More Luxurious Chains: A Study of Contemporary Freedom
How our sense of personal freedom has degraded throughout history and how we can reclaim it
The book 1984 is famous (infamous?) for many things, but chief among them is reinforcing a particular vision of freedom. You could call it optimistic, but it is rooted in an almost pessimistic way of viewing people in societies.
That vision of freedom? It’s the vision that — no matter how many restrictions are placed on a person from the outside, we are always free to think and feel anything. If you manage to give that up, you’re no longer free.
And it is, indeed, possible to give up that freedom. In fact, we do it partially all the time.
We used to define freedom in physical terms, because life was largely physical for most people. These days, life is largely mental (cognitive and emotional) for most people. For most of us, basic physical needs are no longer the focal point of each day. By and large, we have food, water, and shelter.
So the mental time and space that used to be taken up by pursuing basic sustenance and security is now free to be occupied by other needs — or at least things we think are needs.
