What's It Mean To Be

Free? Damn I hate questions. The questions answered with a simple “Yes” or “No,” unfortunately, do me absolutely no good—those are the questions we tend to gloss over anyway. There is very little to be gained from a question with a dichotomous answer. Even if one were to think in terms of mathematics, it is not so much that x=y, but WHY x=y that matters. Qualifications, I think it is, that drive a good question. Think of them as proofs, reasons, the becauses, the whatevers, and it is still all of these things that help us understand what a questions means.

To live as we please, pursuit of happiness and whatnot, is that freedom? Is freedom the same as being free? Can an absolute price be placed on freedom? Can freedom be determined by how much sass and backtalk we give to the authorities? Is he who’s free, he who can unfalteringly, unwaveringly stand behind his principles? Does freedom come at a price, or is the price already paid? Why is it that the people who oftentimes claim to be most free, most often fall into line with their pre-labeled identities? What is determined by freedom?

It frustrates me sometimes to ponder the intricacies of questions like these, if only because my head gets locked into abstractions and endless chains of referendums that send me spiraling into unconscionable depths of human pondering. We all have minds of imbalance, ranging from the hyper sexual nature of some to the hyper violent of others and the hyper narcissistic of most others. Perhaps it is precisely the thing we think allows this kind of thing that most hampers its most intense expressions.

Even the Beatles weren’t free. For all their wealth and money and fame, they were locked into a mode wherein they were only allowed to produce sometimes incomprehensible music for the masses. That kind of pressure produces results, it is true; however, it is not the kind of results that come from complete freedom. It is the results of adrenaline and the expectation to produce. One of the greatest things that ever happened was the break-up of the Beatles. Some of the greatest acts of freedom are the unfathomable acts of superhuman beings imposing their free will on the unwilling.

Do you see how difficult it can get? When a great act of freedom is also a great act of evil, it does not cease to be a great act, it only has that qualifier “evil”—I guess the same could go for a great act of selfishness. It is in this equation that we see how greatness is not altogether equivalent to good and bad, and thus all other associated with a generally determined qualifier of “good” or “bad” are called into question.

Is freedom really preferable to having somebody’s will imposed upon us? When we allow the human mind to sink to the depths of it’s depravity—which is at some level sanctioned by the term freedom—then we are asking to have the most heinous acts occur. Think of television. The most heinous acts are perpetrated on the minds of your average American by exposing it to the imposed will of some television executive trying to make his (or her) mark on the world. And it is by the same token that the imposed will of one is also their illustration of their better handle on freedom than you. They can do whatever the hell they want, and throw explosions at your face until you understand explosions, before you realize that the will you think of as your own is, in fact, not.

What are you doing? Are you actively involved in imposing your will, or are you passively accepting the will of others? We wind up doing a little bit of giving and taking I suppose. We accept the will of some—most often our parents I think—and impose our will on others, but even that seems to be an incredible cop out. “Yeah, I impossible my will on that SOB the other day,” but the next day there’s nothing to do but cry at my unwilling but unconditional surrender to some other’s will. The moment you lose everything, is the moment you gain something?

There is no such thing as passive freedom. One cannot sit idly on the sidelines of the freedom game and wait passively for the coach to give him the nod. When you have no friends you are free to do what you will with your time. When you have friends you are free to do what you will with their time. It seems slightly incongruous, doesn’t it, that freedom is possible in any situation. It is occurring to me that freedom is a complete farce and possible in any situation one can imagine—yes, even in captivity, incarceration, or all other forms of detention. Freedom is malleable, you see.

Birds fly because of their instinct to forage and gather food, a mate, and young. They are slaves to their desires. Extinguish desires may well be the route to a genuine experience of the world. Then again, to desire is perhaps the most natural thing on the planet. We desire to eat. We desire to love. We desire to copulate. We desire. Those who don’t desire spend their days desiring to not desire. Language has the ability to mean everything and nothing all at once.

Is it possible to say something and nothing?