The Strange Thing About "Freedom"
What does it mean for us that "the Truth" shall set us "free"?
I’ve been watching the TV adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle recently, endeavoring to make it farther than I had last time I watched it, and hopefully I’ll make it to the end. It really is an interesting series, and while it must of course depart heavily from Dick’s original story in order to extend a 200-page book into forty episodes, it still retains the core elements faithfully and is able to tell an engaging and independent story. I think the one thing I like about it the most is how it seems to emphasize this theme of “How is life like this?” that crops up sometimes in regular conversation but also in pivotal moments in the show when the totalitarian realities that weigh down on the main characters come to a head in some calamitous uproar. Everyone has the perception, whether because a good number were alive before the war (it’s only 1962) or because those who are younger are alive early enough in the years of the regime to understand that the lives they live were forced upon them by invaders.
I really appreciate how this is handled in the characters and storylines related to the German side of the story, for we might get the impression from alternate history or even perceptions in real history that the Nazi Neuordnung would’ve been peachy for White people and terrible for everyone else. The Man in the High Castle explores how both the racialist and totalitarian elements of Nazism would combine to make an even deadlier poison: even as a White man, you might never be racially pure enough or obedient enough for the Reich’s standards (this is precisely the lesson one main character, John Smith, learns throughout the show).
There’s a few lessons and insights I’ve been getting from this show, and all good media should prove intellectually stimulating more than visually,1 and there’s one in particular I want to share in this article. Obviously, the overarching conflict in the series, above all the racism and violence and interdimensional Nazis (...yeah), is tyranny. It’s constantly on display in every episode, just how unbearably draconian the regimes of both Japan and Germany are, and a thorough dissatisfaction or disillusionment with this state of affairs is what drives the stories of the main characters. It’s just apparent to everyone in the story that what’s happening under the auspices of Germany and Japan is downright diabolical, and something needs to be done. As one character in the show, Randall, says,
“It takes a lot of effort not to be free, keeping your head down, holding your tongue.”
It was probably this line that first got me thinking about the things I’ll discuss in this article. While there’s some implications in this quote I might not necessarily agree with, it is thought-provoking, for it gives this impression that to not be free incurs a burden, one that is slavish and crushing. Thus, by contrast, “freedom” is to be seen as being unburdened, an uncaged bird who can now flutter away, stretch its wings, and live free. Living under the German or Japanese regimes enormously curbs what people are able to do, how they are able to express themselves, and even how they can think. As the fictional epitome of totalitarianism, George Orwell’s Oceania, demonstrates, even your thoughts aren’t safe, as the State tries to invade even your conscience.
What this makes me want to ask, especially to get to my point, is this: “If tyranny is so suffocating, why do people accept it?” This is the case in the show, and it’s the case in real life. In the show, the only people who exhibit day-to-day anxiety and frustration with the regime are the main characters, and in scenes where said characters must blend in with the everyman or keep their intentions under wraps you can sense that the feeling the narrative is trying to evoke in you is “Are these people blind?” In addition, although this is more common in the scenes focusing on the German Reich, the nonchalant “Heil Hitler” or “Sieg heil” is jarring to our ears, and for the right reason: we know there’s something wrong with those phrases being commonplace, and over time as the characters in the Reich become more self-aware their uttering of these phrases becomes more choked. In the real-world this is the case as well, for we know, and in many instances can observe, that the German people loved Hitler, truly, even without being ideologues or functionaries themselves.2 (This is a case that Dr. Neema Parvini, of
fame, makes in a video about Nineteen Eighty-Four, concerning both Germany and the USSR, that is, the day-to-day complacency and genuine support of the peoples under those regimes.)If keeping one’s head down is such an exhausting endeavor, why have so many millions throughout history (and in the present) continued to go along with doing it? Oh, there’s a few things I could say here, but let’s make it easy for ourselves. In particular, I believe the answer lies in something the famed psychologist Abraham Maslow explained to us. Namely, in his hierarchy of needs, which proceeds from the most immediate and most pressing needs to those that human minds can begin to approach once these higher-order concerns are met, Maslow places two types of needs as the uppermost: physiological and safety. Maslow potently describes the intensity of each of these most basic needs: “A person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else… A man, in this state, if it is extreme enough and chronic enough, may be characterized as living almost for safety alone.”3 Since, as has been recognized for centuries, one of the foremost animal desires is self-preservation, which can only be satisfied if steps are taken to preserve the self, and especially to preserve until procreation. Eating, drinking, sleeping, warmth etc., physiological needs, will be most immediately and primarily sought after by an animal, as will be the case for humans, who are still fundamentally animalistic (Ecc. 3:19).
