Our Quest for Freedom: Remembering

[This is from my new book Our Quest for Freedom and other essays]

How can it be that so many of us knew, deep down, that there was something not right about this society, even without the help of Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab?

We have, after all, never known anything else. Generations of us have lived this reality. What point of comparison do we possess, that enables us to make an unfavourable judgement on the contemporary world?

When we are born, we do not know what kind of world we will emerge into.

We were not expecting this world. We were not made for this world.

That’s why we can end up being so unhappy. Why they have to try to shape us, break us, diminish us, so that we fit in with their project.

This society is not natural, but artificial. It has been constructed so as to order human life in a way that suits certain interests, the interests of those who regard us as their cattle, their human capital from which they can become still fatter and more powerful.

They haven’t finished with us yet, either. Next stop is to concentrate us into cages that they can’t call camps, for fear of equivalence exposed, but instead term “smart cities”.

Each stage in their “progress” has hauled us a step further away from our natural freedom and a step closer to their final solutions.

But inside, we remain natural – at least those of us who have not volunteered to have their genes manipulated by the powers-that-lie.

Inside, we still have the image of a certain environment into which we expected to be born.

We expected to be loved, held, cherished; to gently come to know the ways of our people and of nature; to be well-nourished physically, emotionally and culturally, so that we might grow up clear and healthy, ready to blossom into the creative, co-operative, courageous person we were always meant to be, so that we might pass on this well-being and wisdom to future generations, so that we might have played our humble part in the human unfolding.

This didn’t happen. This didn’t happen at all. It could never have happened in the debased society in which we were raised.

But that expectation is still there within us, somewhere, even if it is buried beneath a thousand toxic layers of hurt, fear, shame, craving, guilt, resentment, bitterness and boredom.

That expectation, a sort of flickering image, a ghost-like notion of a world we have never known, manifests itself in different ways for different folk.

It can be a fantasy, something to which people can escape in dreams or fiction, or an elusive illusion which they try, and fail, to actually grasp by travelling, by moving home, by starting again.

For some of us, it is a paradise lost, a golden age of the past stolen from us and to which we would deeply love to return, if only we could.

For others of us, it is a dreamed-of future, a golden age that could be ours if only we could find the courage to seize it.

For a few of us, it is all of these. It is an archetype of how we are meant to live, of what human life is supposed to be like.

When we look inside our hearts and see that flickering image, we are remembering who we are.

[Audio version]

Our Quest for Freedom and other essays can be downloaded for free here or purchased here.