THE FIRST STEP
Recognizing the Slave Within

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what be potentially is.
    -ERICH FROMM  (from Man for Himself, 1947 )

PERFECT FREEDOM
Perfect freedom does not exist except when we are freed of life. Then the mind is unprisoned, and the soul is free to fly. Death frees life, releasing it like a bird that soars without fear of its enemies, like the sparrow with no fear of the hawk. Absent death, perfect freedom cannot exist. I do not argue for death. What I argue for is freedom without regard to the exterior forces that enslave us. I argue that freedom can exist only if we have first freed the self. And in life the self is ours to free.

THE FIGHT AGAINST FREEDOM
Most of us do not want to be free. Most of our parents were slaves. We have grown up as slaves. The system in which we live and struggle and attempt to fulfill our lives is a system of slavery. In the end all systems enslave, whether they be orders of government, religion, or society, and although our system may offer the best chance for individuals to be free, systems themselves never free us. We must free ourselves.
   Once enslaved, few want to burst out from under the leaking roof of the slave hut to freedom and stumble in the cold dark night alone. In the back part of our hearts, we equate freedom with terror. To be free leaves us isolated from other slaves. Better that we rage until we are palsied, point and squall and wail at fate, shake our fists at God, blame the politicians, blame anybody, everything, because to become free demands that we take responsibility for our bondage. No, we do not want freedom. We were born in slavery. It is too frightening outside the slave hut. We want, instead, a more comfortable slavery gilded with bountiful excuses for our servitude.
   On the underside of freedom lurks the sense that we are as puny as a particle of dust at sea. We stay imprisoned in bad marriages because we are afraid to be alone. We endure every manner of indignity and outrage, every agony and tedium, because we are afraid-afraid to throw off the traces and experience the naked terror that so dominates the idea of freedom. We kiss our shackles. We stay at home with the old folks, or never leave the farm or the neighborhood. We linger on in daddy's business or hang on to the old job until we have worn a track around it like the knee-deep trail of the old gristmill horse, because we are too frightened to march out into the wilderness alone.
   Already we know that no one is ever really free. Not the president, not the chairman of the board, not husband or wife, not the haughty businessman, the playboy, or the idle rich. Freedom is for the birds. And even they are securely bound by their instincts. No. No one is free, and no one wants freedom. We want to talk about it over a beer. To many, freedom is death. If we awakened one day to confront pure freedom, would we not scurry back into our dark little holes as fast as terrorized mice?
   Cages are cages whether constructed of steel and concrete or from the fabric of the mind. Like all experiences, both freedom and slavery are registered in the mind. The mind sets the limits of bondage and provides the gate to liberty. What each of us mistakes for our freedom is really our experience within the cage.
   I remember when one simply bought one's ticket and hopped on the airplane. Today we have constructed new cages in old zoos. Today we are terrorized by terrorists. Yet there are probably no more than a few score people in the entire nation whose madness would cause them to plot the willful destruction of hundreds of innocent passengers. As a consequence, these few, whoever they might be, control 260 million people. Today we take it as an unquestioned part of travel, as the way of things, that we must identify ourselves with an official picture identification-the precursor of tattoos on our wrists. Today we accept as the way of things that our bodies must be searched mechanically, that our luggage must be inspected, that once aboard, we must behave in numerous purposeless ways that have little or nothing to do with our safety but control us perfectly like cattle run through the chutes. We know that if someone wants to manufacture a bomb and blow up the plane and its passengers, all of the endless procedures we have endured will have proven to be only the known landscape over which any terrorist can travel with ease.
   We do not provide ourselves with safety. We have only given up our constitutional rights against unlawful searches and seizures for the illusion of safety. Yet no one complains, or if a complaint is heard, it is in the form of an impotent mumble to which a security guard, who may not be able to read the regulations he has been hired to enforce, responds by warning us to comply at once. Otherwise, we can take the bus to Chicago.
   Today one's every move, every decision, every act, is governed by rules and regulations devised, ostensibly, to permit masses of people to function together in harmony. We dress according to rules, eat according to rules, excrete according to rules, sleep according to rules, and die according to rules. We mate according to rules, and, according to rules, we rear and educate our young. To build the simplest house requires compliance with a mountain of rules that would confound all but modern man who has been born into this bureaucratic cage. The rules that govern our daily lives would fill reams of fine print on tissue-thin paper. Still, the human being, more than any other creature, is perfectly able to adapt to nearly any environment. We can swelter and prosper in the jungles. We can tramp over the ice and multiply in igloos. The rules and laws and the multitude of man's endless impositions on man that consume our freedom have become a part of our daily environment to which we have also adapted with little more than an occasional whimper.
   The difference, of course, between the monkey in the zoo and the man on the street is that the monkey cannot be contained without physical restraint, while the man can be caged and shackled and whipped and exist in captivity from birth until death within a prison without walls and still believe, at his last breath, that he is free.

