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THE granting of social and political “freedom” to the majority of a nation’s population — once so natural to most aboriginal North Americans and Australians — is a relatively new idea in European contexts.

Slavery gave way slowly to serfdom, and serfdom to indenture and oppressive employment practices… but, even today in the most libertarian countries, the ideas of a minimum wage, unemployment benefits and universal housing, health and old age care, suffrage and access to education — basic prerequisites of freedom for society’s poorest people — are widely seen as impositions on the freedom to amass wealth, and often begrudged among those keenest wavers of freedom’s flag, the proprietors of the Western economy. It becomes a contest between two desirable but definition-defying principles: “progress” and “justice”.

It surprised me to see, in Ontario, signs saying something like, “This land is our land, government keep out”: if you deny the very authority that ensures your possession, what are you saying? Don’t protect me? Don’t educate my children? Cut off the hydro? Deny my vehicles access to “your” roads? Deny me health care? Don’t count my vote? Revoke my citizenship? Erase me and my family from government records?

Despite the absurdity of this, it is with rhetoric about the “darkness of injustice” and “shadows of oppression” that The Ontario Landowners’ Association presents its claims that “the urban environmentalist, politicians, bureaucrats and academics covet and thirst over our priceless property”… which is not the tone these same people welcome when, say, aboriginal Canadians point out that their lands were appropriated without payment to provide land “owners” with the ”brightness and freedom” they say has now been reduced to “ but a dim reminder of a bountiful past.”*

The problem is that, as long as we remain social creatures, public freedoms are always negotiated, always antagonistic, always a compromise. Its brokers, as in ancient Rome, have usually been the land-owning wealthiest of the free. Those to whom it’s least extended have always been the poor, the undereducated, the dispossessed and the weak… people like the disemployed petty debtors whose homes are forfeit when banks over-reach their capacities to aggregate interest. Historically, it has too often ended badly, in wholesale bloodshed.

That said, it’s interesting that 4,600 years ago there was a wise king of Sumerian Lagash who, among other reforms, outlawed forced sales and seizures, put other constraints on exploitative enterprise and granted tax relief to widows, orphans and debtors; that, historically, Judaism and Christianity have both found the charging of interest theologically odious; that in a number of early medieval European states charging interest on loans was outlawed; and that Islamic financiers have developed a different form of banking, based on partnership formation, that obviates it.

For the people at the base of the modern Western financial food chain, the social and political freedom that’s granted comes at the cost of insecurity: spurts of consumption and indebtedness in times of surplus; layoffs and foreclosures in times of shortage. And, if there’s a choice, the curtailment of freedom has long been preferred to starvation.

“Freedom”, although it’s long proved an effective battle cry, becomes a mercurial concept when it gets to the detail, and to workable political accommodations. There are “freedoms to…” and “freedoms from…”. There is political freedom, intellectual freedom, academic freedom, economic freedom, religious freedom, press freedom, freedom of travel, freedom of speech and expression, and freedom of association. There is the freedom of the wild, the freedom of consumer choice and the freedom of ownership. It’s nice to be free from violence, bigotry, coercion and fear, “cruel and unusual” punishments, crime, invasion, enslavement, exploitation and unnecessary pain or hardship. And — in even the most ideal of states — the varieties of freedom we want to enjoy tend to impinge on and limit each other. It doesn’t help that individuals and different cultures value some social freedoms more highly than others. It becomes an endless, essential but never entirely satisfactory negotiation, ideally striving for the greatest possible good for the state as a whole and, within the state, for the greatest number of people… with some safety nets added for those least well served.

And, ironically, there is probably no more contentious issue in a healthy, freedom-loving, pluralistic democracy than the extents and boundaries of personal “freedom”.

But, in all of the clangour and turmoil over abutting rights and interests, values and egos, the greatest compromiser of freedom is oneself.


It is some nagging, unworthy thing inside me that resents humility, that gets afraid, that wants what it does not need, that frets about tomorrow and stirs envy towards the strengths or successes of others. It is prickly voices within me that ask “but what if?” when I feel drawn to something unfamiliar. It is the same voices that threaten to throw tantrums when I start tossing out old ideas, old perceptions and old attitudes. They are responsible for my fears and failures, for my possessiveness and insensitivities.

It is the voices within me that urge me to lock doors, and hang back when someone else is hurt, insulted, confused or attacked. They make excuses for me to keep a distance from strangers and encourage me to surround myself with cocoons of entertainment and consumption.

Claiming freedom from this source, from myself, is the most headily exciting form of liberation I know. For one thing, it brings revelation after revelation of ways in which I am not alone and that there is far more beauty in the world than I could previously have imagined. It floods my experience with more vivid colours, more exciting flavours, more alluring forms… it feeds a growing desire to counter in whatever ways I can the ugliness I meet with: the ugliness of cruelty and damaging ways of fear, anger, neglect and ruthless acquisition; the ugliness of power and suspicion and violence against people but also against other creatures and landscapes. “Bad” acts and impulses are always ugly when you see them with any clarity and, too often, they arise from those false voices within.

Breaking free of them is to step into a different, wonderful universe of experience. It frees us from failure because it very quickly becomes clear that each of us is part of a flow of forces that ebb and flow in ways and directions that are not responsive in precise or specific ways to an individual’s best intentions. Individuals are essential, but the actions of one are always affected by, and diminished or magnified by the actions of others. What one person seems to achieve always hinges on the actions and inactions of thousands; what one person seems to inflict out of personal vindictiveness has happened in the same way: released from a flow of malice that is rushed on its way by the actions and inactions of thousands. You and I can join these flows deliberately, or obliviously unaware… but we cannot step aside, and we all share responsibility for the outcomes. Each of us is implicated in whatever comes to pass on the planet: in the causes and the consequences.

Fortunately, it’s extremely rare for a truly free person to choose a life of destruction, ugliness and wanton brutality; these forces are seeded in fears and doubts, anxieties and anger… in failures to forgive and compulsions to judge… and they generate experiences and emotions that are, in absolute terms, as unnecessary as they are damaging.

The truly dangerous way to live is as a prisoner to all those inner voices of fear, anger, envy, self-righteousness, false need and unnecessary doubt, listening to all of those ego-manipulating murmurs of “what if?”… .

The classical Greek stereotype of slaves was negative: slaves were widely held to be fearful, acquisitive, not interested in ideas or beauty, unprincipled, dishonest, ungenerous and self-centred. The “free” person, on the other hand, was recognised as self-sacrificing, generous, learned, principled and acting with integrity and justice for the benefit of all.

Freedom that is simply self-interested offers no freedom as all. And, where one person is denied justice, there can be no assurance of justice for anyone.

The price of freedom is the sacrifice of self-interest.


If we think like slaves to our inner anxieties, we enslave ourselves. It’s only when we risk freeing ourselves from ourselves that all of those widely debated public, social and political freedoms begin to matter or have merit.

*see: the Ontario Landowners Association website: www.ontariolandowners.ca