Freedom - this might be one of the most powerful words ever coined. With the help of a few alphabets it represents an indefatigable urge of a living being. I’ve never heard of something that conveys so much passion in so few letters.
Freedom, almost seems like a magic word to me. There’s nothing that a man can or should value more and there I violated my own principle by imposing my idea on you, or did I ? For you too have a brain and may very well decide that it is love which is the most important value of all, or hard work you might say ( if you live in China). But I too have a freedom to let my own views out and therefore, the onus is upon the receptor to judge my statement and then to accept it or not only after due deliberations.
The fact of the matter is that there are a very few people who actually analyse what is happening to them and are thus even capable of evaluating all the dimensions of freedom and what it really means. What is it and who is stopping whom? Is it then an affirmative right or is it some sort of a restriction on one party to not violate the rights of the other.
My actions, the one that I supposedly am performing completely free of any influence whatsoever, might in reality be the expression of the social values that have been forced upon me from my childhood. There is a search for a characteristic ‘me’ in the life of every individual and the tid bits of information that comprises this basic question cannot be procured separately from the society that we live in. The whole of our existence is shaped by the lens that we adopt for viewing and filtering all the information that gets to us, is it not therefore implied that a part of us is also the society that we lived in?
That might be an obvious statement. But, then let us take it further. Are we therefore not defined by the people surrounding us, for it is their thought patterns that we ultimately are going to imbibe and then shape our incoming stimuli through.
The unlimited expression of any individual is thus a myth, as much of a myth as is the existence of big foot. Apparently every one of us only has had small feet. The fixture on individual right to freedom has been a part of the modern discourse. The label of mad is given to anyone who deviates a certain degree from the norm, even he/she does it for the expression of their true selves. It’s not surprising that it is the people who’s job is to analyse their own emotions that are regarded as the most ‘weird’ or even as mad. Artists, the expression of the bare human soul are not likely to fit with any one size system.
They are the people who’ve had the courage to dissociate from the popular trends and then to delve into their own minds. Artists have therefore been able to change how people think about themselves by being able to insert their own touch into the general. Acceptance of a particular trait is preceded by ridicule and then a grudged allowance.
For freedom to be expressed, courage is the foremost requirement. Courage to be yourself is a difficult job, as it robs the people of an easy characterisation matrix that they’ve been using. For knowing an individual, especially a unique one, it requires years and years of interaction and experience. It is here that the heuristics serve their purpose.
The point that I’m trying to make is that a life not analysed isn’t free, for you are falling for the popularly established forms of perception and judgement making. Not only that, in your daily life, all the decisions that you make are going to be derived from an external framework, which might be that of the religion that you follow, or that imposed by your parents, or that of your peers or whatever. If you don’t analyse the why of your life, your life also remains a big question mark.
Not that everyone does care. I don’t think most of the people want to care and the others can… but still if I was the only one who could see the chains that the people drag at all times, should I have kept quiet or put some on myself so as to not appear different?
