Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gerry Spence

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Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom

St. Martin's Griffin

Chapter One

THE FIRST STEP

Recognizing the Slave Within

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.

?Erich Fromm
from Man for Himself, 1947

PERFECT FREEDOM

Perfect freedom does not exist except when we are freed oflife. Then the mind is unprisoned, and the soul is free to fly.Death frees life, releasing it like a bird that soars without fearof its enemies, like the sparrow with no fear of the hawk.Absent death, perfect freedom cannot exist. I do not arguefor death. What I argue for is freedom without regard to theexterior forces that enslave us. I argue that freedom can existonly if we have first freed the self. And in life the self is oursto free.

THE FIGHT AGAINST FREEDOM

Most of us do not want to be free. Most of our parents wereslaves. We have grown up as slaves. The system in which welive and struggle and attempt to fulfill our lives is a systemof slavery. In the end all systems enslave, whether they beorders of government, religion, or society, and although oursystem may offer the best chance for individuals to be free,systems themselves never free us. We must free ourselves.

    Once enslaved, few want to burst out from under the leakingroof of the slave hut to freedom and stumble in the colddark night alone. In the back part of our hearts, we equatefreedom with terror. To be free leaves us isolated from theother slaves. Better that we rage until we are palsied, pointand squall and wail at fate, shake our fists at God, blame thepoliticians, blame anybody, everything, because to becomefree demands that we take responsibility for our bondage.No, we do not want freedom. We were born in slavery. It istoo frightening outside the slave hut. We want, instead, amore comfortable slavery gilded with bountiful excuses forour servitude.

    On the underside of freedom lurks the sense that we areas puny as a particle of dust at sea. We stay imprisoned inbad marriages because we are afraid to be alone. We endureevery manner of indignity and outrage, every agony and tedium,because we are afraid?afraid to throw off the tracesand experience the naked terror that so dominates the ideaof freedom. We kiss our shackles. We stay at home with theold folks, or never leave the farm or the neighborhood. Welinger on in daddy's business or hang on to the old job untilwe have worn a track around it like the knee-deep trail ofthe old gristmill horse, because we are too frightened tomarch out into the wilderness alone.

    Already we know that no one is ever really free. Not thepresident, not the chairman of the board, not husband orwife, not the haughty businessman, the playboy, or the idlerich. Freedom is for the birds. And even they are securelybound by their instincts. No. No one is free, and no onewants freedom. We want to talk about it over a beer. Tomany, freedom is death. If we awakened one day to confrontpure freedom, would we not scurry back into our dark littleholes as fast as terrorized mice?

    Cages are cages whether constructed of steel and concreteor from the fabric of the mind. Like all experiences, bothfreedom and slavery are registered in the mind. The mind setsthe limits of bondage and provides the gate to liberty. Whateach of us mistakes for our freedom is really our experiencewithin the cage.

    I remember when one simply bought one's ticket andhopped on the airplane. Today we have constructed newcages in old zoos. Today we are terrorized by terrorists. Yetthere are probably no more than a few score people in theentire nation whose madness would cause them to plot thewillful destruction of hundreds of innocent passengers. As aconsequence, these few, whoever they might be, control 260million people. Today we take it as an unquestioned part oftravel, as the way of things, that we must identify ourselveswith an official picture identification?the precursor of tattooson our wrists. Today we accept as the way of things thatour bodies must be searched mechanically, that our luggagemust be inspected, that once aboard, we must behave in numerouspurposeless ways that have little or nothing to dowith our safety but control us perfectly like cattle run throughthe chutes. We know that if someone wants to manufacturea bomb and blow up the plane and its passengers, all of theendless procedures we have endured will have proven to beonly the known landscape over which any terrorist can travelwith ease.

    We do not provide ourselves with safety. We have onlygiven up our constitutional rights against unlawful searchesand seizures for the illusion of safety. Yet no one complains,or if a complaint is heard, it is in the form of an impotentmumble to which a security guard, who may not be able toread the regulations he has been hired to enforce, respondsby warning us to comply at once. Otherwise, we can take thebus to Chicago.

    Today one's every move, every decision, every act, is governedby rules and regulations devised, ostensibly, to permitmasses of people to function together in harmony. We dressaccording to rules, eat according to rules, excrete accordingto rules, sleep according to rules, and die according to rules.We mate according to rules, and, according to rules, we rearand educate our young. To build the simplest house requirescompliance with a mountain of rules that would confoundall but modern man who has been born into this bureaucraticcage. The rules that govern our daily lives would fill reamsof fine print on tissue-thin paper. Still, the human being, morethan any other creature, is perfectly able to adapt to nearlyany environment. We can swelter and prosper in the jungles.We can tramp over the ice and multiply in igloos. The rulesand laws and the multitude of man's endless impositions onman that consume our freedom have become a part of ourdaily environment to which we have also adapted with littlemore than an occasional whimper.

    The difference, of course, between the monkey in the zooand the man on the street is that the monkey cannot be containedwithout physical restraint, while the man can be cagedand shackled and whipped and exist in captivity from birthuntil death within a prison without walls and still believe, athis last breath, that he is free.

FREEDOM INSIDE THE ZOO

Yet we cannot be free outside the cage unless we are able toexperience freedom within it. Consider the wild monkey who,lately transported to the zoo, hurls itself against the wallsuntil it is battered and exhausted. Consider how it refuses toeat within the cage and may eventually die. On the otherhand, his cage brother, born in the cage, sits peacefully bymunching on whatever morsel the zookeeper has tossed himand bounces off the concrete walls as if he were swingingfrom tree limb to tree limb.

    Slavery and captivity are not synonymous for either manor monkey. The wild monkey can be captive in the jungleitself. Relegated to an inferior rung on the...