What we need to realize is that what often precedes the rise of certain dictators in history, such as in Germany, Russia, France, Italy, and elsewhere, were periods of immense hardship. Few nations could compare to the absolutely dreadful state of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.4 You thought the Great Depression was hard? In America during the 1930s, most metrics relating to measures of standard of living outside of the financial increased or remained the same, and as the halcyon depiction of the Roosevelt presidency in the halls of Congress and academia demonstrates neither did America suffer major political instability during this period.5 In Weimar Germany, on the other hand, politically, economically, and culturally the country was on the brink of dissolving, held together only by a common Germanic identity and the residual willpower of the emasculated government, but the country was for all intents and purposes undead.6 Because, as numerous professional and anecdotal studies of Weimar Germany relate, the price of bread, eggs, water, heat, electricity, fuel, and other physiological necessities was extremely comprised, the Maslowian hierarchy was compromised, and thus the German people en masse grew restless and in desperate need of restitution.7 Enter Hitler, a rejuvenating Caesar of Spenglerian enormity, who promised to restore German pride, German might, and, most importantly, German safety. The economics employed by Hitler to achieve this aside,8 he brought a sense of security and pride to the German people, securing their physiological and safety needs. Accordingly, people didn’t care about what Hitler was taking over, who he was purging, what he was planning, or anything else, as for the first time in nearly a decade they had some notion of “order.”
Do we then say that Hitler did something good? By no means! But by what means do I say that? Hitler did bring satisfaction to the German people, he did bring “order.” However, clearly he didn’t. He’s mainly infamous for his involvement in the Second World War and Holocaust, right? That heinous conflict which saw the most deaths in history in the shortest time frame, and brought unimaginable amounts of destruction and suffering to Europeans in the wake. This is where we should return to The Man in the High Castle, for our common perception of what an Axis victory would be like, and even the Nazis own perception of what their Neuordnung would be like, is of a well-ordered and carefully scrutinized world of fascist obedience and chauvinism. The Man in the High Castle, however, presents an alternate vision which I think is incredibly realistic and unique, and helps us understand how order isn’t equal to tyranny, and how tyranny and “freedom” exist on a spectrum independent from order.
The overarching conflict in The Man in the High Castle is the geopolitical tensions between the German Reich and the Japanese Empire, the only two remaining powers in the world who’ve split it between themselves. Both being totalitarian regimes we’d expect that order would be the baseline for the lives of the subjects of these regimes, but the show is full of violence, hatred, and war. Even those at the highest rungs of command are subject to their lives being destroyed by all the chaos that exists within the system. Like I mentioned earlier, with regards to the German Reich, “you might never be racially pure enough or obedient enough for the Reich’s standards.” In addition, the racialist imperialism of the Nazis constantly threatens to boil over into a third world war with Japan, but, as one character shouts in one of the climactic episodes of the series, “You can’t build a better world if there’s nothing left of it!” The Man in the High Castle demonstrates, then, that tyranny is actually antithetical to order, because tyranny, to use a comparison I came up with long ago, is like grasping a soap bar harder and harder under the impression that, like with other things, a tighter hold will prevent it from slipping away. But, as we know, this will more likely than not result in the soap bar flinging out of our hands, bouncing against the shower, and ricocheting back to hit us in the head! Likewise, human nature is a very slippery thing.
