To Bear Your Freedom
Freedom is a notion we are rethinking now. We are fighting for freedom. Our freedom is under threat. We are gaining freedom. We are liberating, setting free. We are granting freedom―and we are defending freedom. The war has provided this notion with new significance, a different value, different worth. We have thousands of people deprived of their freedom―that is how we refer to them. These are our prisoners of war and captives. These are those who live under occupation. These are those whose lives, instead of being a space for self-realization, subjectness and free choice, have become a space for survival, where external activity is limited by the rigid framework imposed by the invaders.
*******************************
One of the first and most important discoveries I made about captivity was not even the fact that captivity was an atmosphere of violence and fear. This was expected. Such a discovery lay in understanding that the system of captivity primarily aimed at depriving a person of their subjectness, at turning a person into an object. This object will do whatever those who control it want it to: will learn and sing appropriate songs when told to; will keep silent when told to; will say what and when told to; will do push-ups and squats on command. Violence is primarily about this: depriving a person of the right to freely choose their own actions, the absence of control over their own life in any form. About turning a person into an object. Physical harm comes either at the same time or later: when the guards feel that the object is expressing its own desires or aspirations, or simply when they get tired of it and want to break this object. Then physical harm comes, and with it death approaches. However, first comes the deprivation of freedom, subjectness, free will. The best prisoner or captive is deprived of their own I. Not quite a person. An object. And in these terms violence is the main antonym of freedom, the main antithesis of it.
*******************************
In this sense, occupation is very similar to captivity. The dictionary definition of occupation is almost always based on control over a (certain) territory. However, this territory is not a desert, people live there, often hundreds of thousands of people. And under occupation, they are all a derivative, secondary resource, useful or harmful to the invaders. People under occupation, even if they retain some freedom of small choices regarding their agenda, are objectified by the invaders: they have no voice, no choice whether to follow the orders of strangers with weapons, whether to accept foreign passports, whether to obey the introduced innovations and whether to force their children to obey them. Captivity is the occupation of one person in every detail of their daily life. Occupation is the captivity of many people, who are denied the opportunity to influence their own destiny. By taking away freedom, the invaders take away a piece of humanity with it, the piece which makes us human―the ability to choose our own path. And that is why both the release from captivity and the departure from the occupied territories are often portrayed as liberation, regaining one’s freedom.
*******************************
Attacks on freedom are not limited to physical control and violence. Turning people into objects, into tools for attaining goals alien to them, depriving them of their subjectness can also be achieved by other means. The abomination of propaganda (not in the sense of spreading certain opinions and views, but as a system of manipulating people) lies precisely in this: its creators treat people as objects that have to be deprived of free will. To force people to act one way and not the other, fitting them in a mental picture of the world that will require one thing from them―and only one―attitude, acceptance and action. Therefore, freedom is inextricably linked to critical thinking, to processing of what propagandists are trying to feed us, seeking not to expand our space of freedom and choices, but to narrow and destroy it. Manipulative propaganda is mental violence aimed at destroying freedom to the same extent as physical violence destroys the space of freedom of prisoners of war, captives and people under occupation. And resistance to it in order to preserve one’s own humanity is, though in a different dimension, also resistance to conquest and occupation.
*******************************
We have a long history of unfreedom, and a long history of fighting for freedom. During the Bolshevik Great Terror of the 1930s, it was not enough to declare a person a criminal and to kill him/her: s/he had to be forced to agree with this and to admit guilt for something s/he had not done, to sign what s/he had been ordered to sign, to say what had been written for him/her in advance, and to agree with the necessity of all this. S/He had to give up their own voice and replace it with the voice of their executioners. Or lose their voice altogether and silently survive or die in villages devastated by the Holodomor. However, the same 20th century that brought almost model, dystopian examples of struggle against freedom and humanity, immortalized by Orwell in the image of a boot stepping on a human face, also brought examples of struggle for freedom and its defense in Ukraine. From the acts of defiance or violent resistance to the Soviet occupation to dissidents expressing their own positions, despite risks and threats, we see how people fought for their choices, their subjectness, their freedom. They fought to remain free and, therefore, to remain human beings to the fullest extent.
*******************************
We are all born free. At least that is what the texts which have been important to us for so long that they have become classic say (but that does not make these texts any less fragile and increasingly despised). We are born unfree―unable to survive, to acquire our first skills, knowledge and abilities without others, those who protect and accompany us. Others teach us the first skills in walking, using things, mastering the most subtle and magical tool of all the wonders we know together―language. Without others we would have had no information about the world around us, and about what this world is like, and what is possible to do in it. At first, we are limited in our own achievements and abilities, but even later the most important things to us, from acquiring knowledge to taking care of our health, depend on others. And this will continue throughout our entire lives. However, our inseparable freedom starts emerging in what we do with what we have received―because now this depends on us. Our views. Our choices. Our decisions. And, ultimately, our creativity. After all, we continue sharing with those around us what we bear, our worldviews and interpretations, desires and proposals. This includes both the reinterpretation of what we have received from others, and the result of our own free creativity. We create, each and every one of us, our own world from what we have received and from our inner space of creativity―something new in language, in our views of the world, in our decisions on how to behave in this world. Our choices are the result of our freedom, creative freedom. These choices, these decisions cannot be made otherwise, and no one can take this freedom away from us. For this is how we exist and not otherwise.
*******************************
Freedom is relative. Because it can be restricted, suppressed, destroyed; it needs respect, care, protection and nursing. Treating others, we can give them more space and resources for consideration and creativity, or we can deprive them of space and be very selective about resources. In the first case, we value their freedom, their existence as people, their choices. The maximum of such an attitude, the maximum of respect for freedom is love―the maximum affirmation of the Other’s existence, with the approval for their worlds and respect for their choices. In the second case, we bring their death closer, because it is inextricably linked to violence, restriction, objectification, fear and pain, and the prospect of disappearance if they express their own thoughts or views. Therefore, affirming the freedom of others is affirming our own freedom, through effort, expense and despite these restrictions. Freedom requires bringing oneself outward, working to embody it and, if necessary, defending it.
Freedom is absolute. Because no one can completely deprive us of it. Because even when we cannot choose the conditions in which we find ourselves, we can choose our attitude towards them, as Viktor Frankl wrote, choose our thoughts and views of the world. As long as we exist, so does our freedom. The freedom of choices we make every day and at every moment with what the course of events, other beings and ourselves provided us, and this freedom cannot be taken away from us, and we cannot get rid of it. But along with it, we cannot get rid of the responsibility for the choices we make: each choice bears responsibility for its justification and consequences. Freedom is what we bear within ourselves, whether we want it or not, even if sometimes this burden may seem heavy. However, it is precisely by bearing it that we bring it into the world and realize it, embody it in our choices and actions. And even when a person chooses not to make a choice, this is also a choice, and the responsibility for it remains with the person. Responsibility is the Siamese twin of freedom, one whole with it and, like in case of freedom, there is no escape from it. Freedom to treat, freedom to think, act, create―everyone has their own responsibility, originating from the word response―to the question about the grounds and justification for the realization of our freedom. This response must be worthy.
The future is yet to be written, it is now undefined and unpredictable. The future will become the present we create by our choices, our creativity, the realization of our freedom, or its restriction and destruction―together, all of us. And thus all of us, each and every one of us, are responsible for this future; it is precisely our responsibility, from which we will escape nowhere, and for which we are destined. Because it is the consequence, the embodiment of our freedom; our free direction towards the future is an integral part of our humanity.