It may seem unexpected to suggest that freedom is a lost value. Are we not in a democracy? Are we not even, according to some conservatives, “too free” and not responsible enough? Perhaps we have been so in the second half of the twentieth century, but things have changed imperceptibly. We live in the era of automatons and the art of being free is lost. Worse, the total monitoring of our actions, coupled with an ubiquitous police of thought, makes us live rather in a period of totalitarianism, even if apparently smiling.
Intelligent and different minds, in times of freedom, make their ideas heard without fear. Today, they prefer to keep quiet because ideology is back. And indeed a unique form of thought is established, one that is most compatible with commercialism: the freedom to consume outweighs the freedom of expression, so that those who do not agree with the values or the absence of values of our civilisation seem doomed to identify with so-called “reactionary” thoughts: nationalism, traditionalism, communism. Radical Utopians today are moribund because they are precarious; or they are confused with the creators of digital start-ups. At first, the latter have a seductive language that everyone takes for a desire to create a better world. Then we realise that they work mainly for the success of a completely deregulated capitalism, imposing their market shares in an oligopolistic way. They are ambiguous beings, as is freedom today, between progress and subjugation, which La Boétie called “voluntary servitude”. What is happening?
Capitalism has absorbed communism, not by killing it, but by merging with some of its characteristics. First, the bureaucracy. It infiltrates everywhere today: the natural is the enemy of the regime. It is necessary that the words and gestures of the worker are controlled, conformed, timed, corseted. Everyone spends too much time filling out forms, which are not more lightweight because they are online. Then, egalitarianism. The hunt for elitism and difference is a war against the heads that stick above the values of the system. We want the lowest common denominator. Under the pretext of humanism, we create regiments of sentimental idiots, infantilized, incapable of logical thought and firm decision. We produce a uniform humanity, and behind speeches of tolerance we prepare the automata of tomorrow. A humanity, a Reich, and a führer who has no face, because his name is Big Brother. George Orwell was right when he described 1984: it’s happening today.
But this painting is too black, and a flame remains, of course. Freedom is in our hearts, buried somewhere under comfort, conformism and the fear of loneliness or social rejection. What is then true freedom? To live the life that our soul suggests to us, to make the world our intimate co-creation, and to cultivate early enough the necessary intelligence to understand our desires, keeping the noblest, the most authentic. To be free is to be able to surround ourselves with peers and create the community we wish to create without artificial obstacles. Freedom is about being aware of our automatisms. It is obvious that we are beings of protocol, of conditioning, if only because we are prisoners of a language, of an era, a society, laws, our body. But by understanding ourselves we gain the right to say NO to those who do not understand us or who do not want to understand us. In the end, freedom is the love of mutual understanding rather than common imitation. Freedom is the love of parallel universes, of possibilities. It is the fidelity to the idea that whatever our comfort, or our distress, a world that is no longer open to radical change, to experimentation, and to the consideration of all ideas without moralistic condemnation, a world that is not multiple and deeply pluralistic, is a dead world. Liberty is, as Rabelais put it, a temple above which is marked the formula Do what you want. When we have solved the political equation in which every living being does what she wants, we will have crealised the state of freedom. It is an asymptotic utopia, an impossible one, but one can be faithful to its ideal. Because if you do not target the stars you will not not take one step forward.