An elder in my church, a great and experienced man, who’s the definition of a cosmopolite, has traveled to many different countries and experienced many different cultures, and is full of lessons and observations about how humankind works. One of the things he’s said is that, in traveling to all these different countries and learning about their people, he’s figured out that it’s a humorously Americocentric idea to believe that everyone wants liberty, even among our close European relatives. Rather, most people want order. They want to wake up every morning and be assured that everything will be the same, that they’ll have just as much money in their bank account as the day before and that their car will start up again to get them to work (and that they will still be able to work), etc. Most people are thus simple-minded, which is why during COVID-19 we saw so many people, before 2020 completely regular and low-profile people, turn into nightwatchmen and public health vigilantes. Because people wanted to return to the order and regularity they had enjoyed before the singlemost unprecedented event in the lives of most people alive occurred,9 and so in desperation they served as useful idiots, revealing an equally important truism about “order,” “freedom,” and “tyranny”: most people are threats to order rather than agents of it. Consider the quote by C.S. Lewis, which gained renewed popularity during COVID, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
Exploring how Western society responded to, and continues to live under the shadow of, COVID is a great way to explore the antinomic dynamics that exist between these notions of “order,” “freedom,” and “tyranny.” Governments were telling us that we only needed “two weeks to flatten the curve,” but people saw this as a transgression of their freedom, of the government encroaching on the classical liberal rights of bodily autonomy and freedom of assembly (among other legal and constitutional concerns). Accordingly, this led to a disordered outcome. When the public health regime fired up we were told first that masks weren’t very efficacious and the emphasis was on social distancing, and then the rhetoric was that masks were efficacious, then it was that any vaccine developed in record time as proposed by Operation Warp Speed wouldn’t be effective (Kamala Harris: “Well, I think [taking the vaccine is] going to be an issue for all of us”), then it was that vaccines were Godsent and needed to be mandated, and now we’re being peddled our fifteenth round of boosters. As Matt Vespa of Townhall writes, the government cannot expect it to actually promote and secure public health when it engages in such crookery:
“Get vaccinated but also continue to live in fear. Yeah, no wonder why hesitancy is through the roof. All this move does is make the vaccine-hesitant dig in further and give anti-vaxxers all the ammunition they need to chip away at the credibility of the vaccines. … You cannot do that [promote public health] when you a) fearmonger, b) shame, and c) offer contradictory advice.”
Indeed, as FEE reported in 2021, while we were concerned about catching a bad flu, inflation caused by government monetary policies during the pandemic was going to (and certainly is in the process of) depreciating the standard of living for American households (and note that a lot more inflation has occurred since 2020-2021), which will lead far more destructively to the endangerment of the physiological and safety needs of the average person than anything else (remember Weimar). Accordingly, what we saw was that in the Western world, once synonymous with “the Free World” and “the liberal international order,” liberal democracy, of its own volition essentially, contorted into something fiendish, which, as Tho Bishop writes, “has highlighted how meaningless both the term ‘liberal democracy’ and the performative concern about its well-being are… To the surprise of no one that had been following their actions carefully, the enlightened technocrats from neoliberal institutions have proven to be the greatest cheerleaders of rising authoritarianism in the West.”
So, what do we make of all this? In a part of the world where from every mountainside freedom rings said “freedom” resulted in abject disorder, and in strange parts of the world that are subject to intense control this, too, results in abject disorder. Disorder, then, arises from “freedom” and tyranny, it seems. But this is so antithetical to our preconceptions about how the world works I believe we just close our ears and pretend this isn’t the case, that everything is actually going alright, although there’s nothing to back that, as Americans are consistently reported as exhibiting record high pessimism toward all the most basic institutions of our society: the government, the economy, the schools, the church (and even each other). We clearly can’t accept Orwell’s vision, that of “a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” but it doesn’t seem like our fervent promotion and celebration of “freedom” has led us away from that, but somehow toward it. What do we make of these peculiar observations about society?
