What Is Freedom

What Is Freedom?

Some months ago I was driving around Washington DC when I passed the group of truckers who were protesting, among other things, mask mandates.  On each of the trucks was posted a sign that said that this mandate violated their “freedom”.  As I thought about this I wondered how they defined “freedom”.  I concluded that they were using the term to mean the ability to do whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want with no outside constraints.  This is indeed one of the definitions of “free” in the dictionary.  However, is it an adequate definition for human society?  Is this view of freedom actually limiting us in some significant ways?  Is it missing an important ingredient?

Let’s begin our reflection by noting that any definition of freedom is predicated on the capacity of each of us to make choices about our behavior.  The ability to make choices resides in the brain where two distinctly different regions determine our power to chose our behavior.  Actually in some instances they limit our power to make “free choices”.  There are many situations in which our brain makes a choice for us without conscious consideration.

The first of these regions is the limbic system, the oldest part of our brain, and the arena where we generate our immediate emotional responses without any input from our self awareness.  This region generates four basic emotions: fear, anger, want, and lust.  It is the source of our “fight or flight” response to a situation   In the world of our most ancient ancestors this was critical to survival.   That striped animal with the huge teeth was dangerous and fleeing was mandated without “thinking” about it.  Today this still serves us in certain situations such as running from the gunman on the subway or in the mall.  In those instances we are not making reflective choices, i.e. we are not “free” to decide our actions, – rather our limbic system is instigating survival behavior without thinking, that is without self-aware deliberation.

Unfortunately this primitive response also happens when there is no real immediate danger.  Think of the last time you got angry at the driver in your lane on the interstate who was going too slow or the one who cut you off in the parking lot from the slot you were going to park in.  Road rage, even if it is limited to honking the horn and cussing out that person rather than shooting them [which has happened in recent weeks], is the limbic system at work and it is only when we override it with the other region of our brain that allows us to make deliberate choices where we are aware that we have done so.

This region is the prefrontal cortex, the part in the front of our brains above our eyes and it is the “executive” function of our capacity to make choices.  We can get upset with the driver and yet choose to remain calm and not shoot them or run them off the road because we can deliberately decide how we will respond.  For example we may have compassion for the elderly person who is going slow on the road because we understand that they are dealing with limitations of aging, and that there is where we may be someday.  Thus we simply wait for the break that allows us to pass them.

Yet even this region makes decisions for us from time to time without any deliberation on our part.  This is due to the fact that this region of our brain can act based on what we believe subconsciously about things.  For centuries people didn’t sail far on the oceans because they believed the earth was flat and they could sail over the edge and die.  And even when the Roman church was faced with the truth offered by Copernicus that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa, their beliefs were so strong they sentenced him to house arrest.  Their decision was hardly based of “free” rational thought. 

Thus it is my opinion that for us to truly be “free” to chose our behavior we need two ingredients that are missing in the more popular view of “freedom”.  First we must be exercising our ability to consciously undertake critical thinking about our choice.  We must be willing to submit our beliefs about something to rational, logical criticism in order to have the best understanding we can have upon which to act.  Second, we need to submit our consideration to a set of moral values in order to make certain that our actions are ethical rather than hedonistic.

So is freedom simply the ability to do whatever we want, whenever, we want, wherever we want or is true freedom the ability to make self aware, rational, moral decisions about our behavior and act accordingly?  We are a social animal, despite our overemphasis on individuality, and consideration of others is necessary for us to survive as a social order.  I would suggest that we cannot define freedom from an individualistic perspective alone but must do so in the context of our relationships to others using rationality and moral principles as the guides to our behavior.  Only when we do so are our actions truly “free”.