The Freedom we surrender

did we have any freedom at all...?

Whenever I spoke with people, it always seemed to me that I was speaking with their issues — or more precisely, with whatever that shields them from those: with their complexities, their masquerade, their theater, and sometimes their circus. I rarely managed to speak with the people themselves — open, vulnerable, real… the ones who aren’t afraid to be wounded while speaking of something close, something intimate. In the past, people kept silent about such things for fear of hurting their illusions; now people don’t speak of such things because they’ve forgotten how to speak at all. Everything that holds any value forces you to be either strong or invisible.

—When does that understanding arrive?

Hearing the question, Daniel turned his gaze aside, lost in thought. Catherine understood this kind of silence and waited calmly for an answer. In a world overflowing with productivity, such a measured pause was considered a sin.

—It’s the strangest paradox, Catherine. The sense of understanding never arose when conversations revolved around general topics or life experience. It arose when I saw people full of doubt, struggling with uncertainty — in whose eyes you can catch the sparks of real thoughts trying to ignite. You see the tension, the eyes in which you behold the full weight of awareness, a burden heavier than life itself, yet one that doesn’t sink into darkness, or brushed off by sarcasm, or lost in the abyss — it is overcome. Take our conversation as an example: we’ve had different experiences in life and we hold different views on things, and yet I see in you the same awareness that pursues the few, the one that pursued me — the will to be free of defenses, to not fear crossing boundaries someone else has drawn; to not fear trying, or inventing; in short, to not fear living.

—Well, we simply had to grow up through concrete. And in the process you come to understand that the truth leads you out from the depths of hell. The system shook each of us in its own way, and amid all that chaos we just try to be ourselves, I don’t see any point in presenting myself as someone I’m not. The truth is all that’s you’re left with.

—It may sound simple and yet that’s a rare thought, Catherine, people are afraid of facing themselves that’s why they play all sorts of charade to escape reality. To invent is human, to obey what’s invented is the ultimate human, closing-the-loop experience.

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—Clearly you lived through the era before everything went to hell. What did freedom mean “before”?

—I like that you speak of it in the past tense.

—Well, yes — according to the “official” record, “freedom” isn’t even a word in the dictionary anymore, so, yes.

—When I was your age, the very concept of freedom was, in fact, profoundly terrifying: at every stage of life you can take an indefinite number of actions, and each such action opens before you an equally indefinite number of consequences, on account of which you must take further actions; and so on, and on, and on, in a closed circle. You don’t know in which of these countless branchings the thing you want is to be found — and besides, do you even know what you truly want?

Your mind plays all sorts of games with you, convincing you of one thing and then another, until you grow strong enough to choose your own suffering and learn to live with it. Often, after such introspection, any thinking person is seized with horror and freezes in indecision; for every decision made is irreversible against time, of which he has so little. And in the same way, in the end, not making a decision is — paradoxically — also a decision. So, following this reasoning, man never needed freedom at all, only the comfort of the illusion of choice. People surrendered their freedom voluntarily, because they never needed it in the first place.