What is freedom today?
In order to be actually free to do what I
want, I certainly would like to have the state
and other bodies taking care of things not
only without my choice, but even without me
knowing about them.
On the other hand, are we aware to what extent
when we freely choose, our choices are pre-determined.
This is why I think the last revelations by
Wikileaks are so important. They are about
TISA. A mega important trade agreement – an
agreement about the free flow of finances
and information – which is something that
will predetermine the contours of world economy
for decades to come. And not only are negotiations
secret but we have learned that even the agreements
itself, if it will be accepted, will remain
secret for five years. The most dangerous
forum of non-freedom is the non-freedom which
is not even perceived as such.
Then there is another forum of freedom, which
I think has a disastrous impact and we shouldn’t
underestimate it.
I met at some point in Belgrade in the late 90s when Milosevic
was still in power, some probably ethnic cleansers
– nationalists. I’m even ashamed now for
doing this but I got into conversation with
them and they gave me a wonderful, short lesson
on how nationalism, fundamentalism works.
They told me no, it is not what we hear from
you western intellectuals, that we live in
a risk society, everything is open so we nationalists
are afraid of this freedom and so we escape
from it into old, fundamentalist ethnic and
religious certainties.
They told me no, we experience your Western,
liberal world as overregulated. You are all
the time bombarded by messages of be politically
correct, don’t be a racist, be careful of
what you eat, discipline yourself and son and so on. And as they told me openly, I want to eat whatevery I want, smoke
I want to steal what
I want, I want to beat women, rape them and
so on. And becoming a nationalist, doing some
ethnic cleansing, gives me this terrifying
freedom.
This is why I was not surprised when I heard
that in the area of Iraq and Syria controlled
by, it is not just religious fundamentalism.
There are also gang rapes, tortures, freelance
killings and so on.
You see, this is the problem of fundamentalism
– it is not just there is no freedom, there
also is some kind of false freedom, the explosion
of this obscene freedom.
For me, the highest form of freedom is love.
Here I am a pathetic, old romantic.
Love basically means that you totally dedicate
yourself to one other person. You renounce
one of the key freedoms of choice to exchange
sexual partners and so on.
Now comes my surprise: this freedom is now
gradually taken from us.
I think our idea today is love without the
fall. And you know I found some dating agency
which plays on this. They say we will render
possible to you to find yourself in love without
the fall.
No! I think the only free love is the fall.
You walk along
the street, you slip on a banana peel, a lady
helps you and maybe it will be the love of
your life.
But you cannot predict it. Without this fall,
love is not love.
So the lesson is true freedom means looking
into and questioning the presuppositions of
everything that is given to us by our hegemonic
ideology and by ideology I don’t mean here
some explicit teaching but simply the way
in our daily lives we experience our reality
to question everything including the notion
of freedom itself.
There's a lot wrong with the world at the moment, isn't there? Can we agree on that?
Let's not get into the specifics of what for God's sake!
