The last decade or so, as I write this in 2019, freedom around the world has slowly been on the decline, reversing a long trend in the opposite direction. In the latest Freedom House report, 44% of countries were described as “free”, 26% as “not free” and 30% as “partly free” (including countries such as Ukraine, Turkey and Mexico).
There can be no doubt that these are important statistics and that they offer an important tool for debate, research and political movements around the world. There are, however, also severe limitations to this measure. The greatest limitation is that it makes it appear as though there can be no higher conceivable freedom than what has already been materialized in e.g. Sweden or the US. I am not questioning the methodology of Freedom House—it serves its purpose and fulfills an exceedingly important function. Rather, I would like to suggest the possibility of yet higher forms of freedom being achievable through the transition from a modern society to a metamodern one.
My basic argument is this: People are only as free as they really feel in their everyday lives . If you look at the population in a country like Sweden, you notice that some citizens are in fact much more free than others. How can that be? I thought that, in Sweden, “all animals are equal”? After all, they all live in a country with the best Freedom House rating possible. Yet some people wake up in the morning feeling they have control over their lives, while others are driven by fear and shame, constricted in so many subtle or complicated ways. Consider these examples:
Is a person freer if she gets to follow her dreams and work towards goals and ends that are genuinely inspiring, rather than having to work only to pay the bills?
Is a person freer if she dares to speak her mind in every situation, rather than feeling she has to hold back in order to avoid the judgment and disdain of others?
Is a person freer if she feels that she is a responsible participant of her community and society, rather than a passive spectator?
Is a person freer if she can make life choices without fearing for her financial security?
Is a person freer if she can walk down the street and meet no beggars, see less social misery and not have her mind filled with commercials vying for her time, attention and money?
Is a person freer if she consumes goods and services in order to do something she believes in rather than acting out of inner insecurities?
Is a person freer if her mind is affected by less cognitive biases and prejudices?
Is a person freer if she makes most of her choices in a calm, harmonious state of mind rather than a stressed, anxious one?
Is a person freer if she has many different positive identities to choose from, so that if she fails in one regard, she may still flourish in another?
We can safely answer each of these questions with an emphatic “Yes!” It should not surprise us, then, that from this perspective most people are not quite free in a deeper sense of the term—not even in the Nordic societies. From this viewpoint, the Nordic countries are not conclusively “free”. Rather, these societies have the prerequisites for higher freedom.
Freedom House rating 1 is where the path to true human emancipation begins—not where it ends. [36]
As such, I would like to suggest another kind of freedom . Not a vague one that would offer excuses for (and obfuscations of) the oppression that goes on in China or Russia—but one that builds upon what has already been accomplished in the freest societies; a definition of freedom that points skyward, towards a more deeply felt and pervasive freedom encompassing all aspects of everyday life.
The basis for this theory is the idea that freedom must be felt and embodied by the citizen in order to be real . Hence, we look for support in the sociology of everyday life and, more specifically, in the sociology of emotions .
None of this is to downplay the significance of legal structures and the constitutional rights of citizens as measured by Freedom House. However, for the word “freedom” to have any value, to be truly meaningful, we need to include the emotional aspect. After all, if we don’t feel free, what does it then matter to live in a country rated “1”? Emotions are just as important a part of freedom as our institutions and legal rights, and in order to reach higher levels of freedom, people must be emotionally emancipated.
To strive for less, to call it the day when we’ve established rule of law, independent courts, freedom of expression and universal suffrage, is not only unambitious, it is even unethical given the suffering caused by feeling unfree.
Let us speak about another kind of freedom; one that begins in chains, slavery and fear, in the wailing tears of a billion years’ history of life—and ends as a democratic, inclusive dance of spontaneous becoming.
Freedom as Emotions
In Book One we discussed the “inner states” of people—and I claimed that these are more fundamental than emotions. The inner states relate to the totality of what your living experience is like at any given moment; every moment can be more or less clear, crisp, enchanted and alive—and this includes spiritual experiences. The inner states are very important since they make up the totality of how we experience the world: light or dark, high or low, harmonious or utterly confusing.
But even if subjective inner states are more fundamental, this does not mean emotions are unimportant. Emotions are different because they have a certain direction; we generally feel something about something, we are angry at this person, ashamed because of this or that misstep, proud of our this or that achievement. In grammar, prepositions specify relations between things—and emotions often come with prepositions. If we are in higher states, we generally react with different sets of emotions, but the states and emotions definitely do interact. And emotions still play a very crucial part in (almost) all social life for (almost) all people.
