A mindset which has increased significantly in current years is the idea that everyone has the right to do what they want. Critics are simply haterz.
“Haterz gonna hate”.
“Haterz” is a relatively new excuse people use as an excuse to ignore the norms and traditions in your community regarding self-restraint, critical thinking and delaying gratification. Social pressure can be oppressive but it can also keep you in check if your ignorance and your impulsive urges are potentially harmful to yourself. Your social environment forms you on good and bad. It becomes a point of origin, a harbor which you can set out from and explore yourself and the world.
One of the greatest personal challenges people face in our modern time is freedom. Endless freedom.
Not that freedom in itself cannot be a good thing. It is a human fundamental need . But you can have too much of a good thing to the extent of it becoming unhealthy, even lethal.
Our society used to have an established, well-defined framework for its citizens. It was framework which felt too limiting to some people and they could strive to escape it. They had a reference they could navigate by in their freedom to seek another identity and role in society.
They had something to escape from.
Think about how a bat navigates: it sends out ultra sound to echo locate its position in relation to obstacles. This way it is able to avoid flying into things. Humans navigate by interaction with their surroundings. They send out signals by speaking, body language and actions. In return they get feedback from the world around them.
But what would happen if you remove every wall and obstacle so that the bat never receives any feedback?
In the sixties and seventies we rejected the tradition-based society which provided the individual with a frameset for men and women – wewatned to define ourselves. As a result today we lack the reference by which to navigate because we have made it entirely up to ourselves. Endless freedom. There is nothing to escape from anymore except endless freedom.
There are no walls in people’s lives. Humanitarian policies increasing people’s comfort zones and Technologies with algorithms to analyze and predict your preferences in movies, music and news removes the necessity and the personal incentive to interact with the world.
As with most things in life personal freedom ranges between 2 extremes on a spectrum – restraint and freedom. Take the following 2 examples:
1: A woman is restrained by wearing a Burka. This way she cannot exercise her sexual influence and stir arousal and temptation in men. Note that the woman is considered to be passive, not seeking arousal herself.
The opposite is the free woman who wants to be as sexually active as a man. She has a hundred past sexual partners and a handful of sexually transmitted diseases behind her. She tells male sexual encounters to not complain when she calls them about seeing a doctor because she has been tested positive again.
One of the few positive aspects of feminism is that it lets the man see what the woman is really like, if she has the freedom to run with her impulses and her female nature.
It is as if this was the very reason why women had to be kept in the household and why some Muslims dictate that a woman wear clothing which veils her feminine features, at times even her gender. It seems to be the male instinct that the woman will
The same goes for the man, which is why there also used to be cultural conventions for him to follow. This was to keep a society together and sustain people’s existence through the family unit.
2: The teetotaler restrains himself by not allowing himself to be exposed to the temptation of alcohol. The person is aware of the freedom he has to be corrupted by urges and impulses. But he never seeks out his inner weak character.
The drunk has followed his weakness and nurtured his weak character instead of his strong character. He followed his urges and the path of least resistance.
In almost every aspect in life you will find yourself somewhere on this spectrum regarding your limitations and opportunities. Today the expansion of personal freedom in western culture has exacerbated the two extremes: the ones who preach rules and regulation to make people conform and the ones who cry for more freedom.
My thought is that “Freedom isn’t for everyone.”
Just like the mentioned examples on sex and alcohol this depends, of course on the person. Some people can handle a lot of personal freedom, other people very little.
Compare it to a person winning the lottery. Some people are able to handle the money on their own. Other people are aware of their limitations and hire an advisor to help them. The last group of people is the group which spends it all in a matter of few years.
Freedom, whether it comes in the form of money, sex or alcohol is simply unmanageable to some. They simply do not know what to do with it.
The original frame of discipline and responsibility in society has crumbled over the past decades since the youth revolted in the 60’s and 70’s.
The baby boomer generation of ’68 were young people, basically still big children with no experience in life, who rejected the culture and mindset of their parents – the generation which represented 2 world wars. The children took charge in what they believed was a mission for world peace and love. Yet when you claim your freedom from the framework which helped people have boundaries and identities, you have to create everything yourself.
What are the personal negative effects of endless freedom?
- Greed
- Hedonism (kun nydelse
- stress
- Violence
- Sense of being lost
- Sense of purposelessness
- moral standards declining
- Individualism
- Isolation
- Loneliness
- depression
So, your tribe is gone and with it is the identity which it gave you. If you reject your tribe you have to create your own.
But can you?
Many people simply do not know how to define themselves in this endless freedom which is the result from the sixties and seventies. They lack the knowledge or ability – and courage – to find a way. Endless freedom is perhaps very much like a personal life crisis for the modern individual. If you don’t find a way to define yourself, then that crisis risks lasing the rest of your life. With endless freedom you are left naked and forced to display the very essence of what and who you are. You cannot hide in the group or derive strength from it to compensate for your own lack of strength or skillset. There is no group.
Instead we have idealistically invented globalism. Now we are all one big tribe. There is a paradox to this ideal which we must pay the price for; when we all become the same, we also all become nothing. We become isolated in a big mass of nameless faces with no points or people of reference around us. Everything has become relative with no personal boundaries to navigate within.
To me endless freedom is like an ocean that keeps getting bigger. E.g. I cannot imagine a person who would like to be sitting alone in a row boat in the middle of the Atlantic. And even worse – as more and more people seem to experience – without any oars; no identity or sense of purpose to move you in any direction.
You now face the choice of either remain sitting in the boat until your time runs out – or jump in the water and end things with some level of dignity.
With this situation of endless freedom in mind, most people will probably prefer restraint – for the woman it means wearing that piece of black cloth which conceal their being in return for the collective taking care of them, and for the man it means restraining himself from ever enjoying a cold beer on a hot summer’s day.
That is how bad endless freedom is. It brings people to a state of stress and hopelessness. And helplessness.
And the more ambitious you are with your life, the worse it may become.
In a radio show a young woman called in and told her story about escaping depression. The cure was not pills or psychological treatment. It was human.
Her sister let her spend time with her infant daughter. She placed her child in the arms of this depressed woman and she began to feel better.
Why?
This woman had herself as the center of the universe. However, the child took over that position in her eyes and as a result the woman was pulled out of her despair by focusing on something beside herself, something which gave her a sense of purpose as a woman; being a mother. the universe was not that endless and empty anymore.
What is at play here?
With endless freedom the individual becomes the center of its own universe. It is in reality the adult prolonging the adolescent state where the child sees itself as the center of its own universe and as it grows and matures it has to learn that it is part of something bigger. It has to learn about responsibility.
The problem is that human beings are social creatures, they are not meant to be the center of the universe. They are meant to be part of something larger than themselves. That is the danger of consumerism. It will tell you what you want to hear to get your money because the customer is always right.
But the individual is often wrong and makes mistakes.
With endless freedom you must know yourself what you need. Otherwise the endless freedom in our consumer culture might make you sick.
That is why I am worried that the appreciation and respect for things like discipline and responsibility has greatly diminished. Because discipline and responsiblity is the cure for meaninglessness.
It requires certain traits to handle freedom
- Discipline
- Ethical and moral standards
- conscience
- Observing ego (self-awareness)
- A sense of responsibility (the wrapping container of the previous)
What is the message? Is there a moral to this?
The message is that you can cure your hopeless state freedom by taking on responsibility. Like the woman in the radio show who realized that she could take responsibility for a little baby and have value in another person’s life.
She realized that she was not the center of the universe. She was not alone. And she mattered to someone.
What would you choose? More freedom than you have now, or a sense of purpose?
Again, my thought is that “Freedom isn’t for everyone.”