Consent or Coercion? What is true freedom?

I wrote in a previous post: "Gaining consent over our lives is the first step towards liberation and true freedom." 

We all love that intoxicating feeling of “this is MY life, this is MY time. I get to do what I want, nobody can tell me what to do.” But this idea of freedom is an illusion. Thinking this way is like driving on a highway at whatever speed because it’s MY car. No, that is not TRUE freedom. That is an illusion of freedom because that is your ego feeling free. And that illusion of freedom is how you end up hurting other people and violating consent. That is not true freedom. 

So what do I mean by “true freedom”? 

True freedom is when you can agree with other drivers on some rules of the road and drive in harmony with them. It is only then that we and everyone around us will experience true freedom. As long as we think, “I can do what I want,” you will be driven by an intoxicating power trip that affects other people, taking away their freedom without consent in both small and big ways. 

The freedom to be yourself doesn’t mean "fuck everyone." 

As long as you keep thinking that true freedom is just “doing whatever I want,” then you will keep getting into accidents because you’re not recognizing the other cars on the road.

True freedom means, “I have agreed to the rules of the road and I’ve learned the roads so I don’t need to check the map, and now I get to choose where I’m going.” You work with the other drivers to create a give and take, while also choosing the place you want to go and getting to the place you want to go the way you want to. That is true freedom. The freedom comes not in gripping the wheel and staring at Google maps telling you where to go. Freedom comes in letting go and singing along to the radio instead of focusing on the road and the map all the time.

True freedom is asking yourself, “Do I want to drive fast or slow? Take the interstate or a more scenic route?”

Maybe how you act doesn’t matter to you. Maybe you drive like an asshole, speeding and endangering everyone else on the road. Maybe you are a grumpy person, bitter and resentful and ungrateful. Maybe you are rude, and none of it matters to you because it just comes out of your mouth and through your body and goes into the universe and you don’t have to sit with that energy anymore. In fact, you might even feel better because you have expelled that negative energy. 

Maybe you don’t mean anything to yourself. This is perhaps the saddest part of it all. It’s not only that you don’t respect others. It’s that you don’t respect yourself. 

But you do mean something to other people. In this way, HOW YOU MOVE MATTERS. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you. But it does matter to other people. 

We are not aware of the ways that we live in unfreedom so much by cultural expectations and cultural hegemony, whether that be capitalism, patriarchy, or just other unspoken rules and expectations, including the unfreedom of individualism, consumerism and materialism, then we haven’t actually given consent to live these lives. 

We are just living while sleeping. We are asleep at the wheel. But the freedom comes not in gripping the wheel, it comes in letting go and singing along to the radio instead of focusing on the road and the map all the time.