Part 4: On Freedom
Intro, Part 1, Part 2. Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
The most radical freedom we can embrace is the freedom to exist; to be conscious, capable and one of many; to reject completely that there is Other. American Capitalism, and the political structures that support it, constrains the human understanding and capacity required for us to build the world that white Americans claim is the one that was once great, the one they want again. In this post I intend to contrast the consumptive freedoms of the white American Dream with the generative freedoms that are possible.
Don Quixote and The Cult of the Righteous Lunatic
Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”
“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.
“Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length.”
“Take care, sir,” cried Sancho. “Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone.”
— Part 1, Chapter VIII. Of the valourous Don Quixote’s success in the dreadful and never before imagined Adventure of the Windmills
Don Quixote is my personal hero. I find myself desperate to smite a myriad of illusive foes. I want to vanquish personified windmills mindlessly grinding the grist of Capitalism. But in my quixotic fervor I see the Trumpian mob, similarly possessed, similarly driven, similar complexion.
Don Quixote, I think, is the new Horatio Alger. No longer do we populate our dreams with the mythology of all powerful bootstraps or the perfect industry of the demure and assimilating immigrant. All of that has been replaced with the ephemeral glory of the lone lunatic, righteous and questing, following his most perfect compass hidden somewhere deep in his all knowing gut. American mythology has shifted from stories of plodding industry and subservience to stories of the chosen and their perfect agency and righteous conquest. Both lies of course. Both serve the same purpose, to drive the windmill that turns the millstone that benefits some one else.
American Capitalist mythology requires us to believe two lies:
- wealth is evidence of worth
- anyone (but not everyone) can be wealthy
Both of these lies exist to define the pursuit of wealth as the gravity of American life — the wind that turns the millstone. I believe that markets are indeed a good agnostic governor of human activity but the pursuit of wealth is a very poor substitute for freedom.
We embrace the ugly, self-serving ideas of patronizing white men not because better ideas don’t exist or because we aren’t capable of greater things but because the American myth machine has muted our courage and shriveled our imaginations.
We are capable of more. Instead of the puerile and cannibalistic scholarship of Garret Hardin, Milton Friedman and Richard Posner, we can implement the generative freedom meticulously described by Paulo Freire, Amartya Sen and Elinor Ostrum.
Generative Freedom
Freedom requires Critical Consciousness
In 1968, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire first published Pedagogy of the Oppressed where he declares that each of us can be free to make decisions that positively affect our lives and that the goal of education and learning is for each student to build a Critical Consciousness that informs and guides our actions. Freire describes an approach to life and learning which eschews duplicitous mythologies and focuses on experiences designed to illuminate social and political contradictions; designed to create a consciousness of our world that necessitates the radical agency of the oppressed over the context of their oppression. As a contrasting example, Trumpians, though they wail freedom, are not free because they are unable to create an accurate or even useful understanding of their world. Critical Consciousness is an essential ingredient for the freedom that America pretends to aspire to.
Once we have the knowledge of self as a people then we could be free
and no devil could ever enter the boundaries.— Freestyle Fellowship, Innercity Boundaries
Freedom Requires Capability
In addition to being able to understand our world as it is, our freedom is contingent on our ability to use that knowledge to impact our circumstance.
In 1998, Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his Capability Approach to economics. Sen was focused on positive or generative freedom. He saw a world where free markets gave permission to participate or more accurately, permission to consume, but there were no systems designed to facilitate individual agency. Sen’s capability approach argued for economic capabilities as positive or generative freedoms; freedom defined as agency over one’s own life.
I am using the term “agent” … in it’s older — and “grander” — sense as someone who acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives.
— Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom
I gotta be righteous, I gotta be me
I gotta be conscious, I gotta be free
I gotta be able, I gotta attack
I gotta be stable, I gotta be black— Freestyle Fellowship, Innercity Boundaries
Freedom Requires Self-determination
And finally, freedom requires that we are able to define and manage the work that is necessary for us all to be free. In 2009, Elinor Ostrum won the Nobel Prize in Economics for explicitly annihilating the Tragedy of the Commons. Squarely in the tradition of the generative freedoms of Freire and Sen, Dr. Ostrum’s work, Governing the Commons, demonstrated clearly how rigorous community engagement can sustain natural ecosystems and the resources they produce. Specifically, she was interested in discovering and defining an economic and legal framework that could be used to govern the sustainable use of the natural ecosystems that provide our daily sustenance.
In the beginning of her book, she directly addresses Hardin and invokes Freire and Sen:
Instead of presuming that the individuals sharing a commons are inevitably caught in a trap from which they cannot escape, I argue that the capacity of individuals to extricate themselves from various types of dilemma situations varies from situation to situation.
And in the conclusion she takes on Milton Friedman and Richard Posner when she says:
If this study does nothing more than shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve Common Pool Resource problems is for external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation, it will have accomplished one major purpose.
— Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons
Freedom is Collective
From the beginning of the American project, the powerful individual has been battling for his constitutional freedom to harm, and the vulnerable community has been battling for its constitutional freedom from harm. Both freedoms were inscribed into the U.S. Constitution, into the American psyche. The history of the United States, the history of Americans, is the history of reconciling the unreconcilable: individual freedom and community freedom. There is no way to reconcile the enduring psyche of the slaveholder with the enduring psyche of the enslaved. — Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
Dr. Kendi perfectly describes our current situation and I agree completely that we find ourselves “reconciling the unreconcilable: individual freedom and community freedom.” Because of this, I not so humbly suggest that we subordinate the freedom of the individual to that of the community. In the other posts in the series I have tried to make the point that the human community is the context of our existence and the sustained health of the human community is the sustained health of each individual. It is not possible to be free alone. I understand this as a rule.
It is a simple place to begin. We each exist. The freedom to which we each individually aspire is the freedom to exist, individually and as one of many.
The freedom declared by the rioters at the Capital on Jan 6th is a lie. White supremacists are captured and held by lies — lies that tell them their freedom is impinged by the existence of others. And it is true that my life is made more difficult by the existence of some but that is life as a human. Individual freedom characterized as the freedom to harm is antithetical to community freedom and therefore antithetical to the freedom of each of us.
When we are free we can begin.
Well you better listen my sister’s and brothers,
’cause if you do you can hear
There are voices still calling across the years.
And they’re all crying across the ocean,
And they’re cryin’ across the land,
And they will till we all come to understand.None of us are free.
None of us are free.
None of us are free, one of us are chained.
None of us are free.
This is the fifth post in a series:
Intro: Replacing Milton Friedman with All Of Us
Part 1: The Neighborhood
Part 2: Incentivizing the Health of the Human Neighborhood
Part 3: Difference Defines Us
Part 4: On Freedom
Part 5: Behavioral Economics and The Algorithm
Part 6: We Can Build That
