Transcending Freedom

As the light comes down through the House in long yellow columns, the way sunlight catches the mourning dove’s iridescent patch at the throat, shifting a still pink to the most beautiful green, reminds me of a field I have never seen.

The field is in Fujian Province. Rice paddies terraced on the hillside, each one hand-cut, and sweet potato vines hung lowly across the ground. Stone walls holding each terrace built by whoever came before. The soil, dark and wet and smelling of everything that ever grew or decomposed in it and becoming the lifeline for the next thing to grow. Hundreds of years of waking to the same senses. It was paradise. So, we grew in it, and so did the birds, and they moved through the light like they owned the air.

That’s when the first shots rang out. At the birds and then at each other. Because of an idea.

The idea had traveled a long way by the time it reached Fujian. Born in a London library where Karl Marx watched the factory owners keep the labor and pay back pennies, deciding that the arrangement of labor was not inevitable. It was a choice humanity had made badly and could make differently, and the idea had developed an appetite of its own, traveling as a little red cover with a new name on it. We thought we hungered for this new economic freedom.

The irony being that the People were not supposed to hunger. The People’s grain, the People’s quota, the People’s sparrows declared enemies of the People. Everything was the People’s. After the Chairman said sparrows were enemies of the People, the villages rose up and chased the birds from branch to branch, and the fields went quiet.

We used to think that was freedom. Before this was landlords, and the landlords owned the field your grandfather cleared and your father flooded and you planted every spring before sunrise. They held a deed, and this deed was older than any of us. This was tradition, and this tradition became natural. Before the landlords were the dynasties, and before the dynasties were the warlords, and before the warlords were whoever was strongest that season, and the arrangement always felt the same. Someone held that deed, and someone worked in the field: never were they in the same hands. Soil that gave everything and away nothing. The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas. Did we ever have a choice?

The other idea also came when we left. Older than Marx, but confident in the ways that ideas are confident when they have already won. Life. Liberty. Property. The field belongs to the man who works it because God and nature said so first, and the Americans wrote it into law. All men are created equal, and the invisible hand of the market rewards the man who works the hardest. And, the man who works the hardest is the man who is most free: freedom is you, alone, in possession of yourself. We had never heard anything like it, and some of our ancestors tried crossing the Pacific towards that sentence. The hand sorted us into laundries and restaurants, into the jobs nobody else would take.

I used to think that was freedom. But freedom, it turns out, is heavier than it sounds. To be truly free is to be alone, and to be truly alone is a kind of terror most people will do anything to escape. Strip away these external authorities, and so we did. A self with no architecture, raw and exposed and looking for something. We all turned to our different authorities, and the invisible hand reached into the chest and took the last thing left. What it replaced belonging with was buying and into this dream we bought.

You bought the identity, the community, the ritual, the sense that your life is moving toward something. We ate ourselves to this hunger. America packaged this and called it the free market, and for a moment, it looked like the invisible hand had finally won when in 1992 the last competing idea fell. Yet, the richest country in history has the top ten percent of households owning over seventy percent of the wealth and almost forty trillion dollars in debt. Addicted, indebted, and lonely. Is that really freedom?

Here is the human condition underneath all the conditions. Every system we have ever built was an attempt to answer the same question: what do I owe and what is owed to me and what does any of it mean? The dynasty said: obey. The collective said: disappear. The market said: earn. The self said: consume. Some turned to nationalism. Some to consume. Some to screens and substances and anything that numbed the question long enough to sleep. Some turned to work. Some turned to love. We turned to every authority that promised to hold the question still long enough to answer it. And, none of them could.

I tried turning to our society’s God. What did our God say?

Each religion promised a different kind of freedom. The Greeks had many gods, and three women sat at a loom to cut our fate. We were entertainment for them. The Hindus said the self is not the problem, an illusion and this cycles through births and deaths measured by the coin of karma. We just kept cycling. The Buddha made self a construction of universal suffering, and so we had to detach from the outcome. The Quran told us to surrender, and this surrender is in God’s will. The Christians said that we should accept God’s grace: His son died for our sins.

Each one promises freedom. Freedom through dharma, freedom through removing desire, freedom through submission, freedom through grace, freedom through spirituality; each one carries their own genuine truth, and each one gets institutionalized. Each institution reproduces hierarchy, and they take their harvest somewhere else. That is the structure, and every building has its own mystery to hold up.

Which one then should I believe in to be free?

I stopped asking that. The question assumed someone else was going to answer it. Every system I had tried was built on that assumption: that the right ideology, the right God, the right proof would arrive and hand me the freedom I was looking for. I had been waiting my whole life inside a cage I did not build, looking for the person who would unlock it from outside. Nobody was coming.

And if nobody was coming, then the question changed. Not which God can save me. Not which system finally delivers the freedom it promised. But what I can actually do, today, with the body and the history I have, to reduce the amount of suffering in the field I can reach. I started looking at reason because every liberation I had tried was a transaction. The reason of science. So, I turned to science.

The enemy now instead was mystery itself: irrationality. Everything must be logical. We mapped the genome, split the atom, and went to the moon. We eradicated smallpox from the earth. We learned to save entire families with a single needle. We built the Large Hadron Collider, and we sent Voyager 1 past the edge of the solar system. We transplanted hearts and all kinds of organs. We built across all of nature. We flew, too. We did all of this and much more. It felt like there was nothing that science could not solve.

The promised land was genuinely beautiful. Science had already done things no dynasty or collective or invisible hand could have managed. It had no Pope, no Party, no landlord. It had only evidence, and this evidence depended on reality. Pure science had no hierarchy. So, I started to align my life towards this belief.

Still, science, it turned out, could not stay clean any more than anything else could. The same science that achieved all of that also gave us leaded gasoline, addictive drugs, atomic weapons, and a global warming problem slowly killing everyone. The same science that is trying to replace humans. The same science following us to a freedom from nature is the same science that is also following us to our own destruction.

And as the sunlight comes down one last time, I can see the innocent dove fly into its own freedom, unknown of any cage. It does not know which God is correct. It does not know about the deed or the quota or the sparrow campaign. It does not know about the dangers or benefits of humanity. It glides in the wind not knowing any of this, and the not-knowing is not ignorance.

I am on the other side of the glass. I held my hand against the flashing sunlight, and all I could see was nothing. Every system. Every God. Every proof. Reduced finally to a brightness I could not look directly at and a darkness behind my hand. And in that darkness, I understood what the dove already knew: that the field was never waiting for the right answer. It just gave. The family received it. Nobody called it freedom. It just was.

That meant everything.