Albert Camus once wrote that Freedom is nothing but the chance to do better. This quote has stuck with me for a very long time and I find myself often reflecting on what this little nugget of wisdom specifically means and more aptly, how it applies to our contemporary context. Better? Are we doing better? Are we embracing and embodying our supposed and innate radical freedom?
Lately, a quick peruse of the news and/or social media suggests that we, most certainly, are not. This realization (and terror) has led me to consider yet another Existentialist philosopher (Jean Paul-Sartre) and his idea of something called bad faith. Sartre describes bad faith as (please note I am loosely paraphrasing here from Being and Nothingness) as a human tendency in which we use our freedom to, in fact, deny our freedom. I wonder what William Wallace would make of that, huh? You can take my life..... but you'll never take my flat screen TV and pumpkin spice latte…..maybe?!? I don’t know. Do these seemingly simple choices appear that dire or important? I would argue that they are paramount to our continued existence and directly shape the kind of lives we are able to live and aspire to. Bad faith, yeah it’s a thing. It’s an insidious thing that sucks the spirit of humankind dry and enables us to continue to live in the myth of consumerism we have become so comfortably acclimated to.
To deny our own freedom seems to be a highly contentious and counterproductive activity, doesn’t it? We really don’t deceive ourselves, do we? But (“but” is really just an acronym for the “bare underlying truth”) we do this all the time and practice self-deception like a well-honed religion. We deceive ourselves in a myriad of ways on a daily basis with ease and without much effort. Radical freedom is the idea that we can always choose differently. No, this does not imply that we can always control and/or predict our social, political, and economical spheres but we can ALWAYS choose how we react to them or better yet, how we counteract them. We practice self-deception every time we don’t think we have an option in what we buy, what we read, what we watch and even down to what we eat. We choose everyday to either embrace our freedom and/or negate it. I guess the most profound question we can answer in our quest for living well boils down to this: What will I choose?
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Jean-Paul Sartre