In my last post, What do we mean by ‘Morality’, I tried to argue for defining morality as those things which make all people happier. Thus ‘moral values’ are those values that make anyone who holds them happier. I obviously don’t know what all such values are, but there are a few that I’m fairly sure about. Things such as truth, love, beauty, and freedom seem to me like they probably qualify. I doubt many people would argue that it would actually make you happier to decrease the amount of love or beauty in your life, so I won’t have to make as much of a case for those. But people seem to be more conflicted about freedom, and it is one of the goals of this site to get rid of that conflict.
Why We Don’t Want to be Free
On the one side, people everywhere want freedom, or at least claim to. But I, and I think most people are also afraid of it, because of the responsibility it entails. By freedom I mean “the ability to make your own decisions, and to have those decisions affect your life.” With this ability comes responsibility for both the good and bad that comes into our lives. With freedom comes the possibility that we will royally screw things up. Fear of this possibility can paralyze us. We desperately want to be free, and so we fight to keep what we have, but we are often too afraid of our own potential to work to increase it.
Don’t Give In
I urge you to fight this fear, it does you no good to keep yourself chained to invisible masters. This may be difficult to do if you’ve been enslaving yourself for too long, but try to imagine for a moment that five years from now you will be absolutely and totally free, that you can make any decision about your life and have it materialize immediately, that every obligation you have is one you want to have, that you feel no guilt for breaking unfounded ‘rules’ that make no sense. Can you imagine it? Even a little bit of it? Can you honestly picture such a thing and say you would wish it away? Of course it’s ‘risky,’ but isn’t it better than the alternative? Isn’t it better than showing up day after day at a job or in a classrom that you don’t enjoy? Isn’t it better than always wondering whether other people approve of what you are doing? It scares me too, but I’m just going to have to push through the fear, because five year from now, I want to be closer to that picture, I want to be free.
Freedom and Depression
In his excellent book Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman discusses the many psychological studies he has done showing that pessimism leads to depression. I find his definition of pessimism interesting; basically, he says that pessimism means you believe you have no control over whether good or bad things happen to you. He calls it ‘learned helplessness,’ and shows that the more strongly you display these habits, the less happy you are. Well, obviously helplessness is the opposite of freedom, so you would expect this. It seems clear that we need to at least believe we are free in order to be happy.
Seligman advocates trying to replace those limiting beliefs to more useful optimistic ones, even to the point of being dishonest about your actual amount of control in the opposite direction. While I agree that excessive optimism is better than pessimism, in the long term I’d prefer the following approach; Instead of lying to yourself about your actual level of freedom, wouldn’t it be better to be honest about where you are on the helplessness/freedom scale, then dedicate yourself to improving that position? In the long run you will surpass even the overly optimistic person’s beliefs about how free you are. But not only will you believe you are freer than them, you actually will be. This way you get to be honest with yourself, and not be pessimistic at the same time.
Since the entire theme of this site is freedom, I won’t be writing about how to become more free in this article. I expect that I’ll be writing many more on that very topic before too long.
As always, if you see any errors in my reasoning, my writing, or my raggedy clothes, please let me know. And thanks for reading!