An uncontrollable desire for freedom and submission

Blazing new trails and charting one's own destiny toward a full and complete reality seems to demonstrate an instinctive desire, inseparable from the human condition in the secular world we inhabit: the constant search for freedom. Whatever form it may take, various narratives, works, and books have carefully presented us with utopian and dystopian scenarios that play with the manipulation of freedom.

Ursula K. Le Guin, in one of her science fiction novels, ended up sketching the world ofThe Dispossessed, an anarchist, utopian society where the beings who inhabit the planet of Anarres narrate their break from the oppressive, inhumane, and capitalist world they once inhabited. On Anarres, as in the reality we live in, even though the relationship with nature is more balanced and the understanding of hierarchies is different from the capitalist world, Le Guin firmly demonstrates the prevailing dichotomy that exists between the desire to be free and the desire to submit to a certain order or dynamic.

Although many may fiercely confront the duality that exists between these two poles by condemning human existence between firm and insoluble paradigms, we admit that, perhaps, there is an intrinsic and inseparable coexistence between freedom and power. Between black and white, the harsh shades and grays that surround the utopian and dystopian worlds of this society end up generating not only different possibilities of how we can access freedom, but how we can detect that we are being subjected to power.

Current world politics follows a rigid positivist norm. In it, we believe that we belong to a continuous and permeable wheel, which has layers that initially seem accessible. Falsely, we push our practices toward an endless void. The popular custom of “where there's a will, there's a way” is silently introduced into our way of thinking, provoking an uncontrollable desire to achieve what we want intuitively. If we fail, we are led to failure, as if the fact that there are more closed doors than open ones were the fault of the common citizen. Even if we can analyze it coldly, the freedom we want to grasp is subjected, vulnerable.

Karl Marx points out that “[…]men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please... the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The answers and results end up demonstrating that even when we act with free will, we are driven by market interests, internalized political biases, or a prevailing inertia. This deep entanglement of what we should or should not do ends up creating practices in our daily lives where utopia appears as a distant matter, always unattainable, represented by the deepest desire of every man.

Utopia reveals a safe, egalitarian, and upright world. Absolute. Where each individual lives in full happiness, complete. Life in this world is unquestionable, just like the intimate individual desire for freedom. Augusto Cury said that freedom is a utopia, and perhaps it is. I do not know. What is at stake in this case is how a utopia is presented, what means were used to put it forward, and what the cost of living utopically is. What does it mean to feel safe, equal, and upright? Happy, perhaps?

Curiously, we live in a period in which access to information is disseminated in an untamable way. This can sometimes be confused with freedom, with democratization, with happiness. The permission for there to be no control over what we read or access, whether through the Internet or smart devices, can give the false clue that we are entering a reality without limits.

One of the basic ideas of the modern nation-state is based on the concept that to be part of something, a country, for example, it is necessary for everyone to work connectedly and share a common goal. Even if there are inequalities between individuals, everyone moves toward continuous progress, for which they are granted access to the proposal of a full life suggested by the State. The nation-state is founded on a cultural, social, and political medium, as it is based on national identity, a sense of belonging to a certain community, and the promise of prosperity that depends intrinsically on access to information.

“For the favors or sub-favors, for the gains or re-gains achieved with tyrants, there are finally almost as many for whom tyranny seems profitable as there are those for whom freedom would be pleasant.”

This voluntary servitude that Étienne De La Boétie comments on can be established in the critique of the culture that common means of information exert. The deceptive promise of freedom that permeates the democratization of information lies in the fact that access to information or culture is not generated with a goal of cohesion or inclusion, but rather in a project of incorporation into submission.

The ethical and critical function of how to understand the culture that is disseminated is developed precisely in analyses of the knowledge-power relationship that ended up building the system of domination we live in. How we know and what we know, always in a certain way, will have consequences on how we elaborate the meaning and value of our lives. For this, it is necessary to understand the political and ethical function that this “democratic” access ends up generating through its practices. In a utopian world, free access to information leads us to an apathetic state of silence and manipulation. In a broad sense of the word, a utopian world of mere “cultured” individuals represents the acceptance that power is legitimate to inject its oppressive maneuvers freely, imperceptibly.

On the other hand, continuing to question and suspect what our knowledge feeds and legitimizes regarding power dangerously leads us to abandon the fundamental question of knowledge and emancipation, and the foundational trust that thinking together has the capacity to transform life. This transformation occurs, necessarily, when we think: not only by developing theories, but when we interrupt the ideological harassment that arrives every day as a constant noise through media bubbles. It is in this reflective moment of elaborating human experience that we not only break our chains but separate ourselves from the collective enterprise of current society to seek complete emancipation and freedom.

“The main task in life is to give birth to oneself and to become what one potentially is. Erich Fromm, when analyzing human existence in relation to its ties of freedom, submission, and control, comments that the search for freedom and the rejection of submission rest on the elaboration of life conditions themselves. In other words, it is about obtaining a life that meets the conditions of freedom and dignity, always in relation to the aspirations of our personal perceptions. It is, without a doubt, the counterpoint to the idea that even in the existence of a common environment, it does not necessarily mean that this environment is equally accessible to everyone, or that there is an ideal abstract model into which we can incorporate ourselves. Utopia deceptively defines the edges of an existence; dystopia is precisely the breaking of the umbilical cord of submission.

Being surrounded by dense, gray, suffocating smoke feels like a scene from a movie about a dystopian world we don't want to live in. A terrifying film about a distant future, where flying cars inhabit the atmosphere, afraid to touch their feet to the ground. Earth, in this context, is a hostile environment of virtual simulations, incorruptible dictatorships, oppressive leaders, and a mass subjected to the power of the machine. In it, man, in the absence of God, has longed for an artificial intelligence that was better than his own. Technology presents itself as a new mysticism.

In this totalitarian world, what we see is the irreversible degradation of human conditions.

The fire that consumed the Amazon rainforest, long before the alarm sounded on Monday, August 19, 2019, left unforgivable traces on a future of the past similar to a dystopian scenario presented in films like Blade Runner or Brazil. Here, it is difficult to imagine a utopia when the viable paths inspire nothing more than despair.

The doubts are multiple and yet they persist—indivisible. The consequences of our actions and the consequences of our knowledge represent the irreversibility of deeds. On the other hand, it is through opposition to the irreversibility of deeds that we find the slightest hope of freedom, for it resides in never ceasing to develop a reciprocal activity of conquest. Of recomposing spaces, remaking meanings, and learning to build a trust that we can access regarding what is fundamental and basic.

This crosses our fundamental conditions of human experience, of dignity and freedom. For it is during the path of opposition to submission that we reach utopia, and not when we arrive there.

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Laura Del Vecchio Lança is an editor at Envisioning as a social definition. A philosopher by wandering profession.‍