Being free
and feeling free
are not necessarily the same thing
What if they are both right? Simultaneously?
After all, it’s never about the law itself! And always about how far those putting the law into practice are willing to ‘stretch’ the letters. Do they remain inside the spirit of the law or go as far as they feel entitled to? Entitled to go…
Same thing happens with empathy.
Empathy as something you feel. Each of you differently. Intensity-wise. Relative to different aspects of life. And so on.
And empathy as something you ‘trade in’. Show off, window dressing, expected good will gestures…
A society whose members no longer feel enough empathy towards their peers is ‘loose’. ‘Loose’ enough to be ‘about to be lost’.
A society needs to function like an organism. To live. If it is to survive… And no society remains healthy enough, aka ‘functional’, while failing to generate a ‘healthy’ amount of empathy. Of bona-fides empathy…
On the other hand, a society which fakes empathy to the tune of forgetting what the real deal looks like becomes weak. Weaker and weaker as the empathy it exudes becomes faker and faker…
Same thing regarding ‘freedom’.
Which is first and foremost a concept. Coined and minted by thinkers. Who have tried to understand history and human evolution.
Who have noticed that societies which have allowed/created the conditions for their members, as many of their members as possible in any given set of circumstances, to feel ‘free’ fared better, a lot better, than the equivalent societies which have kept their members, too many of their members, in servitude.
In abject servitude, for all servitude is abject.
Societies practicing agriculture, have freed those toiling the fields from ‘need’.
Settled, food growing societies, used to, and continue to, be more resilient than the hunter-foragers before them. For as long as they took good/respectful care of their fields.
Settled, industrialized, societies have freed their members from ‘want’. Their members live longer and more comfortable lives than the subsistence agriculturalists before them.
Settled, post-capitalist societies have freed their members from the ‘harsh reality’. While a vast majority of those living in the capitalist/democratic countries of yesterday felt free, nowadays post capitalist societies are fractured. Both sides removed from the real reality. Both sides living in a ‘virtual’ reality.
One built by ‘man’. By ‘human’, actually. ‘Gender specific’ arguments have no place here.
One side feels trapped and the other feels entitled. The trapped ones feel as being held back by a glass ceiling. The entitled feel pulled back by having to take care of the ‘trapped’ ones. And each of the both sides blame the other one for their predicament.
Not exactly sustainable, don’t you think?
Meanwhile, neither of the two sides realize none of them can survive alone. Without the expertise of the other side.