FREEDOM INSIDE THE ZOO
Yet we cannot be free outside the cage unless we are able to experience freedom within it. Consider the wild monkey who, lately transported to the zoo, hurls itself against the walls until it is battered and exhausted. Consider how it refuses to eat within the cage and may eventually die. On the other hand, his cage brother, born in the cage, sits peacefully by munching on whatever morsel the zookeeper has tossed him and bounces off the concrete walls as if he were swinging from tree limb to tree limb.
   Slavery and captivity are not synonymous for either man or monkey. The wild monkey can be captive in the jungle itself. Relegated to an inferior rung on the monkey-ladder, it is subject to a monkey-imposed hierarchy. In the jungle, it is pinioned to a territory with limits, to the safety of certain trees the leopard cannot climb. In or out of the zoo, the monkey may accept the limits imposed upon him as freedom.
   In his preface to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote of an army of managers who, without coercion, controlled a population of slaves who were perfectly manageable because they loved their servitude. "To make them love it," he wrote, "is the task assigned in present-day totalitarian states. "

HISTORY, OUR SLAVE MASTER
In the same way that nations are the product of their history, so, too, each of us owns a personal history. Just as many nations possess a past in slavery, so, too, each of us has experienced to varying degrees an individual slavery. The deeper we have fallen into slavery, the more difficult it is for us to recognize it, especially if we have been ravaged by its power at an early age. The colt broken to the lead before it has run free is the easier to harness.

THE ETERNAL NO
From the moment we are freed from the imprisoning womb and the cord is cut, we not only begin to assert our freedom, to search for it and grasp for it, but at the same moment powerful forces are loosed against us to enslave us. Although we were born to become free, the mother, the community, the law, the system begin to fling the eternal no at the child. As the child reaches for a glass on the table, he hears the eternal no! He hears "No!" as he toddles toward the door. He hears "No!" as he reaches for the nose on his father's face. He hears the eternal no echoing in his ears from cradle to grave. The Ten Commandments, with their "thou shalt nots," ring in his ears. His teachers, more dedicated to their comfort than to the child's free growth and expression, smother the child with the eternal no from the first moment he is entrusted into their hands until the factory we call the educational system has, at last, spit him out.
   His life is cut into segments of time. The fence of time captures him. There is a time to steep, a time to arise, a time to go to school, to eat, to play, and a time once more to go to bed. Never has the child been permitted to revolt against any of the enslaving forces that domesticate the human animal and convert him from the wild aborigine of his genes to the human machine that will eventually perform as predictably as a windup toy.

THE REBEL WITHIN
By puberty the war between the forces of freedom and those of slavery explodes to the surface. The child, now brimming with hormones, begins to assert his individuality. He strikes out in unpredictable ways against all authority-against his parents, the school, the law. He experiments with alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. He tests his sexuality. No matter the love of parent, the supplications of parent, the pleading of parent, the threats of parent-nothing will divert the child from his rush toward individuality. One cannot experience individuality in the womb, attached to the placenta, suckling at the breast, held by the maternal hand, or contained within the parental folds. Like the slave who breaks his chains, one can achieve individuality only through the rebellious forces of freedom.
   But no sooner does the child begin to assert his independence during puberty-although usually with the wisdom and aplomb of a wild hare-than the forces of the eternal no are reapplied with even greater vigor. In high school he is no longer coddled. School has become a higher-stakes penitentiary. The rules are impersonal and rigid. The juvenile's own social system, too, has rules. He can belong only if he complies with the gang and accepts its rules. His genetic longing for the tribe shouts in his ear. His need to become a functional, recognized member of the tribe dominates his decisions. To belong is the paramount goal. Parental approval and acceptance in the larger social order bear little weight for the adolescent. His is not the adult world, nor does he wish to enter it. He does not respect it. The adult power structure is the enemy. Yet it is from that power structure that the eternal no pounds perpetually in his ears-threatening, punishing, and finally enslaving.

