't need with savings that ought to stay saved. Listen to this story, it's a common one. 

Your phone alarm goes off. The first thing you do is check your messages. You find yourself scrolling on Instagram. It's pretty entertaining content, but you're still half asleep. You like what you want to like and send your favorites to the friends who will appreciate them the most. Sometimes you scroll by an ad that feels a little eerie, like it knew exactly what you were thinking about, or what you were talking about yesterday. You come close to clicking on a few. You're thinking that maybe your phone has been listening to your conversations, but no, it's probably just that the algorithm knows you really well. It’s not so bad though, because it shows you really funny stuff. Then you check the time. Oh shit, it's been 45 minutes already and you're still in bed. So you get up and start getting dressed and brush your teeth. You’ve already forgotten the last reel that you liked. But Instagram hasn’t. Instagram has a whole profile on you. Usually, within the first 5 minutes of making an account. It knows your age, gender, where you go to school, what your hobbies are, what your mental state has been lately, what social circles you run in, and what type of conversations you typically have. It’s built this whole profile for the sole purpose of making money. A corporation perfectly in line with the incentives of the world. There is a long list of people counting on Instagram to make money so that they can make money. So that they can afford more comfort.

The way social media maximizes its chances of making money is two-fold. Firstly, it wants to show you ads that are most likely to convert to a purchase, because the corporation will take a cut. Secondly, it wants to keep you on the app as long as possible, so that it can show you the most ads. The best way to achieve both of those goals is for it to understand you as best as possible. It needs to not only understand what you like now, but also what you might like next. It needs to be able to predict you. And the best way to predict anything is to gain the most amount of context or data, so that it can recognize the most patterns, and use them to better sell you stuff. It can slowly nudge your interests for you, slowly taking you down content ‘pathways’ that cut through predictive interests that segue into each other with different content genres. Most of the time they know what your next interest will be before you do, because they have partial control. There's a lot of data to be collected on you, and you can be sure they get whatever they can use. In this way, social media is surveillance.

I don’t see anyone arguing that this data collection and psychological manipulation for monetary gain is in line with morality. It is okay only because the unwritten incentives of the capitalist system say it is.

Modern Trends Which Further Restrict Our Freedoms 

There are three concerning trends I am seeing in the world that relate to both capitalism and the media that it incentivizes. The first is what I call a pay-to-win existence, where the quality of your life and the value of your money diminish over time, as more and more experiences in the world become increasingly expensive. The second is that attention spans are getting shorter, and less critical thinking is being required of us, making it easier for us to be controlled. The third is that media fragmentation and disconnected social spheres are trending towards isolated societies, which also makes it easier for us to be controlled. 

A Pay-To-Win Existence 

We are seeing the world become a sort of pay-to-win theme park, except the rides are the simple pleasures of life. Anywhere you want to go, any activity you want to do, has a cost to it. The number of free experiences keeps decreasing too. There is a trend towards making everything a subscription rather than a one-time purchase. Take video games, for example. With a one-time purchase, you can play the game, get your enjoyment out of it when you're into it, and then come back to it when you feel like it. You can forget about it for months and re-experience the joy of the game when you remember it. A subscription to play the game doesn't yield this same satisfaction however, you feel guilty if you don’t continually play it. Subscriptions are based upon having a monthly income, and if trends continue, subscriptions and bills will take up all of your monthly income, leaving you with less ability to save, forcing you to keep working.

Profit-seeking incentives lead to manipulative pricing schemes. The same coffee at one location can cost half what it does at a more popular location. The uber ride when you need it the most will cost the most. Your plane ticket can be 200$ when you first look at it, then you spend 10 minutes deciding, reload the page, and now it costs 250$, because the algorithm knows that in that time you had committed. It used your data to make more money for the same product. Companies will continue to squeeze every penny they can out of you, until all product prices are no longer based on the cost of the goods or reasonable profit margins. The prices are purely based on what they can get away with. The consequences of morally misaligned incentives. 