Another important topic in Book One was the study of human flourishing and happiness. Some readers, no doubt, felt the focus on happiness seemed a bit naive. But, of course, negative emotions also play a major part in everyday life and societal development. And if we are to expand human freedom and development, we are obliged to offer them their due concern, touchy and difficult as it may be.
If you accept this argument, it makes much more sense to believe that the collective good of freedom is always intermeshed with a wide array of basic and complex emotions, and that the anatomy of freedom must always follow the anatomy of human emotions .
The most solid way of introducing emotions into the study of freedom is to start from a negative: Can we imagine a concept of freedom that would completely exclude all emotions? Can we be free while being controlled by a paralyzing terror or shame? Not really.
So, if emotions should not be excluded from the study of freedom, what would be a productive way of introducing them? A simple but powerful way to do this is to study how different negative emotions can and do constrain people’s freedom.
For that, we need to get some help from the sociology of emotions. As it turns out, when we point skywards, we also point inwards.
Sociology of Emotions to the Rescue
The great sociologist of everyday life interactions, Erving Goffman, wrote his most important works in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. He had a way of cynically describing and commenting upon how we adjust to, and are steered by, the situations in which we take part. This was the study of, in his own words, “Not, then, men and their moments. Rather moments and their men.” [37]
Moments and their men. Situations. In psychology, a corresponding development occurred in the 1970s with the emergence of “situationist psychology”. It argued, and showed experimentally, that people’s actions and choices were more affected by the situations we are in and less by our personalities than previously assumed.
A key idea in Goffman’s work was that people collaborate in each everyday situation to keep it going, to define what is going on, to keep up appearances. We �
�save each other’s faces” by avoiding topics or withholding comments, we ignore small mishaps even if everyone noticed them, we stretch our backs and put on a face before we enter a friend’s house, we conceal our nose picking and stained underwear, we find ways to subtly neutralize and diminish painfully obvious differences of class and status. When any of this fails we feel embarrassment or even intense unease and shame.
Ah, shame. That’s the point here. We have all been implicitly trained, since early childhood, to try to avoid it. The reason everyday life functions so smoothly after all, despite us all being rather neurotic and unreliable, is that we all play a part in avoiding to be the “social marauder” who wrecks the flow of everyday situations. Small children will sometimes sabotage situations by pointing at someone and asking why they smell, or ask auntie why she never cleans her house. But the rest of us generally stay in line. With astonishing obedience.
Everyday life, in which we go about our business and seek to attain our goals, is only made possible because there is a huge underlying machinery that checks any attempt to break out of it. And we all keep the machinery running with exquisite skill, quite automatically. We don’t stop and think about it; we simply adjust by not even considering the other options available for actions that could in theory be taken but just seem too weird. This is perhaps true of large, urbanized modern societies in particular, but it seems to have cross-cultural bearing. You can go to the shanty towns or slums in India or the favelas in Brazil, and most people will act in a recognizable manner: avoiding to shame themselves, avoiding to be of hassle (unless it’s a desperate salesperson or a robber), saying hello before they speak, taking turns in conversations, displaying some dignified demeanor and signs of cleanliness. Sure, the norms vary, but some of the mechanisms are undeniably the same.
Yet shame is not the only emotion humans habitually and unreflectively avoid. There are, of course, a host of other negative emotions that steer our everyday choices and interactions: fear, guilt and the envy of others. We are all programmed with a huge battery of behaviors that masterfully avoid all such negative emotions. We are all obliged to wear that ball and chain. Only once the negative emotions are out of the way, once we are out of harm’s way as it were, we can go about our day.
Indeed, the process of “socialization”—when we grow up and become members of society by internalizing how to talk, behave and so forth—can be described as the learning of a host of behaviors that serve to avoid negative consequences; from the most concrete habits of not walking on red and safely navigating the melee of cars and pedestrians on the streets, to the subtlest ones like knowing when not to speak our minds and pretending not to notice when someone spits when they talk.
This underlying machinery can look quite differently depending on which society you are part of. And different emotions will steer your behavior depending on the situation. Are you avoiding being slut-shamed by your family, or just avoiding the ridicule of your peers? Shame is steering your actions. Are you avoiding a death penalty for speaking up against the Great Dictator? Fear is steering your actions—even what thoughts you may allow yourself. Are you avoiding God’s judgment of your inner desires and heretical thoughts? Guilt is steering you. Are you not following your dreams because people around you would disdain your attempts and subtly withdraw their support? The envy of others is controlling you.
