Freedom

I have had my mother's phone line from her B&B directed to me this week. Today, I received a phone call from the police which puzzled me. Apparently, a woman has gone missing. "The only clue they have about her whereabouts they have" is a list of B&Bs in the area that she had made. They are terribly concerned for her safety. But why? Maybe she is escaping something. Maybe she is escaping herself, an abuser, the people around her, the negative psychiatric help she is receiving, whatever. I don't know. All I know is the desire to escape. I worry less for the woman's safety if she has made plans for escape than if she is found and is put back in hell. Of course this is my own imagining. But if she is looking for places to stay, she isn't that irresponsible with herself.

But this makes me think. It is quite impossible to disappear. CCTV, police tenacity, helplines, the prospect of ID cards etc all take away part of our freedom. If one is unhappy with one's tribe, one should be free to start afresh with another tribe or alone in the wilderness. But we are not allowed to without repercussions and guilt.

I tried disappearing myself, once. I ran off to live in the forest. I had this romantic fantasy of reappearing to the world months later, nut brown, toned and slim, in an unshakable trance that connected me to nature, to wildlife. Unfortunately, the dark and the mist descended at the same time. This was too frightening; to lose sight and be completely alone when I was so used to people. All I saw was a light shining from afar. I followed it and was lucky enough to catch the last bus home. I see this as my biggest failing: that I allowed my fear to get in the way of my needs; that I failed to fulfill my urge to slip away and returned to an unhappy life where I learned nothing but deeper sorrow.

But what if I the mist had not fallen? What would have happened? The people who saw me off to my adventure would have been less afraid for me than the mother on the end of an unanswered telephone.Eventually, there would have been a convulted search which probably would have resulted in my "rescue". But all I wanted to do was escape. Why would I not be allowed to?

The prospect of ID cards sent me into a panic. The infringement of civil liberties for me was all about the inability to escape, from life, from society, if you needed to. I think that is a perfect human right. Assylum seekers are a tragic example of our refusal to allow this. People survive horrors, they are judged by bureaucrats on whether their horrors are great enough to start afresh, albeit degraded. But it's completely contrary to everything that we should be.

We are a sick society that believes more in states than in peoples. If people ruled the world, rather than states, we'd be free. We submit to the laws of our countries, but many make no sense at all: they are not bound by a general human code. For me, this code is about not hurting people (except when confronted by the same violation yourself) and about helping others, about leaving the world as clean as the day you were born. What in that prescribes borders, submission, patriotism, greed, etc? We feed on statistics as if these are important. If I can feed myself, clothe myself, educate myself, breathe, I won't deny anyone anything. But this is not the society I have been raised in. It is a society of control.

The Domesday Book, of course, was the start of it all. The mediaeval king wanting to know what the inhabitants of the land he had invaded were all about. Because with that information, he could create a feudal system where he had ultimate power. Feudalism is not a thing of the past. It is as present now as it was then, only now the feudal lords have absolute control. We have submitted so deeply, we cannot begin to claw our way back, except by revolution. Our ancestors have bestowed upon us an ever-increasing serfdom, and we must try with all our mights to prevent this from becoming even deeper entrenched.

We are led to believe that with all leisure-time we are afforded, the fact that we are largely out of the fields/mines/factories that we are freer than we have ever been. But we are as enslaved as ever. For in that leisure time we fill ourselves with their thoughts, their ideologies, their prescriptions. We rarely choose that time to be absolutely free. Even the meditators, the yoga-heads, follow a regime or subscribe to an ideology. We are told what to think and then they tell us that others are brain-washed. We are all brain-washed. No man is resilient enough to completely resist every tug, every pull to society's whim. Occasionally, on the streets, you will find a homeless man with nothing but his dignity who is wonderfully free.

"Ain't freedom just a matter of opinion?" A line from a Terry Callier song. True enough. The freer see themselves as freer than less free. But nobody is free. We shall never be free unless society either crumbles or allows itself to be entirely open to whatever we as each individual is. And if we are allowed to escape. Which will be the end of our notion of society.