Shorter Attention Spans And Less Critical Thought 

With people spending more and more time chronically online, we are finding that our attention itself is becoming valuable. All the various apps and creators are vying for it. They all want you to watch what they made. To read what they wrote. You want to engage with the best of it, too. Newsflash: it's literally impossible to keep up. It's so hopeless to even come close actually with thousands of hours of content released daily. The media platforms want to fill your time, and your attention is a rarified and finite resource. The war for attention is shortening your attention span. Content has shifted to smaller chunks, so you can consume content at any time, anywhere. Content becomes faster, brighter, and more emotionally surprising to keep your eyes glued to the screen. As your brain and body adapt to this, it becomes harder to go back to slow content. It becomes harder to stay focused on 2 hour movies, harder to read books, and harder even just to spend 15 minutes without pulling out your phone. 

Your phone is how you access the breadth of technological advancements. All the ways your life can be a little bit easier. From calculators to maps and ChatGPT, all the tools to run your life are right there. You are no longer required to do all of the hard work in organizing your agenda and thoughts. You can offload as much of the problem-solving in your day as you choose. Just like with attention, a downside of offloading your critical thinking is that once you get used to it, it becomes harder to then bring back those skills. 

As we exercise our freedom to trade our longer attention spans and well-rounded problem-solving skills for distraction and ease, we are restricting our long-run freedom to use those abilities later. It becomes harder to recognize manipulative media. It becomes harder to see bias in the technology we use. Most importantly, though, it becomes harder to formulate our own opinions on the world, as opposed to internalizing opinions from media or tech, because doing so requires sitting with your ideas and sifting through your experience. Free thought requires both your attention and your critical self-reflection. 

Media Fragmentation And Isolationism 

A side-effect of having algorithms in control of what we see with the goal of holding our attention for as long as possible is that all our content becomes custom-made. We see personalized feeds; different creators, genres and trends particular to our lives. This creates media bubbles, where millions using the same platforms are seeing the world through different lenses, isolated from one another. 

This fractures our shared reality, while simultaneously, we spend significantly less time interacting with real people. It becomes harder to agree on basic facts, and it becomes harder to trust a stranger. The world you experience is not the same as that of your next door neighbor, because half of your experiences are now online, where the experiences diverge. Even though you shop at the same stores and live on the same streets, you’ve lost many of the similarities you once had, and more effort is required to build connections. The web of society's connections turns into groupings, and those turn to isolated points. 

This scares me because an isolated population is easier to control. When we have less community, we have less cross-communication about the changes that are being made in the world. When we are not aware of the means by which we gather the majority of the information to live our lives, that information can be manipulated. We can be manipulated. It was already hard to tell real from fake before, but with the advent of AI, a bad actor behind the algorithms can now sway the opinions of a nation easily. Our freedom - choice without restriction - is impeded because we are no longer given choice over the content we view. The choice has been made for us.

I want to share a description of another world, one much like our present, if the trends above continued into the future. I hope this can provide some further motivation to fight against these trends to reverse their direction. 

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You wake up. The alarm is going off, this blaring, static, squelching that must be the most irritating sound in existence, but you didn't save enough money to be able to change it to something more pleasant. You swing your legs around the bed and get dressed as you see ads for various energy drink products displayed in your heads-up display that rests just over your eyes, partially see-through, like a permanent contact lens. As you leave your small apartment - which consists merely of a bed, chair, kitchenette, and bathroom - you grab your VR gloves and head out to go to work. To get there, you walk to a subway station a block away. The winds blow scorching heat at you, and you put on goggles to protect from the dust that comes along with it, but it doesn't protect your nostrils from flaring as they stay dry to the point of pain. The world has been ravaged in many ways, and travel has been limited to only the most important citizens who are able to afford it, so you remain stuck in the city. 

You get to the subway station and hop on, putting on your VR gloves. Once you do your eye and ear gear immerse you into a lovely world separate from the grimy subway car and the other people. Everyone else on the train immediately does the same. We live our lives in the sim, it feels only natural, because why would we bother with the real world, it sucks. This is where we do our shopping and where we connect with our friends and the AI bots, not that we can tell the difference between them anymore. They encourage us to buy the latest games and movies and worlds and adventures within the sim, but mostly we just spend our time consuming interactive content storylines. Some short silly videos, filled with advanced level memes you have to know to find funny. But outside of work and sleep this is where our time is spent. It’s part of the reason the outside world is so fucked, no one bothers fixing it because it has stopped being our problem, we don’t live there anymore, just our bodies do. 

