Freedom: A Reverie

Freedom — the process of releasing the self from bondage

Freedom isn’t just the lack of chains; it’s the struggle to outgrow them, both outside and in. Across history, cultures have twisted the idea into shapes that suit their myths: the Greeks glorified eleutheria as civic virtue, Buddhists framed nirvana as detachment from craving, and modern politicians sell it as a checkbox of rights. But real freedom isn’t a fixed state, it’s a rebellion. Against systems, against conditioning, even against the mind’s own traps. The catch? Most people never push past the illusion of 'being free' to question who —or what— they’re truly freed from.

True freedom ignites in the mind before it ever touches the world. An unshakable sovereignty that no law can grant and no tyrant can steal. The Stoics knew this: their sage finds liberty not in changing storms but in steering own mind. The Buddhists mapped it deeper: not just weathering suffering but dismantling the very self that suffers. And the existentialists laid bare its terrifying cost: we are condemned to invent ourselves daily, with no divine script to absolve us. This isn’t passive 'inner peace' —it’s war against illusion. To strip away the fictions of ego, to stare down one’s own conditioned fears, that’s where freedom breathes.

Western Roots: The Paradox of Eleutheria and Libertas

Freedom’s Western roots reveal a paradox: it was never purely personal, but a contested bargain between self and society. Ancient Greece and Rome —so often mythologised as cradles of unfettered liberty— in fact chained freedom to duty. The Greek eleutheria wasn’t a permit: it was the privilege of self-rule because of civic participation. As Aristotle declared in Politics 1317, its essence lay in the dynamism of 'to rule and be ruled in turn'. To be free was to debate in the agora, to defend the polis. Individualism here flourished precisely through collective obligation.

Rome’s libertas twisted this further: it meant not just the freedom to act, but freedom from masters. Yet even here, liberty hid its clauses and existed only within the law’s iron frame. The paradox endured: you could be liber yet bound to the Senate’s decrees.

These contradictions seeded the West’s enduring tension: is freedom a shield for the individual, or a tool for the collective? Athens and Rome answered with a demand that liberty requires sacrifice, that its price is eternal vigilance. Today's 'democracies', inheriting this dilemma, still struggle to balance the two.

Eastern Liberation: The Art of Unbinding the Mind

If Western freedom builds citadels of rights and laws, Eastern wisdom dismantles the fortress of the self. Here, liberty isn’t claimed through constitutions but uncovered through dissolution of ego, resistance, and the very illusion of control.

Buddhism’s radical proposition: freedom isn’t won but noticed. What we call suffering is just the mind’s addiction to craving, which is a self-constructed cage where every desire for more (or less) forges new bars. Nirvana? Merely the moment the mind stops feeding its own prisons. The Eightfold Path isn’t a moral code but a toolkit for psychic disassembly. Mindfulness as the chisel, meditation as the hammer.

Taoism takes this further: freedom as surrender to the current. Where the West glorifies the will’s triumph over nature, the Taoist sage thrives by 'forgetting' the will entirely. The Tao Te Ching’s paradox says it all: “The rigid crack; the flexible ride the storm.” To swim against the stream is exhaustion; to float with it is sovereignty.

Zen sharpens both into a single blade. Suzuki’s yokes aren’t laws or tyrants, but the subtler chains of language and logic. A koan doesn’t teach; it detonates. When the mind stops categorising (free vs. bound, self vs. other), what remains is suchness: action without hesitation, compassion without calculation.

Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. By making us drink right from the fountain of life, it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world.
— Suzuki

The Eastern challenge to the West: What good is political liberty if the mind remains a slave to its own compulsions?

The Stoic Gambit: Freedom as Fortress

Where Eastern sages dissolve the self, the Stoics arm it —not with passivity, but with ruthless discernment. Their proposition is radical in its simplicity: freedom isn’t the absence of chaos, but the sovereignty to name what matters.

Epictetus’ dictum, “We suffer not events, but our judgments” unlocks the paradox. A tyrant owns your chains only if you grant him the deed to your mind. Seneca takes it further: “The man who has freed himself from desires has also freed himself from fears.” Here, freedom is a mental training for how to see the world so clearly that even exile feels like moving to a new home, not a punishment.

The Stoics proposed a striking paradox: true freedom comes not from controlling the world, but from surrendering all concern for what lies beyond our power. Where Taoists speak of flowing with the universe, the Stoics insist on the disciplined act of naming only virtue as truly good. Even as chaos rages around them, their hegemonikon (inner command center) stands unshaken like a fortress no fire can breach.

This stands in stark contrast to Buddhism’s vision of liberation. While Stoicism builds walls around an unassailable self, Buddhism questions whether that besieged fortress of 'I' was ever real to begin with. The Buddhist doctrine of anattā dissolves the very notion of a separate self that the Stoics work so hard to fortify.

Existentialism and the Weight of Freedom

Existentialism confronts us with a profound truth: freedom is not just liberation, but a personal responsibility. For existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and de Beauvoir, freedom is both a gift and a burden, as each individual is responsible for shaping their existence in an inherently indifferent or even absurd universe. There are no predefined scripts, no inherent meanings handed down from above. As Sartre put it, we are condemned to be free—thrown into existence first, left to carve out our essence through every choice we make.

This is freedom stripped bare; no illusions, no excuses. It demands the courage to look into the void and still choose, to act knowing we alone bear the consequences. There is no destiny to blame, no divine plan to lean on. Every decision writes the story of who we are, and with that comes the dizzying burden of authorship.

Unlike Stoicism’s disciplined retreat or Buddhism’s release from self, existentialism forces us to stand fully in the chaos, to embrace freedom not as peace but as perpetual becoming. It is not a destination, but the act of walking. An endless, sometimes terrifying, act of self-creation.

The Anti-Psychiatry Rebellion: Freedom Beyond Diagnosis

Open the cage of societal conformity to ask a dangerous question: What if the real illness isn’t in the mind, but in the systems that label it? Laing and Szasz saw psychiatry not as healing, but as control —a way to silence those whose suffering or strangeness exposed the cracks in society’s facade.

Laing shattered the clinical gaze by reframing so-called madness as something far more human, an existential scream against a broken world. The schizophrenic wasn’t disordered but drowning in truths others refused to see. His work revealed how institutions pathologised pain, turned justified alienation into treatable symptoms. True freedom, then, meant the right to one’s own despair, to experience anguish without being told it’s a malfunction.

Szasz went further: mental illness a myth used to enforce compliance. If freedom meant anything, it had to include the right to be different, even distressed, without being labelled sick. He saw diagnoses as linguistic shackles that turn personal struggles into medical commodities. For him, liberation began when we stopped surrendering our inner lives to the vocabulary of disorders.

This was freedom at its most combustible, not just resisting oppression, but denying its very right to name you. Where society demanded adjustment, anti-psychiatry demanded sovereignty over one’s own mind. Not wellness, but authenticity. Even if that authenticity looked like chaos to the outside world.

Further to Question

These thoughts, from the Stoic’s disciplined mind to the existentialist’s defiant self-creation, from the Buddhist’s release of ego to the anti-psychiatrist’s war on labels, all circle a single, urgent question: What does it mean to be free in a world that both constrains and defines us?

Is freedom the absence of chains, or the strength to carry them lightly? Can freedom evolve beyond 'me' to embrace 'we'?

To be free is neither to escape the world nor to dominate it, but to move through it with eyes open: responsible for ourselves, accountable to each other, and awake to the systems that shape us.