Freedom or Liberation

“Freedom,” in recent years, has become even more of a rallying cry than usual in the United States. Conservative Republicans, and, in particular, those devotees of our last President, but also those who hearken back to the ‘good old days’ of Ronald Reagan, have used the cry for ‘my freedom’ as a cudgel to bludgeon opponents and justify their own intransigence in the face of what they call ‘government tyranny.’ Especially higher taxes, or government demands to wear face masks to protect oneself and others from Covid-19, or to abide by social-distancing requirements for the same reason, are seen as unwarranted and oppressive government intrusions—outrageous limits to the “freedom” that every American is guaranteed. 

            “Freedom to” people also tend to deny the second important freedom category—“freedom from.” This freedom includes the freedoms aimed mostly at less-well-off or impoverished people: the freedom of low-wage workers fromexploitation by rapacious businesses; the freedom of African Americans from slavery—a freedom that even a violent Civil War was not able to guarantee; a freedom that thousands had to fight for, even after that war, to get it enforced, and which, to this day, has never been fully implemented; the freedom of every American, including children, from hunger, from homelessness, from grossly deficient and costly medical care, from food deserts that lack access to nourishing and healthful food; and freedom from industrial corridors which pollute—with carbon emissions, toxic chemicals, poisoned earth and water sources—the very air that people must breathe, and the water they must drink. 

We should also note here that another significant word for freedom in our history is “Independence.” Enshrined in perhaps America’s most famous document, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, this idea of freedom declared the right of the American colonies to be free from the tyranny of English kings, thereby setting America on its ‘sanctioned-by-nature’ independent and democratic course. But it did more. As its preamble states,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

 

Of course, most of us have realized in recent years that the grand notion, “all men are created equal,” omitted significant chunks of humanity: women, who comprised half the population, and all those slaves brought from Africa, and immigrants from certain countries, and so on. So it seems that the Creator, in the minds of the founding geniuses who adopted this document, endowed mainly white men of property with those “unalienable Rights” to life and liberty (yet another word for freedom) and happiness. All others need not apply. And being deprived of this right was a big deal, since the idea of independence became the pre-eminent American ideal. The quintessential American, that is, believes himself not bound or connected or beholden to anyone; believes himself to be (or has the right to be) absolutely self-sufficient; able to provide for self and family, with no need for help from, or interference from, any government, domestic or foreign. And we teach this ideal to children almost from the day they take their first step. ‘You can do it yourself.’ The same goes for the nation as a whole: we insisted on being free of British taxes; free of all interference by any outside nation; and free from reliance on anyone: any other nation; any union of nations; any outside maker or grower or armed defender of anything. We independent Americans are said to have all we need right here, including millions of lethal weapons to defend ourselves, once we ‘make America great again.’ Free again. 

Without getting too deeply into it, of course, anyone with a modicum of knowledge about how things actually work can see that this notion of total self-sufficiency is, perhaps, the most dangerous and damaging illusion of all. Why? Because it relies on a complete denial of what we know about human social relations, botany, biology, and physics. No single entity, that is, has ever been, or ever can be totally free and independent. From the very beginning of our lives, we must rely on others: our mothers first, and our fathers, and families, and, in the very recent past, our tribe members, or our neighboring villagers, or, in today’s complex societies, our neighbors and fellow citizens—depend on them to abide by common rules such as stopping at traffic lights, or picking up their garbage, or contributing to the roads and bridges we all rely on, or not stealing into our houses at night to ransack them, or not playing loud music at three in the morning. Countless observances like these are required to make complex societies work. 

And this does not even begin to take account of the myriad inter-dependencies we have with the non-human world: the plants that supply our world with the green matter that serves us as  food, and the oxygen that allows us to breathe; the bacteria that supply our soil with nutrients, and without whose presence, in our gut, we could not even digest our food; the trees that form the soil we depend on to grow crops, and which manage the CO₂ that is overwhelming our planet because so many have been removed to profit a few; the oceans that supply fish and countless other nutrients and life itself, all of which are now at risk due to over-fishing and pollution and global warming and acidification; the rivers and aquifers that supply our drinking and irrigation water, that in many places has begun to run out. One could go on almost indefinitely, but the point has perhaps been made: no human being could survive for a second without the prior help of the organisms and natural elements that are the necessary precursors and support of us all.  

