Being free in today’s world is a concept which oftentimes lacks compliance, thus leading to a trap of hypocritical thinking and repressed opinions, inscribed within a censoring society that fosters, in turn, censored thoughts and that perhaps hinders the intellectual creativity of its citizenry.
The contemporary world is based upon the idea of a respect which is increasingly being associated with the necessity to filter one’s intentions, in order for them to comply with the rules of an overarching game of conveyed verbal politeness, that stems from an underlying dictatorship on intellectual rights.
The code of human respect might be conceived as the natural propensity for human beings to swim in the free waters within which an unconstrained flow of thoughts is corroborated by the understanding of individual boundaries, tilting towards the acknowledgement of reciprocal diversities; thus, its enforcement should not diverge its root and take on the authoritarian power to shape the words coming out of our mouths when they are still in the process of being formulated. A similar constraint is controversial and almost irrespective of the idea of respect itself, especially if considering that its echo could have an extensive reach and thus propagate as the subtly forced repression of one’s opinions, destined to be locked within the minds of those who produced them.
In the present geopolitical setting, freedom is looking as a race attracting all types of participants, equally having their legs tied and controlled by the rules of their own societal sovra-structure, which dictates them how to move and that simultaneously prevents the full enjoyment of free movement; under a similar existential perspective, citizens’ freedom is inherently infringed upon and relegates its rightful owners within a bubble of resounding principles as those of liberty and opportunities, whose internalization is strived for and aims to substitute their merely theoretic enjoyment. According to a similar existential perspective, the race is won by the one individual who manages to get in the front line as the one most compatible with their societal standards, thus the better suited for abiding by the rules of a game they didn’t forge themselves and that still promises the winner the forbidden fruit of complete freedom.
What might come across as being a matter of public concern is the nature of the aforementioned dogmas, metaphorically born as the strings attached to a fictitious game but that are concretely able to regulate the dynamics of our daily lives; our world is thus revolving around the detrimental neglection of individual freedom and worth, as it scarily approaches a form of intellectual authoritarianism which limits one’s right to self-expression, and that is made pervasive by the infringement of one’s possibility to act upon their intentions and life goals. Under these terms the perspective of the game looks, indeed, revisited as well as perfectly inscribed within the circle of restraining regulations and fallacious liberties advocated for by that same race, whose primary objective of actual freedom happens to be fading in a dusty horizon made of hypocrisy, which still allows the potential winner to passively contemplate the dawn of the truthful enforcement of free speech stricto sensu.
Freedom is thus a quite idiosyncratic and all-encompassing concept, which allows for a certain degree of speculation over its actual definition, that still can’t be taken as objective, as it might be swayed by individual perceptions within a specific sociopolitical space. It might perhaps be such intrinsically assigned subjectivity to make the word freedom a contentious topic to be debated; freedom is indeed a country-specific – or better a society-specific – dimension, whose borders need constant redefinition and whose margins might be subject to controversial revisitations.
Being free in a certain society might entail relevant restrictions in another; being able to assign names to objects or provide a specific entitlement to certain categories of people is the collateral effect of being subordinated to a quite specific context, thus making variations in one’s habits that are contingent on the sovra-structure defining the rules of that same game of freedom, which could be played in each possible setting.
Question remains, what does it mean to be free?
National televisions and mass media might convey an idea of widespread freedom that is wisely stereotyped, as if it had to be considered a granted right whose enjoyment is not being hampered; still, this isn’t necessarily the case, as seen in the intellectual constraints or limits to free will which are becoming the rule within contemporary societies. As humans living in quite diverse societies, we might come to the conclusion that being free is a state of mind more than an actual practice; we might as well have reason to believe that the possibility to think, free of any sort of intellectual constraints, derives from the ideal of freedom that has been implanted in our highly influenceable brains, which struggle – more often than not – to capture reality for what it is.
Following this line of thought, individuals might build a fence around their intellectual convictions and condemn themselves to an existence based on fleeting ideologies, which are self-nourished and keep living knowing that their existence is the only one that should matter, as it is staunchly supported by their own embracer. Nevertheless, the very act of embracing an ideology, whatever the nature, might easily fall into the disrespect of someone else’s, as witnessed in the case of the preemptive judgement of others’ religion due to one’s decision not to believe in any faith; same as those who arrogate themselves the right to denigrate and take the distances from people fostering political ideals opposed to theirs.
This is not freedom of speech or thought; this means transmuting one’s capability to formulate a vision of one’s own into the disrespectful and obnoxious obliteration of any other perspective.
It is quite controversial to believe in an idea of freedom based on the deprivation of others’ right to gather, think, speak and perhaps advance an enactment of the principles they believe in. Also, expanding on an idea of freedom conceived as “country-specific”, our degree of liberty is dependent on societal, economic and political variables whose random mix reflects the equally randomised assignment of our birth to a specific place on planet Earth.
Still, the people of the world shall not forget that their conceptions are laws which will forever stay unwritten and that do not constitute empirical evidences carved in eternal stones; from here the consideration that one should adapt their ideal of freedom to the circumstance they find themselves in and to the custom of the place they come to be at. This might translate, for example, into the embracement of the religiousness of a temple when stepping one’s feet into a sacred environment, the devotion towards which isn’t binding by itself, but requires abidance to its norms in presence of individuals who willingly decide to enter its walls. Accepting some boundaries entails the healthiest acknowledgement of someone else’s right to be free; similarly, restraining oneself from practicing one’s entrenched ideal of freedom and thus adapting to different societal contexts is not only an index of a high self-awareness, but also an active recognition of different freedoms according to different subjects living in quite diverse environments.
Eventually, speaking of freedom calls for the necessary discussion of the way individuals engage with the latter when inscribed within a particular political environment, as that of a democracy. As current U.S. Vice President Vance said at the Munich Security Conference held on February 14th, 2025, freedom to live and just be in a democracy is gradually being hampered by an over-extensive censorship and undermining constraint on “what should be said and what should be done”. People are giving up their rights, hiding themselves behind that Schopenhaurian veil of ignorance that they are reluctant to disrupt, since that same veil might serve as the curtain behind which lies the – perhaps scary – discovery of their true selves. What governmental institutions are failing to understand is that freedom might come with limitations, which relate to countries’ religious beliefs or societal customs; still, what cannot be compromised upon is the freedom to be free. If that fails to be enforced, humankind loses its fundamental reason to be defined as properly human.
