I guess you’ll have to just keep moving. If you try your weirdest and meet no resistance ever, then I’d assume we’re going in the right direction.
“The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”
I think that going to extreme lengths to try to prove one’s own freedom is just a convoluted way of caging yourself all over again.
It is important to keep moving, but it’s got to be for more than just proving that you can. Figure out what direction you’d like to move, and then after you’ve started moving in that direction, keep asking yourself what it is that you want — the world can start to look quite different once you’ve moved, so being mindful about things is how you can keep moving in a manner that’s true to you, even throughout all the change.
When we know that our choices are constrained in some way, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we never actually wanted to go in that direction anyway, even if that’s not true; sometimes that lie is more comfortable than reckoning with the reality of our chains. It can be hard to discern the truth of the matter in these scenarios. Freedom is not just a quality that’s bestowed upon us, but an active skill that we can train, and with time and mindful effort, we can improve our ability to discern between all the places we’re told we can go, and where we genuinely want to go. If it doubt, if you suspect that you’re self-policing your wishes to avoid being disappointed by chains that you subconsciously feel are there, it can be useful to push in that direction, and see how it feels. Sometimes, you’ll find that you were in fact free to go that way, but you actually didn’t want to, in which case, you can just reroute, with greater knowledge of what you want. In other cases, you will confirm that there are indeed chains constraining your movement, which you’ll have to figure out how to escape. Either way, you’ll know more, and be better equipped to actually be free.
I don’t think that we can ever move far enough to prove that we are free, largely because of what happens when we improve our capacities for things, including freedom. The more we grow, the more that becomes possible to us, and so our appetite for more freedom will always increase. This can be dangerous, because it can appear that the most effective way to enable our own freedom is by adding to others’ chains. This isn’t a sustainable strategy though, because it means that when we find a direction we wish to go but are unable to, there will be no-one to help free us. None of us are free until all of us are free
How do I know I’ve moved far enough? What if the walls and whip have just moved?
I guess you’ll have to just keep moving. If you try your weirdest and meet no resistance ever, then I’d assume we’re going in the right direction.
— John Stuart Mill
I think that going to extreme lengths to try to prove one’s own freedom is just a convoluted way of caging yourself all over again.
It is important to keep moving, but it’s got to be for more than just proving that you can. Figure out what direction you’d like to move, and then after you’ve started moving in that direction, keep asking yourself what it is that you want — the world can start to look quite different once you’ve moved, so being mindful about things is how you can keep moving in a manner that’s true to you, even throughout all the change.
When we know that our choices are constrained in some way, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we never actually wanted to go in that direction anyway, even if that’s not true; sometimes that lie is more comfortable than reckoning with the reality of our chains. It can be hard to discern the truth of the matter in these scenarios. Freedom is not just a quality that’s bestowed upon us, but an active skill that we can train, and with time and mindful effort, we can improve our ability to discern between all the places we’re told we can go, and where we genuinely want to go. If it doubt, if you suspect that you’re self-policing your wishes to avoid being disappointed by chains that you subconsciously feel are there, it can be useful to push in that direction, and see how it feels. Sometimes, you’ll find that you were in fact free to go that way, but you actually didn’t want to, in which case, you can just reroute, with greater knowledge of what you want. In other cases, you will confirm that there are indeed chains constraining your movement, which you’ll have to figure out how to escape. Either way, you’ll know more, and be better equipped to actually be free.
I don’t think that we can ever move far enough to prove that we are free, largely because of what happens when we improve our capacities for things, including freedom. The more we grow, the more that becomes possible to us, and so our appetite for more freedom will always increase. This can be dangerous, because it can appear that the most effective way to enable our own freedom is by adding to others’ chains. This isn’t a sustainable strategy though, because it means that when we find a direction we wish to go but are unable to, there will be no-one to help free us. None of us are free until all of us are free