Freedom For?

Everybody wants freedom, but nobody wants responsibility. The day I took responsibility was the day I set myself free. God gave me a set of cards, with their advantages and disadvantages, and I appreciate them both equally, as the flaws have also made me the man I am today. Now, no one else is responsible for my actions but me.

It is so much easier to blame society for our own miseries than to accept the past and the present as they are and to step up to take responsibility for the actions that will determine our future. This is the typical Marxist notion of always looking outward for someone else to blame, a temptation that is all too easy to fall into.

I’ve been there.

But then something crazy happened. An ego death began to take place. Yoga entered my life during the war. The war opens your eyes and, sadly, or realistically, teaches you to stay grounded. Yoga teaches you to be disciplined, consistent, present, and truthful. The other milestone that crawled its way up to my awareness was learning about the oppressor-oppressed narrative through Jordan Peterson, who argues that the narrative reduces human beings to victims and oppressors, overlooking individual agency, personal responsibility, and the complexity of human nature. This insight changes everything, as it teaches you to view every human being on Earth as your equal and acknowledge that everyone on this planet has the ability to think and act independently. It teaches you that the world is more complicated and nuanced than you realize. Just last week, in Toulouse, for instance, I saw an African woman carrying an expensive Gucci bag and wearing a gold necklace. Am I supposed to view her as a victim? Is she worth any “less” than me? Of course not. I see her as equivalent to me, and I assume she’s richer than me, too. But the point is that, beyond the simplistic lens that compresses the entire world into the oppressor-oppressed narrative, I treat that African lady exactly how I would treat myself: with respect. I see her as an individual, regardless of her skin color, religion, or circumstances.

Both doctrines, yoga and the critique of the oppressor-oppressed narrative, teach you not only to let go of the past but, most importantly, to take responsibility, exercise agency, and hold yourself accountable as an individual human being. After that, you stop being a victim and start living!

Then you reflect and begin to ask yourself: What do people mean when they blame society? Who is behind those ideas? And what exactly do they mean by saying “society”? Where is it? Which one? Can you pinpoint it? And who are we blaming, too? Why do we need a scapegoat? We blame the past, the hard workers, the successful, and everything else we can think of. All of it, all the negativity, is a dark diversion from taking control of ourselves and striving to be good people.

People with low energy will always try to bring down people with high energy.

It is also worth noting that people envision society differently and idealize a perfect world where suffering doesn’t exist. Others want to inflict suffering on others, like Stalin, Hitler, and Khomeini, all of whom started with leftist or socialist movements. Then you have people who want to cause suffering but hide it under a soft umbrella of slogans like “freezing the rent” or other politically correct propaganda that sounds pleasant to the ear but ends up stabbing you in the chest. They take advantage of their “oppression” and use it to promote their own crazy ideas, like “Queers Intifada,” sailing to Gaza, or the Iranian government or the Taliban forcing women to wear the hijab. They portray American and Western liberalism as the “oppressor” because, once they are “oppressed,” everything becomes legitimized.

But for the privileged who still can’t seem to figure it out: suffering is part of life, and inequality is inevitable. The people who can’t accept suffering are the same people who avoid hard truths and keep fighting against the past. By fighting the past, they keep it alive. How can one move forward when one keeps fighting the past? Anarchists, for instance, are often people who are fighting their own pasts. You will rarely find an anarchist who has had a stable childhood. They are often people who hate authority and are too narcissistic to take responsibility for themselves, so they continue to project their hatred outward and fight against all forms of authority. The same goes for communists, but instead of fighting all forms of authority, they want to be the ones wielding it. The only thing that keeps both groups going is “freedom from,” not “freedom for.” All they want is destruction and an escape from responsibility.

Equality, in the sense of everyone being the same, is also a fiction. Don’t get me wrong. I strongly believe that everyone should be granted equal rights and opportunities, but the idea that we all have the same characteristics, abilities, and physical attributes is delusional. One person can work eight hours a day and live on minimum wage. Another can lie in bed and binge-watch some anime for eight hours a day. Someone else may rely on social welfare due to a mental illness, while another may spend the whole day at a pub. We all have different circumstances, abilities, choices, and limitations. We are all unique individuals with beautifully different personalities and talents that we should acknowledge, admire, and protect.

The concept of equality in itself is fundamentally subjective, just like the vision of a perfect society. One person’s idea of equality is entirely different from another’s. So people who say that communism never worked are also wrong because, according to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Maduro, Khomeini, Kim Jong Un, Omar al-Bashir (Sudan), Hibatullah Akhundzada (Afghanistan’s Taliban supreme leader), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (ISIS leader), Bashar al-Assad, and the rest, it worked exactly the way they had in mind. For the people who still cling to Marx, do you really want to be associated with the same ideas as the people mentioned above?

Regardless of the history, these ideas of equality and inclusiveness promoted by the modern left are full of contradictions and disconnected from reality.

They also come with conditions and many, many contradictions, as I witnessed firsthand in Shoreditch, London, where people claim to be open-minded and accepting, yet there were signs everywhere saying that Israelis were not welcome.

Communists want to reduce government control, yet, on the other hand, they want to centralize the economy and have their own governments control everything, which is precisely what Mélenchon advocates.

Migrants escape communist or Islamist dictatorships and seek shelter in Western countries, only to end up burning down streets and waving the flags of the countries they fled.

Nobody wants to look inward and step up. Instead, everything becomes an excuse to project our personal frustrations onto the world around us.

This is far from taking responsibility in any meaningful sense. It is far from the truth, far from personal accountability, far from agency, very far from gratitude (especially among people who live on welfare), and far from moving forward. It is far from freedom for.