We work at jobs to pay for the experiences we have in the sim, and we sell our data to get access to the sim every day, otherwise it would cost more than our net worth to log in. I know what they use it for, I haven't had a savings account for years now. In the real world I eat nothing but cheap chemicals masquerading as meals, I spend too much money in the sim to afford the nice food. I'm out of shape and overweight, but I believe that it's my own fault. Not the advanced advertising techniques that use the tech in my head in combination with my psychology to make it virtually impossible to say no. My labor's worth is measured in virtual coins and experiences, and I'm definitely kept too busy and addicted to the sim to consider changing the world, or even think about who it is behind the sim, the ads, dust storms, and algorithms. I wouldn’t want to bother anyway. It's hard enough getting out of bed on its own, any extra thinking feels impossible. I wouldn’t dream of not logging into the sim tomorrow, I stay alive in the real world for it.

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Obstacles To True Change 

We have seen what a world of freedom may look like. We have discussed the flaws of capitalism and the concerning trends it has led to in the age of modern technology. Now we have seen what a world may look like should these trends continue. Next, we will look into the nature of the difficulties that arise when attempting to create the systemic change necessary to reverse these trends. 

Psychological Obstacles 

Much of the friction that occurs when trying to change the world comes from within. From our psychology. These are obstacles that we largely cannot get rid of, but we can mitigate their risk by being aware of them. The three largest psychological obstacles are the way power affects us, the way we identify within the system, and the various prices we are willing to pay for comfort and distraction. 

Power Is Gravity, Freedom Is Chaos. 

Power is the force of control. We are drawn to it, it is hard to pull away. Everyone wants some of it, those who have some always want more. Power means control. It means certainty and security. The constant battle for power and position creates a constant tension when trying to change anything in the world, big or small. Someone is benefiting from the status quo, and you can be assured the only way they will accept change or fight for it themselves is if they see an opportunity to benefit further from the change. Power is the direct opposing force to freedom. We can’t get rid of power dynamics within the world, but we can be aware of them and educate ourselves on the ways they work, and how we fit into this pre-established system. We can question people's motives if something feels too good to be true. We can build systems that don’t allow for power to be accumulated easily, with flexibility and constant evolution built in. 

A world without hierarchy may be the closest thing to a world of absolute freedom, but it would also mean absolute chaos. I don’t believe absolute chaos is the best move for humanity, and even if it were to occur, I believe power would quickly accumulate anyway. Just as in the aftermath of the French and Russian revolutions. Chaos is scary, and people will be drawn to a leader that can give them security in exchange for a portion of their absolute freedom - the social contract.

A balance has to be found between the amount of organization we want, how we maintain its resilience to the accumulation of power. What are the best ways to govern with checks and balances that cannot be eroded or corrupted over time? What are the best ways to prevent authorities from acting purely out of self-interests? How can we account for human greed? How can we improve education systems to better teach the importance of maintaining our freedoms, without each generation being forced to experience unfreedom in order to understand what they are missing? 

Identity Entwined With The System

Another major player in the debate of why systemic change is difficult is that our identity becomes entwined with the system we are a part of. Just like Stockholm syndrome, people are naturally attached to the world they live in, even if they are prisoners to it. People who have been working a 9-5 job for decades are going to feel attacked at the notion that the world didn’t have to be that way. The last decades have come with pain and stress that they felt was unavoidable. If they could have avoided that, then they would have. 

“We live in the cage,

We decorate the cage,

We defend the cage,

We love the cage

 - But it’s still a cage’’ 

It makes sense why the conversation of systemic change is hard to have, but it doesn’t make it any less important. People have already accepted the world order and the part they're going to play in it. That acceptance took a lot of work and internal turmoil. It is a belief rooted deep in how they live their life. It is a core belief, which means it has a lot of inertia and will be really hard to move. Fredric Jameson said that ‘’it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’’ The whole world, and your existence in it, is built on the foundation of capitalism. The question of ‘Is a different system possible?’ is incredibly difficult to answer. Understand the resistance you’re dealing with when you try to have this conversation. But continue to try to overcome your own resistance. Imagine what different systems could look like, good or bad, and share those ideas, get comfortable with the fact that our world is one of trillions of possibilities, some better, some worse. It’s worth fighting for one of the better worlds. 

