Living Freedom Archive

While we share with other creatures an inborn need for mobility, as self-transcending beings we also resist any kind of limitation, even self-imposed.

There is a good sense and a non-sense to the craving for unlimited freedom, and at this late date in the human career, it’s crucial to realize in our daily lives the difference. For many people in the “rich” world today, freedom means consumer convenience and indefinite “growth.” This means rejecting natural and social limits.

The planet staggers under the burden of our lifestyle in the West, and so does the rest of the world who serve us as a new source of cheap labour. A tenth of the world’s population consume more than half its resources and energy and produce more than half its pollution.

The implicit promise is that the others will eventually share what we have. Since our cheap goods depend on their slave labour and on an expiring “ecological tax shelter,” that promise is an outright lie. A false sense of entitlement to plunder the earth and other societies may not be new.

What is new are the provisions we have made to ignore it in our daily lives.

Have we taken for granted, and as our right, a “pursuit of happiness” that does not work for the planet and which can never be shared by the great majority of people?

Is this the freedom we flaunt before the rest of the world, while we remain defiantly free from conviction about what we do?

by Dan Bruiger
Hornby Island, British Columbia
Author of Second Nature: the Man-made World
of Idealism, Technology and Power
www.leftfieldpress.com

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