Freedom is an illusion of the mind

Many people will claim that they have the freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want. This statement is probably one of the biggest lies that you will ever be told in your life, and most of the people who strongly believe this do not really understand just how little freedom they possess. Firstly what exactly is freedom. It is simply the act of acting, speaking or doing whatever you want without any hindrance or obstacle against it. However freedom is an illusion, an impossible goal to try and reach. Our freedom, the choices we make and the decisions we make are all affected by society, by laws, by peer pressure and countless other factors.

Society prohibits us from doing many things, not only by the laws that are created in society, but by the values and such that are in society. Say for example, you could not walk about around in public butt naked, because society frowns down upon such things and therefore doing such a thing is not allowed by society. If one were to do this society would shun you and you would probably end up in a jail or such for a charge against you. It is not the laws that stop many people from doing bad things or things that are looked down by society, but more of what other people think of them. This is the same reason that consumerism is so powerful, because society itself has caused people to give too much care about what others think of them. Another way in which people’s freedoms are curbed are by how little say they have on their life. If the government were to deicide tomorrow that all prices of eggs were going to go up by a dollar, then we would have very little say in it and most probably would not be able to do much to change it.

Freedom is an illusion of the mind, and our mind changes our freedom beliefs to fit with what society agrees with at that time. The only possibly true way to achieve freedom in a society would be to have an anarchist society, where there you could truly be free to whatever you wanted. However is too much freedom really a good thing. Probably not. Freedom is good up to a limit, up till they start to become too much of a nuisance to society. For example freedom should not be misused to spread lies in an attempt to overthrow the government, nor should it be used to create civil unrest in society. However the most important rule of freedom, and the one where upon breaking you would lose your own freedom, would be that your freedom should never curb someone else’s freedom. Everyone should have equal freedom and if someone were to ever take away someone else’s right to freedom then that person does not deserve to have freedom.

However as of now, freedom is merely used as an illusion so that corporation or governments can use it to pacify people when they make a unfavorable decision against the people. As I’ve said, freedom is an illusion.