Couldn’t the answer very simply be that we’re mistaken, or are our egos too bloated for that? I am extremely humble, so I’ll vicariously make that acknowledgment on behalf of post-Enlightenment Westerners: we’re mistaken about the importance of “freedom.” As you’ve perhaps noticed throughout this article, I’ve been putting freedom in scare quotes, and that’s because I believe what we generally conceive of when we read/hear that word is fallacious, and isn’t true freedom. Understand what I’m saying here, because I’m not opposed to freedom per se, but to freedom as it’s understood. As the Platonist commentator
explains, “This modern version of freedom is uncaused self-creation, that’s what we really mean. It’s this kind of free-floating agency that is unmoored.” It is a type of existentialism, then, which makes sense considering that misosophy’s chokehold on modernity,10 and accordingly it results in our modernistic concept of freedom: freedom to or from. Freedom is thus seen as the affirmation that, “I am a slave to no man and I am my own master.”11 Perhaps this isn’t objectionable to many a modern Westerner, but it ought to be objectionable to a Christian.What the true concept of freedom, and indeed what the classical concept of freedom (as explored by Woods), is can be understood if we use a different preposition: for. True freedom is not an abstract mode of being, unmoored self-causation as Woods termed it, but is actually substantive, it constitutes something. What is that something? As I explain in my article “Living Well in the Cross,”
The Cross, the cruciform life in Christ, then, is the true telos of the human being, for on the Cross. The Cross is, in other words, the Christian’s eudaimonia. Aristotle defines eudaimonia as “living well” (or “happiness”), the supreme and most proper orientation one can have in his life, the fulfillment and discipline of one’s truest purpose.
We haven’t the freedom to do or be whatever, but for virtuosity. This is a supremely Christian understanding, though that might be obfuscated for us living under the auspices of the post-Enlightenment West. No one gets as close to wording this just like I would than James K.A. Smith, in his insightful exploration of St. Augustine on this same topic, who says that
[Augustine] has a radically different conception of freedom that we’ve forgotten in modernity: freedom not as permission but as power, the freedom of graced empowerment, freedom for.12
This freedom, as Smith continues, “doesn’t expand with the demolishing of boundaries or the evisceration of constraints” but rather flourishes, becomes something superior, particularly “when a good will is channeled toward the Good by constraints that are gifts.”13 This gets no clearer than in Romans 6 when Paul says the following (vv. 15-23):
What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.
For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Our freedom as Christians is not to engage in antinomianism, a heresy very alike to what Paul describes here, but to engage in (Christian) eudaimonia. We are freed to be slaves, to put it another way. This is, or it appears to be, a logical antinomy, one of many in Christian theology. As my friend Trey of
explains, antinomies typically arise from conflicts between three separate ways of looking at the world: fallen, protological, and eschatological. In his words, “The fallen perspective misunderstands the world, the protological perspective accurately apprehends the world in its current state, and the eschatological perspective contemplates the end/telos of the world (its full union with God in the eschaton).” Not understanding the enslavement of the Christian to Christ derives from a conflict between fallen logic and eschatological logic: in our prideful fallenness (Gen. 3, esp. vv. 3-6) we believe that we, the isolated I, is the apex of existence, indeed even all that exists, and so we seek, to again borrow from Woods, engage in unmoored self-creation; this is synonymous with the self-relation that Trey (and to a similar extent myself) derides.Freedom to/from is thus the result of fallen logic. Slavery to Christ as freedom, however, is an eschatological reality, for when we are enslaved to Christ we don’t find ourselves stunted or inhibited, as most slaves usually are, but, rather, we find ourselves being sanctified, we grow in the eudaimonic journey of the Christian faith, and actually become greater as slaves (cf. Rom. 6:19-23).14 Think of a bird in a cage, which is a cliché depiction of restraint. When the cage is opened and the bird can leave, does it leave to become a dog or a salamander? No! It stretches its wings and takes flight, it does what it was meant to be—free to be a bird. I could probably name a bunch of biblical episodes that reflect this, but as I recently attended a theatrical performance of Daniel examples from him are freshest to my mind: Daniel and his friends, slaves to God and to Babylon, thrive as slaves to the Lord rather than Nebuchadnezzar, and even when their divine enslavement inhibits their worldly liberties (I am in particular thinking of their abstention from Babylonian meats) they thrive (Daniel 1:8, 15-17):
But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way. … At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. So the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead. To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds.
