Obedience and freedom
true for who you gravitate towards as friends, your interests and creative endeavours and literally anything you want or want to achieve in life. These relationships matter to us in a sense because they are arbitrary, because we choose to invest meaning in them as opposed to anything else. Though we may try, I do not think it is possible, for example, to love every human being, some element of love and desire is bound up with its exclusivity. We rarely know why we enjoy things but crucially we do know that we enjoy them or that they matter to us and I think that should be enough to relink freedom to desire and keep a simple definition of freedom as the freedom to do what you want. The final area in which we see restriction enabling freedom is in our agreement with our society to forgo exerting our anger physically on other people in return for the protection from those kind of things happening to ourselves through the establishment of a legal system. This element of security has I think been prioritized too often in the political philosophy of freedom but it is nevertheless essential. This is the area where restriction most evidently becomes obedience. As Aeschylus shows in the Oresteia , the creation of legal systems is not necessarily natural: our deep, instinctive desire, for example, when a loved one is killed, is very often a drive towards a kind of vigilantism. This is where the state needs the necessary power to command obedience to prevent such a basic instinct within us. However, while it is clear to me that kind of legal system is a necessity for freedom the state needs to justify the power it has accumulated for the sake of legal safety in the other respects in which it uses this power. The tribal unit was likely based on acts of reciprocation that expanded over time into larger and larger systems of people. However, where people feel like the state is failing to reciprocate, with good infrastructure, fair courts, a say in its running through rigorous democracy, this demand for obedience, though clearly necessary for the security that is a precondition for individual freedom, becomes illegitimate. This is where the state begins to slip into tyranny. Ultimately, the reason a deep part of us would rather die fighting for our freedom than living under tyranny is because first it creates a stagnancy, and destroys the drive for creativity, as the state believes it has all the answers. The other reason why tyranny is unacceptable is because, as terminal beings, we have a starkly limited time to make decisions about our own lives, so when this is stripped from us we feel as if years of our lives have been forcibly stolen. This is why we need this constant tension between community and individual. Too much individual and you have security, so no freedom; too much community and the community becomes stagnant and cannot maintain itself in the long-term or move forward. In conclusion, it might be useful to conceive of freedom and restriction as two snakes coiled around each other, necessary from one another’s preservation. From our evolutionary desire for comfort, to our philosophical need for the validation of others, to our reliance on language and systems of thought created by others, to the difficult-to-untangle structures of our desire, to security, we have seen at every level that communal and personal restriction and freedom are in a constant unending process of tension and mutual facilitation. To put it starkly, you can never be individually free alone in the desert but only within in the boundary of the city walls and the city’s laws.
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