A Fool’s Freedom

What makes us free? There are, on the whole, three true types of freedom and one false one. Among the three true types, one is beyond our control, one is ultimately determined by conditions in the larger society, and one is largely under our own control.

The beginnings of a backyard garden.

The false type of freedom, what might be called a fool’s freedom, is largely mistaken as the real meaning of freedom. It is freedom, of a sort, and as the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler notes, we all possess it to some extent: it is the freedom to do (or attempt to do) whatever we want. Note that I have qualified this notion of freedom—we all possess it to some extent. There are, of course, some limits to it. After all, I want to be able to fly, but am limited to not doing this without machine assistance. Or I may want to dig a large garden in my backyard over the weekend, but am limited by my strength and stamina and the tools which I have available (e.g. a pickaxe and a how and a rake) and the prevailing conditions.

Nor is this type of freedom a freedom from consequences [1]. I can enjoy fine dining, but it will cost most of my earnings if I make that my nightly meal. I can enjoy a pint or two with friends, but if I drink too much or too quickly, I can expect to feel tipsy (or worse!). I can leap into the air with hopes of flying, but I must be prepared for the disappointment of a quick landing. This false freedom can be enjoyed if it is rightly ordered—more on this later—but if not rightly ordered it can quickly master and enslave us.

In which was published the novelette "The Ideal Machine."The author John C. Wright briefly summarizes the problems of this kind of freedom in his story The Ideal Machine. In this story, an alien makes first contact with humanity via an elderly priest, Fr. Nicodemus John Jude Rossignol, and leaves him with a gift: the ideal machine, which is capable of transforming matter into its ideal form. Thus, for example, the machine can create material wealth or transform a body into its perfected (resurrected) form [2]. Fr. Nicodemus encounters two navy pilots, Lts. Hynkel and Tyler, to whom he attempts to give the machine. He asks them, “Absolute power, Gentlemen! What would you do if you had it?” To this question, Tyler responds:

“I’d wish for a perfect body, endless life and eternal youth, and that I would be invited to live at the Playboy mansion, complete with hot- and cold-running booze, and hot- and hotter-running girls, and the age of consent would be lowered by two years in case one of them was sixteen, and any drugs I could name would be made legal, and McDonald’s would open for business again, selling any drinks of any size they damn well please.

“I wouldn’t ask for the cure for cancer, or AIDS, or terminal stupidity, or anything like that. All I would wish for would be to live and let live.

“And I’d end up like a total pig, surrounded by empty beer cans and empty Big Mac wrappers and empty-headed babes with big boobs, and I would probably wind up killing myself out of boredom.” [3]

I do not mean here that the freedom to do whatever we want is always bad, but rather that it can lead to bad philosophy of life—hedonism and its attendant philosophical errors—which in turn leads to a bad end. The freedom to do whatever we want leads to the consequence of being enslaved by our passions—these passions together are a cruel mistress.

Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne

The Platonist Apuleius taught that demons were subject to “every faucet of human emotion,” and that since they lacked self control and any other virtues, they were “tossed about on the stormy seas of their imaginations.” Saint Augustine takes up this theme in his City of God, writing that Aupuleius was arguing that the demons lacked the condition necessary for happiness, but that they were wretched, because

“Their mind…far from being steeped in virtue and thus protected against any surrender to irrational passions of the soul, was itself in some measure liable to disturbances, agitations, and storms of passion, the normal condition of foolish minds…

“It is not any of the lower part of the souls of demons that Aupuleius describes as agitated as if by raging seas and storms of passion; it is their mind, the faculty that makes them rational beings. And therefore they are not worthy of comparison with wise men who, even under the conditions of their present life, offer the resistance of an undisturbed mind to those disturbances of the soul from which human weakness cannot be exempt… It is the foolish and lawless among mortals that these demons resemble, not in their bodies but in their characters” (City of God IX.3).

His is a fitting description of those who pursue this false freedom of “doing whatever I want,” namely, that such men are “foolish and lawless.” Worse, by pursuing the desires of the moment, they find wretchedness rather than satisfaction and misery rather than felicity—and that’s in this life. They are like the demons, slaves to their passions. Of the demons, and thus of the hedonistic men who follow them, Saint Augustine concludes that “their mind is subdued under the oppressive tyranny of vicious passions, and employs for seduction and deception all the rational power that it has by nature” [4]. The freedom which inexorably leads to such oppression is a fool’s freedom indeed.

This then can be contrasted with the three real kinds of freedom. But that is the subject of my next column.

 

—-Footnotes—-

[1] Freedom from consequences is an even more foolish form of false freedom than “the ability to do whatever I want.”

[2] See the discussion of the characteristics of the resurrected body in the Catholic Encyclopedia. The resurrected body posses impassibility, brightness/glory, agility, and subtility.

[3] From John C. Wright’s “The Ideal Machine,” published in Sci Phi Journal no 1., and also in The Book of Feasts and Seasons (a collection of short stories which I highly recommend). Later in that story, the character Tyler realizes that the Ideal Machine, which is destroyed by Hynkel’s poor use of it, was capable of creating a starship. His reaction is a further summary of what is wrong with the fool’s freedom, which is that he didn’t even know what he actually wanted. “You mean I could have wished for a starship? And I wished for a goddam whorehouse instead!”

[4] City of God IX.6. Saint Augustine also writes that “Demons are at the mercy of the passions…the mind of demons in in subjection to the passions of desire, of fear, of anger, and the rest,” and that no part of their mind is left for wisdom, or virtue.

Nicene Guy

Nicene Guy

JC is a cradle Catholic, and somewhat of a traditionalist conservative. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2014. He is currently a tenure-track assistant professor of physics at a university in the deep south. He is a lay member of the Order of Preachers. JC has been happily married since June of 2010. He and his lovely wife have had two children born into their family, one daughter and one son; they hope to have a few more. He has at times questioned – and more often still been questioned about – his Faith, but he has never wandered far from the Church, nor from our Lord. “To whom else would I go?”

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2 thoughts on “A Fool’s Freedom”

  1. Pretty good, JC. In the Bahagavad-gita all actions are defined thus: in the mode of
    goodness, passion and ignorance. As Jesus pointed out ‘ call no man good’, its not
    a virtue to do what is right and just.

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