We tell ourselves a story about liberty. The stories we learned in schools, in books, in whispered dreams across the marble halls of those who hold powers and etched into the morrows we hold so dear. In those stories, liberty is purpose, the North Star, constant and bright, an inheritance sacred quest passed down from the enlightened and founders of history.
The thoughts were like a prayer. We invoke Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, the founding fathers, the revolutionaries, as if reciting from a book of psalms. Adorned the word “freedom” on our coffee mugs, journals, political flags, and even our own lives, chanting it until the syllables became smoother than our own names. We have come to assume that liberty is the very air around us. Invisible. Essential. Ever-present.
But what if the stories were incomplete? What if it was a camouflage of something entirely different?
What if the dominant political language of the modern world in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere hold for the world a different meaning? What if it was another stories where Fascist became heroes, and Communists became nationals? What if it is a beautiful cage made by both of them and we were the victims? What if it was the union of both where they no longer opposite each other, rather they were united against you?
Beneath the surface of our modern thoughts, there is a quieter, more unsettling stories, mutated and changed to nourish the dark sides of our ways of understanding terms. It transformed the very language we use to describe freedom into a language masked by rational choices and neutrality to guide us in the intended direction. An effective instrument of our containment. It is no longer about speaking the names of a villain in a black cloak or satanic entity of religious dogma. It is about the subtle architect, precise and directed engineering to redesign the landscape of the human consciousness itself.
Liberalism present itself as a reflection of those who sought it. Holding the flags of common sense, the end of historical messiness carried by the conflict between right and left, between kings and religions. But what if it was just another ideology? What if the story was something different? What if the promises of a world of moderation, where everyone is considered as a rational actor, a sovereign self, navigating a world of choices is nothing more an elegant equation while the essentials of the liberty quietly changed?
All sides of the political slogan showed how power is made to maintain itself and preserve its existence. Their ability to crush humanity throughout the history. Left, right, religions, kings they all wield the sword against the people to maintain their sovereignty. Liberalism, is not an exception, nevertheless it performed its violence in a sterile, surgical way in white-coated room. It borrowed the words of “intervention.”, “collateral damage”, “and adjustment.” to neutralize the same exercise of power, of conquer, of exploitation. It uses a clean, bureaucratic, devoid of blood or tears language to hide all of its ideological principles, and creating of the otherness.
The ultimate expression of those exercises is what we now call neoliberalism. The same story that twisted inward by enforcing an image of existence that defined the proper human existence that suit its agendas. One of its most grounded framework was the successes redefining terms in its favor. Painting what it means to be free means is to be an “entrepreneur of the self.” Human beings are no longer human, souls, citizens, or member of a community. We are a start-up of one, a tiny corporation with a single employee. Our value determined by the market. Our freedom is our purchasing power. Our lives is a portfolio managed against the very systemic risks the sovereign powers create for us. Our failure is no longer a matter of their controlled circumstance, conflict of powers, it is a character flaw. Poverty stopped from being theft of resources; it is now a lack of hustles. Sickness is a poor investment in wellness. Every wound is the one fault if we listen long enough.
The new concept flatters us with the language of autonomy while binding us to the wheel of perpetual conflicts to feed the monstrous engine that keep their wealth and sovereign power over us.
It whispers, “You are free,” while teaching us to build our own prisons, brick by brick, and delivering the power to them to be our jailers.
Perhaps its most insidious feat is its ability to consume our longing for something else. Replacing our deepest rebellions against the sovereign powers with seeds of cultivated psychoses. Planted over the years, harvested, packaged, and sold back to us as a call of freedom. Now we are the enemy. From the Feminism who becomes a branded lifestyle of “leaning in.”, prostitution-zing sexuality, learning how to defeat the man and how much more they can get. The Gender and Identity conflict for whoever wish to change the nature, to reach the point the only matter is to keep the shopping spree. The human spirit it self are flattened into aesthetics, another genre of content in the managed carnival of dissent. We perform our liberation for likes, mistaking visibility for power, and consumption for change.
For our mistakes we have, in a sense, consented to our own haunting. We have learned to police toning ourselves, to discipline our own souls to fit the market’s demand. We adopted to become a tool of “governmentality.” a power works through seduction to serve the sovereign powers lies behind the seen. We are persuaded to complicity. We offer our data, our attention, our very lives, and call it connection. We burn out and call it passion. We curate our authenticity and call it freedom. In reality we have learnt to become the perfect salves to the same masters we hated through the history of our existing.
We are living a great and terrible irony, the one we supported, the one we accepted. an that shouts of liberty from the rooftops, while a quiet, desperate powerlessness gathers in the basement of our hearts. We have more choices than ever, and less sense of true rationality. It is the trade we made. We are drowning in the spectacle of freedom, dying of thirst for the real thing.
So what is to be done? We must, I believe, learn to tell the stories, we must know how. Or perhaps, reclaim the oldest one.
This begins with a simple, radical act of separation. We must untangle two words that have been fused together: liberty and liberalism.
Liberalism is an ideological system of management. It is a political genius structure invented by the sovereign power, of both sides, to administering life. It speaks of rights while only give them as privilege. It preaches freedom while imprison those who seek for it.
But, however, the true meaning of our shouts is something entirely different from being a product that can be bought or a privilege to be given. It is the native language of the human soul. The capacity to breathe, to feel, to think, to love, and to connect. It is the essential right to grow with proper education and acknowledgement to define those structure, and stand against them. to stand for justice, conscious It is the courage to define a meaningful life in concert with the others. It is the “freedom of the best interest of human beings” not the “freedom to step on others”
The real freedom is not the right to speak, to vote, or to choose from a menu designed to keep the power authorities over our lives. It is the right to sit at the table and help write the menu.
Freedom is not personal, it is collective. When we really understand it, we will understand that no one is free until we all become free. Liberty is the freedom to belong to one another, to care for one another, to build a world where our worth is measured by the depth of our humanity.
The modern world has given us one in abundance, while starving us of the other. It has taught us how to escape our chains by being part of the conflict, it striped us our choices, leaving us standing in an empty field, wondering what to do with our unshackled hands if we chose them.
The real work of freedom begins when we choose each other, not when we chose to serve egos and flags against each other. It begins when we stop confusing the map and remember that the cage, for all its gilding, is still a cage.
The cage of Liberalism, is similar to cage of Fascism, conservativism, and communism, designed to keep the same powers over us, it is the same cage and it was not built in a day. To understand the architecture of our containment, the historical mutations, the economic foundations, and the complete capture of our political imagination by the dark twin of liberty, reach out to read the full critique before publication. My promises hold a deep, unsettling, and necessary journey into the heart of our political imagination. The full work delivers what I believe oriented view of the liberal ideology, in hope that it would help us make more conscious and acknowledged decision when we have.