If you live in the Americas or in Europe, you probably consider freedom to be a basic, God-given right, and this belief has extended worldwide to other cultures, thanks to TV and radio. But this was not always so for humanity. And still might not be true for you.
First, we will look at our past. History teaches us that for millennia most humans were poor, illiterate serfs or slaves or subsistence farmers. Freedom as such was reserved to the powerful leaders, mainly in the political, religious, military and later on commercial fields, and was basically a result of being powerful. Before then, if you were not of the nobility or a powerful warrior (or the son of such), you were destined to a very limited range of activities or to exile (which often became a deadly alternative. The Robin Hood story, for example, describes a group of individuals that wanted to be free of the tyranny of their local warlord/sheriff, and hid in the King’s private forest. North American children, who read the story, and English myth, don’t realize that the people of that era did not have any freedom to travel, study, prosper… not even to hunt animals or farm on property they did not own.
This is why, in the many colonies that later became the Americas, laws were written to protect their self-declared and hard won “human rights”. In effect, the American colonies of Spain, Britain, Russia, Portugal, France, etc., chose to earn their right to freedom together with their independence, and generally continue to choose freedom and self-determination regularly. Fortunately, freedom is a key element of prosperity, and in all of the new countries of the Americas, freedom allowed for the creation of wealth and the education of most of the population, except in those few cases where authoritarian leaders (including foreign powers and companies) restricted the freedom of their people to learn and thrive. Mind you, this article is too short to speak of how and why this still happens, but I will be glad to correspond with you if you really want to go into this topic.
If we “Fast forward” to the 21st Century, we find that individuals still complain but now it is about different limits on their lives, including those of property and crime prevention, and taxes and other prohibitions… besides the natural limits our body and age impose on us. Besides the fact that individuals in the 21st Century have many more alternatives and education than their ancestors, I observe that many of us hand over our freedoms to different leaders, in marketing, religion, politics, work, and all sorts of distractions for our minds. Why? Because freedom requires thinking and effort and must be earned every day. And sometimes, freedom must be earned every moment of the day, too. A simple example of how we can give up our freedoms for a moment, it that of going to a theater or movie: You are asked to suspend your sense of reality and disbelief and enter into the world and sensations that the actors are creating for you. You give up your personal freedom for a while to live as the actors would have you live for a slice of your day. This was your decision, you might say… but with the advent of subliminal marketing, and other methodologies for unconsciously affecting your behavior, we can be trained to make decisions that are not truly free.
Similarly, a person in pain will go to a specialist, and will decide to trust the specialist’s recommendations. This is logical, and when the pain goes away it usually justifies our decision, but what if our parents taught us to blindly follow our “superior’s” instructions and we haven’t bothered to research and find out if the specialist is truly worth listening to? Well, we run the risk of losing more of our freedom as we fall into a pattern of blind obedience.
Even libertarians can lose their freedom when they blindly follow conclusions that are no longer valid. For example, many extreme libertarians prefer to live away from others, in undeveloped lands (“off the grid” they call it) and have to drive long distances when they or their children need health, educational, and other services that only modern population centers offer. They choose not to benefit from the technology and other normal conditions of modern towns and cities. They choose to pay lower taxes in exchange for restrictions when they need to interact with others, and in my humble opinion they also lose out in opportunities to continue learning from others. This is so because freedom, liberty, is now much more complex than just being free to speak or do what you want.
The freedoms to: learn, experiment, invent, travel, communicate instantly,
among other modern freedoms, require us to work with others and achieve results by means of leadership and cooperation, both. These modern freedoms, including the freedom to think creatively, the freedom to be different, are not achieved by returning to our past as lonely cave dwellers, or small forest tribes, or any other “exclusionary” lifestyles. The only exception I can think of is when we purposefully do so for a short period of time in order to hone a skill or learn something special that requires extreme privacy (as the mystics and spiritual searchers sometimes do). Otherwise, our very presence in a small exclusionary group can limit our freedom to create a better future as we work very hard at reliving the destiny of those that came before us: Traditions are useful for teaching children, but not for adults who want to expand their freedoms and help humanity thrive and expand beyond what we now consider normal.
New freedoms, such as those mentioned above, are part of what I call the 21st Century Renaissance (the Space Renaissance), because we have the option of human expansion beyond our lonely planet. Disruptive technologies of all sorts are transforming how we live, how we communicate, travel, get lodging, etc. and as new expressions of freedom, are often opposed by the powerful elites who wish to protect the status quo. Do you want to exercise new freedoms? Do you want to continue living better than your parents did? Or do you want to go back to the age of outhouses and uneducated masses?
Freedom must be earned every day, and I invite you all to expand your minds to identify the different opportunities every day offers for you to be more free, more creative, and… to achieve your dreams.
Manuel (Manny) Perez, CAMS, MPA is a certified Master Coach with Coaching Hispano USA, and specializes in helping entrepreneurs and dreamers achieve their goals. His corporate, government and non-profit experience make him a powerful community leader and motivational speaker capable of working with all sorts of innovators and people who exercise their freedoms. He is also president of Space Renaissance USA and Co-Chair of the Cryptocurrency Standards Association, and an elected representative of his local community in Queens, NYC.
Manuel (Manny) Perez, CAMS, MPA is a certified Master Coach with Coaching Hispano USA, and specializes in helping entrepreneurs and dreamers achieve their goals. His corporate, government and non-profit experience make him a powerful community leader and motivational speaker capable of working with all sorts of innovators and people who exercise their freedoms. He is also president of Space Renaissance USA and Co-Chair of the Cryptocurrency Standards Association, and an elected representative of his local community in Queens, NYC.