The Paradox of Freedom: Erich Fromm on Moral Aloneness and Our Mightiest Antidote to Terror: Brain Pickings

The Paradox of Freedom: Erich Fromm on Moral Aloneness and Our Mightiest Antidote to Terror: Brain Pickings
"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given," James Baldwin wrote in contemplating how we imprison ourselves, "freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be." It is hard not to instinctually bristle at this notion - we all like to see ourselves as autonomous agents of our own destiny who would never willfully relinquish our freedom. And yet we do - beyond the baseline laws of physics and their perennially disquieting corollary regarding free will, which presupposes that even the nature of the faculty doing the relinquishing is not the sovereign entity we wish it were, we are governed by myriad ideological, social, economic, political, and psychological forces that mitigate the parameters of our freedom. Neuroscientist Christoph Koch put it perfectly in his treatise on free will: "Freedom is always a question of degree rather than an absolute good that we do or do not possess." Read more