Comfort & Distraction 

The last point I want to mention in regards to the internal barriers for systemic change is the pull of comfort and distraction. As discussed earlier, distraction and comfort can be powerful chains to restrict your freedom and put bounds on your choices. So it is important to keep in mind the question of what your freedom is worth to you. Is it worth it to be unfree with minimal autonomy if it means you get all the comforts to keep you satiated? How much freedom are you willing to trade in order to make your life easier? Keep this question in the back of your head. Look critically at new technologies as they come out, look for the hidden costs. Question how much your privacy is worth to you? Your peace, time, and attention? They're all finite, and they're all important. If everyone believes that their comfort and distraction are more important than their freedoms, then humanity will most assuredly walk in a straight line into a technology based form of authoritarianism. 

Physical Obstacles (mediums of control) 

We have discussed the internal barriers towards change happening in the modern world, but unfortunately, we cannot eliminate these barriers, as they are rooted largely in evolution and human nature, so we have to be aware of them and do our best to work around them. There are however, significant physical barriers towards gaining our freedoms too. While still rooted deeply in the world, these exist externally, and our relationship with them can change, humanity can distance ourselves from them to hold onto more of our freedoms in the long term. 

Social Media & Surveillance Capitalism 

We have already discussed some of the effects social media has had and will have on humanity. Decreasing our attention spans by providing the most accessible distraction ever created, while providing an avenue for corporations to track us and manipulate us has normalized the belief that we need to buy or subscribe to things to be happy. Social media has expedited the push of unrealistic body standards and living standards, ensuring individuals are never satisfied. 

These trends will only continue if unchecked, but they are hard to fight. Even if individuals are acutely aware of the impact these platforms are having on our collective mental health and our abilities to build and maintain communities, it is hard to pull away from them. The more subtle ways that these platforms surveil you and use your data to control you is slowly shaping our interests and beliefs to the point that they often know us better than we know ourselves. The only way to gain back our freedoms is by pulling away from the platforms. Build your identity in the real world, develop your interests through your hobbies, through books instead of hours spent doomscrolling daily. It is made to keep you addicted. The more attention you give to them, the more control over the space between your ears you give up as well. 

Algorithmic Control and AI 

“People who can get you to believe absurdities, can get you to commit atrocities” - Voltaire

Algorithms, often powered by artificial intelligence, curate your online landscape. They determine what news, entertainment, and opinions you see online. They keep the content you view in echo chambers, and don’t show you diverse sets of opinions online. They do this to keep your perspective narrow, and to box you in. These algorithms, along with consistent use of AI tools like ChatGPT, slowly diminish your ability to evaluate the information you come across, forcing you to rely more and more on the tools as you outsource your critical thinking to them.

This technology is not going away. I am a firm believer that these tools are only going to get better and more capable as time goes on. We are going to see more and more misinformation and disinformation made with AI that is going to be impossible to discern from reality. So it is up to us to decide how much we want to rely on AI. Holding onto our freedom means holding onto our critical thinking skills too. Fact-check the information you see on social media, because it rarely comes with credible sources. If you see something that looks too good to be true, it is. Use the tools available, but only when you can understand what and why you are using them. Maintain your ability to run your life without AI as much as you can. Recognize when you are witnessing modern day propaganda being spread. It usually doesn’t come from political posters and slogans anymore, it is content that evokes emotions of fear and anger, oversimplifies good-vs-evil beliefs, and pushes you into taking one standpoint. You can recognize it by looking for patterns, thinking about who benefits from you thinking this way, and making your own informed opinions with sourced information. By no means are these easy to do, but they are important.

Static Educational Systems 

The last physical barrier to our freedoms is our educational systems. Education is the foundation by which we can maintain our freedoms. As my grandfather used to say “Get as much education as you can, it is the one thing no one can ever take away from you” - Lynn Schwartz. Education systems have remained largely static over the last century. They still prioritize conformity and standardization of learning over creativity, curiosity and independent thought. They do not prepare you to challenge unjust systems, and would rather instill passive acceptance of authority. ‘You will be happier to do the task at hand, rather than to question the task’. They don’t want to create free thinkers, they want to create good thinkers, which to them means those able to get jobs that fit into capitalism the best. 

