The Freedom to be Me
Freedom: what is it, and how does it link to happiness.
So, the highest goal to which man can aspire, he infers, is love. “Happiness ensues as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of surrender to a person other than oneself.” Thus we see how suffering, otherwise incomprehensible, becomes meaningful.
All this, we must conclude, is only possible when I forthrightly and courageously face up to freedom’s challenges. When I strive towards being master of myself; when I embrace, with its demands and all it entails, the freedom to be me.
Freedom and Development
We have not explored Amartya Sen’s pragmatic conclusions in depth. They span volumes and it is not necessary here. But they all emanate from this freedom core. For example, he says that even though it is now clear that democracies serve better in preventing catastrophes like famines and in promoting economic growth, “political liberty and civil freedoms are directly important on their own, and do not have to be justified indirectly in terms of their effects on the economy.” Similarly, the market mechanism is primarily a demand of and derives from man’s inherent freedom of exchange and transaction (even though this right – like any other – may be regulated if it leads to some social loss or exploitation) and is not the preferred option simply for its comparatively higher economic potential or imperatives. Unemployment should not be viewed merely as a deficiency of income that can be made up for through welfare schemes. It is devastatingly “a source of far-reaching debilitating effects on individual freedom, initiative, and skills”, leading to effects like the social exclusion of some groups and loss of self-reliance, self-confidence and psychological and physical health.
“Development,” concludes Sen, “has to be more concerned with enhancing the lives we lead and the freedoms we enjoy. Expanding the freedoms that we have reason to value not only makes our lives richer and more unfettered, but also allows us to be fuller social persons, exercising our own volitions and interacting with – and influencing – the world in which we live.”
The foray we’ve made into the depths of the freedom faculty isn’t unimportant or extraneous to development and its myriad indices. There cannot be development without a proper conception of the nature of the human person - the subject of development itself. This proper understanding and conceptualization enables the continuous striving on our part, the agents and instigators of development, to ensure that the direction in which society is travelling is at every moment in consonance with the true dignity of the human being.
I would therefore venture to adjust Prof. Sen’s encapsulation a bit, sharpening it somewhat. Development goes beyond enabling people to live the kind of lives they value, it also means providing people with the tools, environment, and so on, that would enable them enhance themselves and the society around them in a consistently positive and dignified manner.
I tried but couldn’t resist slotting in another poem here, before closing. It is Maya Angelou’s “Take Time Out”; beautiful also, in its rallying call to responsibility.
When you see them
on a freeway hitching rides
wearing beads
with packs by their sides
you ought to ask
What’s all the
warring and the jarring
and the
killing and
the thrilling
all about.
Take Time Out.
--
When you see him
with a band around his head
and an army surplus bunk
that makes his bed
you’d better ask
What’s all the
beating and
the cheating and
the bleeding and
the needing
all about.
Take Time Out.
--
When you see her walking
barefoot in the rain
and you know she’s tripping
on a one-way train
you need to ask
What’s all the
lying and the
dying and
the running and
the gunning
all about.
Take Time Out.
--
Use a minute
feel some sorrow
for the folks
who think tomorrow
is a place that they
can call up
on the phone.
Take a month
and show some kindness
for the folks
who thought that blindness
was an illness that
affected eyes alone.
--
If you know that youth
is dying on the run
and my daughter trades
dope stories with your son
we’d better see
what all our
fearing and our
jeering and our
crying and
our lying
brought about.
Take Time Out.
I have, however, left out a whole lot of other issues, like the responsibility that goes with freedom. If I am free, and master of myself, and so master of my choices, it means I am responsible for them; I may be rewarded or punished; I would be deserving of whatever praise or blame that ensues. I have also left out, for example, what my convictions are about man’s ultimate destiny and that of society in consequence. In other words, answers to the two questions: what am I here for, and where am I going? I leave them out, on the one hand, because now might not be the time nor here the place. But I leave them out, too, because I’d much rather treat of them in the pleasure of a wide open space, surrounded by lush gardens and singing birds, and bent over, most contentedly, the unavoidable light sherry - or two.◼︎
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Viktor Frankl
Doctor, Neurologist, Psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor
1905 - 1997
Frankl held that people go through life because they have a sense of purpose. He observed that the prisoners in the camps who knew there was a task outside those confines, waiting for them to fulfil, were the most apt to survive; a point that has been corroborated by various studies since. And so, in attributing man’s motivation to a “will to meaning”, he differed emphatically from the two most prominent psychologists of the century: Sigmund Freud ascribed human motivation to the sex drive (the “will to pleasure”), while Alfred Adler - whose ideas Frankl once shared - put it down to assertiveness and power (the “will to power”). Happiness would be a result of the striving towards that goal or meaning of one’s life. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out,” asserted Frankl. “Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated.”
He stressed that this endeavor is compatible with the difficulties and obstacles that emerge. “Nothing in the world, I venture to say, would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as knowledge that there is meaning in one’s life.” He would then quote fondly from Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for, can bear with almost any how.”
Maya Angelou
Author, Poet, Activist
1928 - 2014
