Filmthinker.com

 A short article about the desire to be completely independent.

 

Living in North-Europe most of us are afforded a fair degree of  freedom throughout our entire lives. In The Netherlands, especially in a liberal city like Amsterdam, you easily find yourself growing up among transvestites, artists and members of several ethnic minorities. Harsh cultural limits experienced elsewhere are mostly absent.

 

But I see some of my friends, including myself, wanting even more freedom. We desire to extend our culturally given freedom and push it to the max. Is freedom addictive? And does it make sense to follow an overtly juvenile and vain attempt to completely liberate ourselves from the world that surrounds us?

 

I wish to extend my power to reconstruct views independent from any imaginable restraint. Enlarge my ability, or a potential of total ‘intellectual independence’. I want to fully chose my free will and use all possibilities to consider multiple ways of viewing the world. But wanting your freedom maximized, can be tiresome and in a way it’s a refusal to grow up. An urge for intellectual independence at times may morph into a hideous monster.

 

I try to please my freedom beast, but my built-in anti-authoritarianism seems to make for an unappeasable desire. As if it is my personal dogma I reject any rule imposed on me, much like an adolescent craving for independence. On a more rational note I find we are equally justified to pursue freedom without limitations. To be truly free, one can not be given freedom. The entity giving you a license to ‘do as you please’ necessarily has some kind of power over you: by permitting or not permitting you that liberty. That is why the ultimate freedom should be obtained by the one who seeks it.

 

An often heard statement against this, is that in life you simply need some rules to survive. But we can make up those rules by ourselves, isn’t it? I know that few among us are able to sustain a high degree of freedom for a longer period of time. We eventually slip back into our demarcated routine of everyday life. Those who do not fallback to boundaries might simply go mad. We put our health at risk if we pursue freedom without any restraint. In our desire for freedom, we might be facing a lost battle. But what if we do not play to win? If establishing complete personal freedom isn’t our ultimate target, we can give our hunt for complete freedom a good and honest try and see it as a game rather then a goal. I conclude that a pursuit of freedom for the sake of trying is interesting enough. In this series of blog articles I will take total freedom as a fictive point at the horizon, feeding my innate curiosity which I see as a source of energy to search, travel and explore.

 

 

post#2: A jump to Feel Free >>