While changing these educational systems is hard to do, with the levels of bureaucracy, politics, and widespread resistance to change standing in our way, we have an advantage. We are in the best position in history to learn and create on our own without a system to guide us. We can(and should) learn everyday, following our passions and curiosities, becoming who we want to become by shaping our identities with conscious attention to the information we consume. We can fight for our freedoms through the ways in which we educate ourselves. Whether you are in school or not, educating yourself by learning about psychology, technology, history, politics, philosophy, and science (and anything else) is the strongest way you can stand out as a free-thinker in a subtly controlled world.

Moving Forward (how to fight for your freedoms) 

“The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements can be true at the same time” - Max Roser

Understanding our world is the first step to improving it. Hold in your head what a world with more freedom could look like and use it as a guide to avoid a world where current trends continue to dystopia. If there is one thing to be taken away from this article, I hope it is the message that your freedom is worth fighting for, precisely when it is hard to recognize the ways it is being taken from you. I want to leave with some practical ways to fight for your freedoms. 

Protect Thought 

The first step to recognizing and avoiding our freedoms being taken from us is protecting our  ability to think. We need to be able to read and collect information in a slow and rational manner, so that we can avoid misinformation and disinformation clearly. We need to continually challenge our mental capacities, practicing them, because if we don't, just like muscles, the skills of critical thinking will atrophy. We need to learn about the world, formulate our own opinions on how things are, and how they could be. It starts with education, and ends with our attention. Don't let the media control the space between your ears. Think about utilizing digital detoxes to reset your relationship with the online world occasionally. 

The second step is to look at the big picture. To question the world in front of you and fight against injustice you see. Journaling is a good habit to practice. Be cognizant of places you see power accumulate, and the methods that power will be used to further restrict the freedoms we have. We must actively stay aware of both our freedoms and unfreedoms and keep the front line of the war for freedom visible and moving in the right direction. Most don't even see the battle, even fewer are fighting in it. Don’t let the system tire you into acceptance. Keep believing and reaching for dreams of a better world, whatever that world may be to you. 

Community 

One of the key ways big problems remain unsolved is through keeping people separated. Collective action is the most effective way large-scale change can occur, and it will never happen if people are too isolated to join together and discuss the issues they have with the world. So keep your relationships strong. Build communities with friends and family, places you can speak freely about patterns you notice in the world and what you want to do about them. Talk about the ideas that interest you. The patterns you are noticing in the world. Be the spark that turns the community around you alive with fire. 

The conversation of freedom may be hard to have, but it is certainly not impossible, you just need to overcome the mental inertia and the psychological friction. Friends and family are your strongest resistance to isolation, and conversation with them is how we can reject disinformation being spread online. Find people who are willing to talk about more than people and events, but those willing to talk about ideas and action. Banding together makes everyone stronger, and makes each individual safer from the dangers of insipid propaganda as it seeks to manipulate you.

Create 

The third way to protect your freedom is to engage with yourself creatively. Make art. Dance. Draw. Paint. Rap. Code apps. Invent board games. Melt crayons into houses. Write poetry. Doodle on your walls. Play with sounds until you like it. 3D print random knickknacks. Write short stories and articles. Create videos. Photograph the world. Make silly maps. Film your friends doing dumb shit. Make sandcastles. CREATE ANYTHING. It doesn’t matter if no other soul ever sees it. Write a story on a piece of paper and burn it after. Art is the medium of freedom. Art has no restriction, it is whatever you want it to be. Art isn't work, distraction, or comfort. Creating improves your ability to focus for long periods of time, and fosters individual expression to resist external control. It is unique. If you want to practice being a free spirit, art is a damn good start. 

Final notes 

Be wary of where you spend your resources. Try to use social media less. Consume information in a way that's purposeful. Create freely. You don’t want to become a mindless content zombie, so fight to retain your thinking skills. Act in accordance with what you think is right, even when it might not be what is profitable. Don’t give up your morals, even though the system doesn’t prioritize them. Most importantly though, don’t give up who you are. Do what makes you happy, follow your heart. The world may not be perfect but that does not mean you should stop seeking the joys of life. Keep your head up, keep your friends close, and your mind closer.