There are perhaps dozens of categories of freedom. Religious freedom is taken from those who have it, without giving it to dozens of countries that have never had it. Not a few, today, repeat the buzzword that one’s freedom ends where another’s freedom begins, as if it were all clear.
Many flee from thinking of their inner freedom, the freedom of their own neurons, the freedom of their passions, affections and hearts. And even more flee from linking it to responsibility. It is repeated that thinking is free; and can be; do not forget, however, the unique thought, politically correct, that so many want to impose on us.
Most people like to multiply theories of freedom from social constraints. They forget the constraints of fashion and the biological ones that nobody chooses; and the limiting conditions of freedom that each add up in the illusion of, but nevertheless do not reduce his freedom.
The “catechism” of the French Revolution leads many to think that everything is said with a few words on freedom. Many people are convinced that if they do what they like, they are already free. Despite Nelson Mandela’s centenary with 27 years in prison, many do not wonder how he, while incarcerated, remained liberated in his thinking and being.
There is a certain dread about speaking on debauchery as if there were only freedom with kindness, and people do not abuse it when they relate to others. Nor do many people like to speak of those who lose inner and outer freedom in each repetition of their substance-dependent behaviors and obsessive thoughts and behavioral compulsions. Few like to think that there are many people, perhaps more and more, who behave with reduced freedom in one, two, three and more behaviors.
Are the millions of Anonymous who face, with the Twelve-Step method of Minnesota, some of their behaviors without freedom and without truth, mistaken? At least these put side by side freedom and truth as the opposite to the lie of their life; they put side by side freedom, beauty and kindness of living.
It seems that it is not politically correct and well accepted to say that lie is glued to the lack of freedom, even when it is stated otherwise. Before Pilate, who seemed to want to know the truth about Jesus, he soon became disinterested in hearing Jesus saying that he came to bear witness to the truth (Jn 18: 38-39). Freedom and lying, together, can only be an illusion; the opposite of goodness and beauty of life. Freedom and lies end in corruption and slavery for the liar and others.
This apparent freedom, cooked with lies, cannot lead to the much-vaunted fraternity of the 1789 revolution, nor to the equal dignity of all people.
Equality, proclaimed without the dignity, respected, of all people, is a colossal sociopolitical lie. And why is the statement of the One who fully knows what it means to be free, so forgotten, “you shall know the truth, and it shall make you free”
Fr. Aires Gameiro, OH