Large portions of our lives, in short, are built on illusions, the predominant one being the grand illusion of independence. And this brings us to yet another, deeper, and diametrically-opposed definition of freedom, of liberation: the one propounded by Gautama, the historical Buddha, nearly three thousand years ago. Gautama spoke about liberation in his most fundamental teachings. But the liberation he promised was not freedom from all earthly constraints or pains, but rather awareness of them, and thereby, of liberation from suffering. Because, as he expounded it, there was a cause of suffering, and it was due mostly to the clinging and attachment to the very things that those deluded by independencevalue most of all: the idea that they themselves are substantial and permanent; that everything they desire is similarly substantial and permanent and can be owned, kept, hoarded from others; and will not change; in short, delusionally attached to notions that the world and its objects can be controlled for their personal benefit, and separated from the nexus of relations in which they are embedded. This is what the Buddha realized himself, and then taught: that all this self-ishness was due to ignorance—the first of what he called “the three poisons” (the other two being greed and hatred.) For when he awakened, he saw that there were no “things” in and of themselves. Rather, every thing that appears to our minds as independent (including our very selves) is, in reality, dependent on all else. He called this “inter-dependent co-arising:” meaning that nothing comes into existence on its own; everything co-arises in cooperation with some other thing or many other things. In short, nothing IS on its own. Everything depends inherently and ineluctably on other “things” that co-arise with it. This interdependent co-arising is how real reality actually works. 

One has only to think of oneself. In order for one to be born, one’s parents had to come together by the agency of countless other conditions and events, social, biological, global. But even that hardly scratches the surface of what is involved in the forming of even one human being. First comes the biology of human growth from that initial fertilized cell, all of which is controlled not by anyone, but by evolution—e.g., the pre-ordained processes of cell growth into organs and blood and the billions of cells that we are. Most of these have been developed over eons via organic evolution—the chemical processes by which cells produce energy, how those cells come together to produce all the organs necessary for life, and how the female body nourishes and gives birth to that life. And how it grows. All done without human will or control. But even beyond that production of life from apparently nothing, the survival of that living entity, once it emerges into the world, is dependent on thousands of other constantly changing events and processes. That is to say, aside from the mostly instinctive nurturing that it requires, no organic being could survive without the work of plants upon which it relies for food, animals that can digest plants indigestible to humans to supply it with protein nourishment, and bacteria within its gut that make it possible to digest what it eats. This is not even to mention the plants that turn sunlight into green matter, without which animals like us would not have appeared in the first place. And trees and soil bacteria and fungi that produce the soil upon which plants depend. 

And yet, most humans insist on clinging to their own misguided notion of independence: their supposed freedom to ignore all other entities to accumulate and own and do whatever they wish to whomever they wish, without regard for the embeddedness of every thing in everything else (the results of this ignorance are now coming back to haunt us). The three poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance are what Buddha called the source of this grand illusion. And the freedom or liberation he offered involved seeing this embeddedness, seeing it and letting go of the illusion of independence. 

In short, the freedom, the liberation the Buddha offered was the exact opposite of what the conventional meaning of freedom and independence offers to the average American—and to people of most other advanced industrial countries, especially western ones. Whereas the conventional idea of freedom offers more and better access to the apparent goodies and delights of this world, Buddhism offers a path by which to see through these illusory and temporary satisfactions, and find true liberation. And that true liberation involves not the desperate and doomed-to-fail immersion in always-changing comfort and security, but rather a way to see that this immersion, this endless craving is precisely what leads to suffering (I want it; I deserve it as much as that person; why can’t I have it?). And that the way out of suffering involves seeing, and then the long practice of giving up on all those attempts to change and control life and make it work solely for my benefit, and instead, accepting real life, life as it truly is—good, bad or indifferent. And more than that, not resting in the self-satisfaction of having liberated myself, but rather working to liberate all others mired in the same delusion, by helping them to see the same thing. This last is fundamental, stemming as it does from the realization that no one achieves liberation alone; all liberation comes only in communion with the whole—the whole of sentient life with whom we are embedded, bound, connected, and which, in truth, we are. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi