BY STEVEN KASZAB
Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said, “Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains.” Never has such an observation been more poignant and clear.
Humanities continual struggles to be “free” from all things oppressive, manipulative and controlling shape us in ways that further encircle us in the stranglehold that is life. In other words, it seems to me that human nature cries out to be nurtured and cared for, while also fearing that this self-empathy will enslave them.
The pandemic has pointed out this struggle clearly. We are told by our governments, freely elected to care for us, to wear masks, stay apart and be safe through self-regulation. We are asked to regulate ourselves, are told what needs to be done to keep us safe, and yet many of us will not carry out those actions, and in fact many of us rebel, protesting against the government agencies. Government was created to maintain civil control, managed by our peers. Our Government is not a dictatorship, but a freely elected institution right?
We are born as free as we can be, and then seconds later we must admit that who, what and where we are shapes this “pure freedom.” Society’s controlling tentacles have a hold of us before we are even born. Is freedom an illusion then? Can we ever be free? Perhaps we need to think of freedom as an adjective describing our existence, not a thing to achieve, but a thing that describes us at a particular time
While in the womb of our parent, society is shaping our parents, moulding us into something. We cannot escape the fact that freedom does not really exist, and that some form of societal authority, some government controls us, and is shaping us daily. A citizen here is just like a Chinese citizen controlled by its government. The only difference maybe is that here we are told we have rights shaped by our government, and in Communist China their citizens have privileges only.
Freedom is something dependent upon interpretation. We think we are free therefore we are free? To be free is to make those choices that are right for us, individually and as a society. We are motivated to choose that which places our needs first above anyone else in society. Those that choose the needs of others first are called heroes.
Perhaps it is time that we all choose to be heroes. Choose to help and assist others before us. Are we a free people, a people that can choose what shapes us as a nation? As long as we can make choices, and our elected officials respectfully enact these choices, then perhaps we are free.