ENCOUNTERING THE EVIL BITCH
By the time children blunder into adulthood, other forces have come to assert their power against them. Mother Nature has stricken them with the ultimate disease-falling in love. Her weapon, the evil bitch, is chemical warfare. The hormone, a magic potion still not fully understood by science, strikes at the human brain, causing its victims to fall prey to the disease, to mate, and to thereby plunge into a new slavery from which they will likely never recover. The forces of the malady cause them to woo, to fight, to copulate, and to produce children. Now they must provide their offspring a nest and nourishment, and, in an utterly predictable progression, they must make certain bargains, which usually require them to sell themselves as a commodity at the slave market. Thereafter they make their bargains from year to year, from job to job, and the bargains ensnare them until they are rolled into their graves.
   We are creatures enslaved by our genes. We are, indeed, like salmon predictably fulfilling our genetic course. Mindlessly we swim with the school into the great seas and back up the river of our birth to spawn, to die, and to be eaten by the waiting grizzly on the bank. Such freedom as we experience is only that which we encounter within the genetic cage of our birth, within the confines of the mammalian creature that we are-confines from which we can never escape nor, ultimately, wish to escape. We were not born to become free. We were born to fall in love with Mary Jane or Billy Joe, to marry her or him, to parent those three little drippy-nosed rascals who will bedevil us until the day we gasp our last exhausted breath, and then, as true to the equation as dandelions going to seed and withering in the first frost, we, too, will complete this seemingly purposeless cycle established by the ultimate force, which some call God.

THE PESTIFEROUS LONGING
Still we long for freedom. And in the end, we must have it. When the infant's cord is severed, the infant experiences the first power of freedom. It can cry at will. And it does cry, exercising its freedom to protest the external forces already laid against it. The babe can be heard. And it is heard. It can respond to its bodily demands. Already it is an entity to be reckoned with. It has a will of its own. It can exercise its will, and although its dependence is clear to see, its dependence, as in all dependent relationships, enslaves the caretaker as well. Yet freedom is the biological goal of every creature, whether babe or brute. Within the confines of its genes the hawk is free. The squirrel. The worm in the wood. Man is born to struggle for freedom. Yet only man devours the soul of his brother. And only man enslaves others of his kind and himself.

THE FIRST STEP TO FREEDOM:

RECOGNIZING THE SLAVE WITHIN
The first halting step toward freedom of the self is the acknowledgment of one's enslavement. If we do not recognize that we are slaves, we can never break free.
   We are told that in this American system our destiny rests solely in our hands. But when we slam against the chains of our slavery, we conclude that there must be something inherently wrong with us. Since the rest of the nation is said to be free and enjoy freedom's rich rewards, it must be that we who suffer this powerful sense of insignificance, of aloneness and enslavement, are somehow defective. We must be weak. We must be at fault. We must be worthless.
   On the other hand, for those who have been lulled into the sweet security of bondage, and exist contentedly within the walls of the zoo, for those who embrace myth and splash like happy babies in the bath of blissful conformity, the question naturally arises: Why should they who are content in their servitude be disturbed? Why make happy slaves miserable freemen?
   But the destiny of the human race can never be fulfilled under the yoke. The potted plant in the window can never produce its most prodigious blooms. I say God performed the ultimate act of love for Adam and Eve by ejecting them from the Garden, for, confined within the Garden, they existed without the knowledge of freedom, and without suffering its pain the slave can never seek the splendor of the self. The first step to freedom, therefore, is discovering and freely acknowledging that we are slaves.