This is also repeated in numerous hagiographies, wherein the most dejected and deprived monks prove to be the most wise and powerful men in the world, far exceeding kings and warlords in their splendorous halls and mountains of war booty. We are better off as slaves of Christ because only in Christ do we experience sanctification and ultimate glorification, while as slaves to sin we will only increasingly decay before disappearing through our prideful self-negation. Because it is our rightness with God, our self-mastery and virtue (to use more classical terms), that matters, our worldly passions are meaningless in comparison. Christ could, after all, at the time of His betrayal, declare, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in Him” (Jn. 13:31). How much more so will we be glorified for forsaking the fleeting pleasures of sin?
Accordingly, this allows us to better understand what true order is and what tyrants actually do that is tyrannical. Order, to start, is the shalom of Scripture, which is the view of things being in right arrangement, in working as intended, or, more explicitly, for all things to be in full and rightful communion with God and His energies. In other words, order is the environment in which eudaimonia is best facilitated, where people are free to have the time to practice and learn the virtues, where they can walk with friends who support your in your self-mastery (an Aristotelian and Solomonic notion; Prov. 27:17), and where you aren’t intimidated into debasing yourself by the incontinent who’ve amassed barbaric power to themselves. That latter condition is the tyrant, the barbarian who’s found himself in the throne room and taken up the crown, which Aquinas touches on in his own discussion of the nature of the tyrant in De Regno (4.26):
Therefore this kind of government is to be avoided as the Wise man admonishes [Sirach 9:13]: “Keep far from the man who has the power to kill,” because he kills not for justice’s sake but by his power, for the lust of his will. Thus there can be no safety. Everything is uncertain when there is a departure from justice. Nobody will be able firmly to state: This thing is such and such, when it depends upon the will of another, not to say upon his caprice. Nor does the tyrant merely oppress his subjects in corporal things but he also hinders their spiritual good. Those who seek more to use, than to be of use to, their subjects prevent all progress, suspecting all excellence in their subjects to be prejudicial to their own evil domination. For tyrants hold the good in greater suspicion than the wicked, and to them the valour of others is always fraught with danger.
As you might’ve noticed, Aquinas employs the word “safety,” and he accurately shows how tyrants, despite their top-down micromanaging brutality, undermine it. Because of how they work, “Everything is uncertain when there is a departure from justice.” Once the ability to live our lives orderly, since we “want to wake up every morning and be assured that everything will be the same,” is compromised our ability to be farsighted, to engage in the discipline to become more virtuous, is likewise compromised, and thus we fall into acrasy.
Returning to The Man in the High Castle again, one thing I noticed watching through it is how vulgar and undignified the revolutionaries in the show are, they aren’t really people to look up to, but rather they’re people you’d want to do away with as soon as you could, but what these reflections on the true nature and consequences of tyranny have led me to realize is exactly that: like Dr. Parvini says, culture is downstream from law,15 so when the law is incontinent so shall the people subject to it become incontinent, and so you need to fight the fiends in control with beasts even more fiendish than them. At least, that’s what we think, because as history shows us, those who resolutely remain encratic despite the perversion around them (I am thinking of the early Christians),16 burn brighter than the revolutionary or the activist and can actually achieve more in the long-term.
