How Free Are You Willing To Be?
- Susan Edsall
- Aug 1
- 6 min read
At one point during the COVID pandemic I was sitting in the boarding area of my flight from San Francisco to Kailua Kona. I heard the click of the public address system. “We have a policy, for the safety of passengers and crew, to keep our center seats free. However, our flight is completely full, so for any of you who are not concerned about having someone sit next to you, please come up to the podium and let us know and we’ll make that center seat available to those people waiting on standby to travel to see their loved ones.”
They didn’t mention the science behind the policy of physical distancing. They didn’t mention that they wanted the money more than they wanted you not to get COVID. But they still wanted credit for their sacrifice in not selling the middle seat, except when they did sell the middle seat, and then they wanted credit for being family friendly. Or some kind of twisted logic. Kind of hard to sort through that thicket. They made it seem like the people following the CDC guidelines were in the same category as selfish little Johnny on the playground who won’t share the ball.
I remained the selfish, cautious traveler and did not offer up my empty middle seat. But the fellow next to me in the boarding area was evidently one of those on the waitlist eager to travel to see his loved ones. “Fuckin’ A, man.” His head bobbed, his right leg extended into the narrow aisle between seats so no one could wheel their bag through. “I hate them making me wear this fuckin' mask. I’m free, man. America’s supposed to be free.”
“Huh,” I said. “Did you drive to the airport? Do you have a driver’s license? Did the other people on the highway have driver’s licenses? Did the airport McDonalds where you bought that egg sandwich you’re eating pass an inspection by the Health Department so you’re unlikely to get food poisoning? Are you confident that the airplane we’re getting on that’s going to be flying over 600 miles an hour at 35,000 feet has passed safety checks? Are you sure the pilots know how to land the thing?”
“Whadayamean?” he muttered.
“I mean, these are all restrictions on your freedom, on the freedom of other drivers, on the freedom of the restaurant owner, on the freedom of the pilots. I mean being free has nothing to do with you getting your whiny little way about anything that bugs you. We cede our freedom to the collective good all the time and have since our country was founded.”
I was wasting my germy breath.
This young man’s ignorance regarding what is meant by freedom got to me. Increasingly it seems we use the word “freedom” to ennoble whatever contradictory, unthought out thoughts we have to support whatever action we’re going to take no matter what—I’m going to dress like a Viking to destroy the seat of democracy because I’m free. No, you are a violent criminal. You haven’t thought for one difficult, disturbing minute about what it means to be free.
Words and their meanings matter. Shared definitions of words enable us to communicate precisely. Without this it is nothing but babble. The word “nonplussed” is a perfect example. Its original meaning is “surprised and confused so much that you are unsure how to react.” People have used it improperly for so long that a new opposite meaning is now endorsed: “blasé, indifferent.” We don’t know what we’re talking about.
I looked up the word “freedom” and one of the definitions is "the power to act, speak, or think without hindrance or constraint." William Golding’s Lord of the Flies gives a good sense of where that leads. And, in fact, we aren’t free when everyone is acting without hindrance or constraint. We're holed up in our houses with the doors locked and the guns loaded precisely because people are acting without hindrance or constraint.
Freedom has become the Buzzword Bludgeon of the day. We wave our flags to promote our rights to carry weapons of war on the street, not to wear a mask during a pandemic, not to vaccinate our children against measles and to send them to public school. We stuff the word freedom into the lyrics of our country western songs. We fly flags off the back of our pickups or the porches of our houses to shout about it (supplemented by the Pride Flag if you’re a liberal). But we have no common definition, so the word—a word fundamental to the identity of our country—has no shared meaning and therefore communicates nothing. But we don’t actively think about what it means or what it requires. Maybe because it doesn’t occur to us. Maybe because it’s hard and slippery.
But it occurs to me constantly. We can’t be truly free without a clear understanding of what that means personally regarding how we behave.
The communities we belong to—neighborhoods, towns, states, countries—draw all kinds of boundaries that constrain us collectively for the common good. We might personally agree or disagree, but we give assent to individuals who represent us, and in general this has created compromises we can all live with. But that only takes us so far.
Being truly free makes serious demands on the personal thinking and acting of each one of us. It requires that each of us first know what our values are—not as a slogan (God and Country!) but as a deeply rooted understanding of our identity: Who am I? What do I stand for? What does that therefore require of me right now, in this moment?
Your evolving clarity about what your values require of you is a very hot fire to hold your feet to. As you proceed through life awake to your values, you gain deeper and deeper insight into what they mean. And that is the only path to true freedom.
Freedom isn’t the value. Freedom is the state you get to by living in purposeful alignment with your values, particularly as your values are stress-tested in circumstances that life brings your way.
Let’s try this out. I say being free is important to me. Immediately I am in the hotbox of community where I can’t play my music at High G at 11:00 at night. Does that mean I’m not free? No. It means I’m free to choose not to be a jerk.
That's the trouble with our sloppy understanding of the word freedom. It’s not so easy. We use the word easily to our peril. It’s a concept that challenges us to be our highest human selves, but that we use to justify our basest impulses—or our lazy thinking. (I’m not wearing a mask in the pandemic because I’m free, for example.)
And because it can seem esoteric to get very clear on what our values are and how freedom relates to enacting these values, we can feel like we’re chasing our tails, and so we put it aside.
Maybe we like the word freedom, or the idea of it, or we’re used to it as an identifying theme in our country, but the work required to align our thoughts and actions with what it means is asking us to be wide awake to our lives. Freedom will force us to face all kinds of questions as we align our thoughts and actions with our values. How free are we willing to be?
Free enough not to get our way?
Free enough to collaborate on what might be a universally unsatisfying but entirely workable solution?
Free enough not to use money as the only metric of our success?
Free enough to think about what we’re causing that will have an effect we’ll never experience (plastic, climate change, forever chemicals, the absence of teaching art in the schools and so much more)?
That last question is why continuous, rigorous clarity about our values and what they imply about our behavior right now in this moment is so crucial. We are having an effect—likely multiple effects—most of them unknowable. So the only “quality control” that we have in our lives is to be guided by our increasing clarity about who we are—and that means clarity about our own driving values. And when we can align our behavior with those, we will be increasingly free rather than enslaved to our momentary impulses, our unexamined assumptions, our disinterest in expanding our thinking, or our reluctance to change.
True freedom is as demanding as it is exhilarating. When you commit yourself to it, the world opens up wide.
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