Sean Tarjoto						Prof. George Shulman
May 9, 2002						Theorizing Freedom
Final Paper

Topic [#13] Is freedom a subjective and internal experience, an aspect of psychological life? Is it a worldly experience of power and action? Assess this tension by using the exchange between "Rachel and "Agnes" in Griffin's essay.

"Rather both of these are ideologists."[]

	Rachel's other is a psychological thinker. She wants to understand the source of her deeper motives, within her own mind and the minds of others. She is wary Rachel and cannot trust her for it because what Rachel wants is to usurp power to find freedom. "One of these is my political self. She has always seen things in terms of divisions of power." Some have the power to shape the lives of others, they possess money, social position, language, education, simple physical force. “I will take the power.” Rachel says, but Agnes knows that she is immune because she knows how her own power is secured by Rachel’s rules of ambition. 
	In the postmodern western world, both the psychological and the political are suspicious of each other. The former grants personal insight and demands love, the other wields power and makes demands through force. Griffin's interpellating selves go at each other, exchanging losses. Agnes does not want her true feelings disguised by rhetoric, manipulated by the cause. She does not take kindly that Rachel cannot trust that Agnes isn’t denying reality. Freedom for Agnes is possessing her own reality. Liberty is the domain of the private, and Agnes is her most trustworthy politician.  Yet, Rachel locates the lack of freedom everywhere there is an imbalance of power. None of us are free, since some of us aren't -- King said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."  Marx said that "the development of each is a condition of the development of all." 
	How one should accept a definition of personal freedom? The psychological thinker values her private codes of justice, her own superego. Agnes' moral codes are the only ones clearly defined and are a source of power. That power only serves Agnes and it, perhaps, cannot be usurped since it is already a slave to her own ego. History has allowed some psychic self-empowerment to assume the force of the law: thou shall not kill, or steal, or even think of doing it. Yet even the rigid delineation of these social laws was transformed in the middle-half of the 20th century. Cultural revolutions saw new definitions of sexual and racial equality drawn through mass acts of youthful defiance toward civility and conservatism. (Although nineteenth-century Owenites saw free love as an idea running around their American communes.)  What is unjust to some today is what will be common law tomorrow. 
	The status quo itself must have value. That for the sake of the ego, for the sake of maintaining all the other impregnable values that, long ago were written down for the sake of us and our children. The nature of repression seems linked to oppression. In the same way the political superego constructs morality, the ego maintains that some of these new codes should not take seriously, because no one, save for a very small, dedicated handful believe in them. The role of the superego is to redefine what the ego can make real. A political movement suddenly shoulder the burden of a great big bag of psychological repression on top of oppression, flattening it to spread it thin against the angry masses. (Sometimes it throws a stone.)
	Perhaps I am only really free when I am being political, when my silent repression is displayed as an act of defiance because it calls for social change - perhaps being a martyr is a real expression of freedom because it is also an expression of love for fellow humankind. If the martyr is right, then we can all reap the fruits of a better world. If the martyr is demonized, if his legacy is lost, or if his message of truth is spread thin over the same angry mobs by those who claim to be its most dedicated, most loyal, then the real opportunity to be free will have slipped away. At some point, the spirit of an idea becomes a wandering ghost. Its head is severed and one only hears the chains clanging down the halls.
	Is my freedom to indulge really an exercise in self-expression?  Can I scribble the subways with a big fat black magic marker, and is this the same thing as peeing on the same wall? If I drink heavily at home, am I free to do so where someone has left multiple copies of AA pamphlets? If I smoke near a publicly displayed sign that reads "Quit Smoking Yet?" it seems that am I making less of a statement than being rebellious; I would be voicing my discontent, but then there would no reason to change for the better if there were a truly serious reason for a cigarette, one so dire that the sign would be devoid of meaning because it would be devoid of purpose (political or otherwise).
	Oppression is what happens to more than one person. Indeed, it usually happens to party of people. Indeed,  it is this party that represents the needs of those oppressed. Each of whom has their share of frequent nose-picking and crotch-scratching, verbal tics and other signs seeming to tell the world they would rather be happy than free. Perhaps this impression I have is really a misplaced political interpretation of a harmless activity.
	I would like to maintain that freedom is a subjective experience but that this inner-self is constantly being changed by the political world and must remember, safeguard, and participate in the rules of power.  Otherwise, the fragile self is ruined because it is thrown into a political ideology, believing that no matter what one does for the cause will set thy free. This is the first mistake: believing that one’s sense of self worth can be measured so crudely. 
	Since, according to Engels, all things are changing, it remains futile to do refrain from seeing how one’s own freedoms change with the flow of history, and the uses of power which determine that history.  A sincere political activist is an aberration in the postmodern 21st century of Late Capitalism, because they are simultaneously inhabiting the state with such a degree of exposure that their public actions match their beliefs.
	The political activist is simply a citizen of the civilization they desire to maintain. They want a peaceful social order like anyone else, but the means of securing it through the iron fists of “justice”, or at the expense of the majority of the world often ends tragically.  It seemed to Tocqueville during his stay within the eighteenth-century American democracy, that all its citizens were activists.  With all its people involved, all variants of psyches are interacting as well, learning from one another, changing patterns, fitting and misplacing and creating a political life to accompany the psyche.
	The raison d'être for democracy is change. Inquiring into one’s own self, searching for the whole truth, like the task of maintaining liberty, is a matter of constant vigilance. Everyone seems to understand what happens to martyrs and saints.  What do we learn when we are told as young children what will happen if we love ("they" will crucify us); if we speak out against injustice (our families will be threatened, our homes and churches will be bombed); if we try to change the world without striking at it (we will be killed); if we speak for the oppressed (we will be killed).  The task of freeing oneself cannot be accomplished without showing others that they also are free -- but one cannot know one may act freely if they are not told, in some way, that they are not being prohibited or silenced. If she knows she is not under the threat of punishment, then she will act as if she were not afraid.