In any case, I believe you should understand where I’m getting at, which is that tyranny is actually tyranny not because “The tyrant says I can’t do certain things” but because “The tyrant prevents me from doing the most important thing: cultivating virtue.” The tyrant shifts, or even melts down, the scales of justice, obfuscates our view of reality, and submerges us in despair, “For tyrants hold the good in greater suspicion than the wicked, and to them the valour of others is always fraught with danger.” This is also why we can better understand how and why our own times are tyrannical as well, for being able to go into a voting booth uninhibited or watch fireworks on July 4th means nothing if you are being debased in the process, or if the entirety of civil society is debased/debasing by default. As I mentioned earlier regarding the record-low confidence in America’s most basic societal institutions this is clearly what’s happening in America, with incontinence flowing down from once-austere façades and washing over the sheep below. (Elite theory and the decadence of the elite are discussions that have been insightfully conducted by
and Dr. Neema Parvini.) The “order” of our society is truly a disorder, one that inspires gross acrasy rather than the refinement and building of character, an issue that even the “liberal” Founders of our country realized and warned against, such as John Adams:We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.17
We are, accordingly, not freemen in our modern society, but rather slaves in the foulest bondage, for “[we] are slaves to sin, which leads to death” (Rom. 6:16, cf. vv. 19-23).
What is there to do, then? Well, I believe I’ve given the answer already. Certainly, I have no grand strategy to present you with, and I don’t presume to be so worthy and noble, but better men than I have lived through similar times. One I’ve mentioned, that being Daniel. What was Babylon if not the seat of iniquity, the supreme symbol of human wickedness, and Nebuchadnezzar if not a tyrant? Yet, Daniel thrived under this bondage, living unwaveringly for the glory of the Lord, and ultimately guided his people of Israel out of captivity through his inspiring virtuosity and its effect on the tyrants around him. During times of trouble there is no better nor more important opportunity to be virtuous, for the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing (as Edmund Burke [never] said).
Hence why Tolkien is a better storyteller than Feige.
Indeed, if you read the studies or memoirs of key Nazi higher-ups, such as Longerich’s Goebbels or Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, you get the sense that the actual ideologues were nothing more than vacuous sycophants and opportunists.
Abraham Maslow, “A theory of human motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): 373, 376.
Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies; cf. Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government, esp. 193-228.
José A. Tapia Granados and Ana V. Diez Roux, “Life and death during the Great Depression,” PNAS 106:41 (2009): 17290-95.
This is not at all exaggerating, and mainstream outlets are willing to repeat it, such as the Smithsonian’s article “How Hyperinflation Heralded the Fall of German Democracy.”
And, of course, this led to much civil unrest as well, which threatened those safety needs Maslow mentions.
See Mises, Omnipotent Government; Günter Reimann, The Vampire Economy.
As if, however, we hadn’t lived through the 2009 swine flu pandemic or the 2013-2016 Ebola outbreak, or, outside of the medical, the Great Recession, 9/11, and a profundity of wars and terrorism. Makes you think how much of the COVID rhetoric was fuelled by agitprop.
See Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
James K.A. Smith, On the Road with St. Augustine, 61, cf. 57-76.
Smith, On the Road, 70.
Ibid., emphasis mine.
Ibid., 75-76.
I have more specific views on this, but I’ll have to clarify these later.
Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church; Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity, esp. 137-52.
“From John Adams to Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives; Noah Webster has a similar and equally relevant quote: “I know not whether I am singular in the opinion; but it is my decided opinion, that the Christian religion, in its purity, is the basis or rather the source of all genuine freedom in government. … And I am persuaded that no civil government of a republican form can exist & be durable, in which the principles of that religion have not a controlling influence” (“Noah Webster to James Madison, 16 October 1829,” Founders Online, National Archives).