The classical psychologist of emotions Paul Ekman noticed that there appears to be six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness and surprise. There are of course more emotions than that, but these six come with their own more or less clearly recognizable facial expressions, which Ekman believed proves that they must be biologically rooted. Interestingly, four of them are negative emotions (anger, disgust, fear and sadness) while only one is directly positive (happiness), and one being more or less neutral (surprise).
A major challenge to Ekman’s theory has recently come from the constructivist psychology of Lisa Feldman Barrett and her team. When they tried to reproduce Ekman’s experiments by traveling to different foreign cultures to see if they could recognize the same facial expressions as specific emotions, they did not offer a set of pre-given alternatives as Ekman and his associates had. It turned out that people in foreign cultures indeed had different ways of understanding and describing emotions.
Emotions turned out to be less universal and more socially and culturally constructed than previously assumed. And not only that. There appears to be no specific “neurological fingerprint” in the brain as different emotions arise, or even a specific physiological pattern. You get angry, and it can mean anything from tension to release to calm seething. In other words, emotions are much more complex than our everyday language can grasp; a language we use to try to catch the essence of elusive chimera that are always momentary, specific, context dependent, observer dependent and where the description of the “thing” (the emotion) cannot be separated from the emotion itself. If “God” could see the truth of your emotions, “He” would not be limited by the confines of any specific language. [38]
Point being: Even if I go on talking about a set of “negative emotions”, we should recognize that these can be delineated, described and known in any number of ways, with different results. As I go along to present the negative emotions and their interrelations, we must not make the mistake of thinking of these suggested terms as “inherent essences”. The same, by the way, has been shown in the cognitive/cross-cultural study of colors—did you know that “blue” didn’t really exist until the Egyptians came up with a word for it? That the older parts of the Bible are devoid of blue seas and skies, and that rural cultures in Angola still to this day lack a word for blue and that members of these can’t even recognize the color, taking it for green? Likewise, emotions in general are delineated and described differently across cultures—they aren’t God-given essences. [39]
Emotional Regimes: Hidden in Plain Sight
It’s not that negative emotions are all bad, or that they have no important role to play. We cannot just remove them and “be free”. [40] In fact, society wouldn’t be possible without negative emotions. If we all were to be entirely liberated from shame and guilt when behaving inconsiderately or harmfully towards others, society would soon plunge into a brutish and nasty state. Life would probably be considerably shorter too.
As such, it’s not as simple as to merely liberate people from negative emotions altogether and then expect we’ll all be freer as a collective whole. We must acknowledge that we as a society need negative emotions to regulate our behavior.
But at the same time we need to remember that negative emotions aren’t predefined by nature; that it is we, as a collective, who make others experience shame and guilt, and that these emotional regimes can be more or less justified, be more or less in tune with the current societal conditions. Negative emotions like shame, guilt and envy are socially dependent; they don’t emerge autonomously in a given person, but are always derived from society’s norms, values, routines—and most of all, the games of everyday life. But as we saw earlier, these games can be evolved, they can be changed. And the result can be more or less oppressive, more or less free.
For instance, a society where gays feel ashamed about their sexuality, women feel guilty about their perceived shortcomings as mothers, their lacking beauty and their inadequate careers, and men feel envious about the supposedly higher social status of others, is a more oppressive society than—all other things equal—one in which these emotions are less prevalent. People who have their lives controlled by such emotions are simply less free than those who do not. There are different emotional regimes in different societies .
Still don’t see the connection between emotions and freedom? Well, try this sentence out for a moment and see how it fits: “All of my life, I have been controlled by shame, never daring
to express myself because I felt so ridiculous, and I wanted to live as a homosexual but a sense of shame stopped me, and I wanted to move to another city but I stayed here because I feared to lose the support of my family which would have left me begging for food.” Or how about: “I am profoundly unhappy in my marriage but I have no choice but to stay because my husband would guilt-trip me and I would have nowhere to go.” Freedom blowing through your hair? Nah.
Then stop for a moment to consider: Are any of these examples covered by the definition of freedom as “political rights” or “civil liberties”? Certainly, legal rights and liberties may contribute to letting us break out of these little prisons, but they hardly exhaust the picture. You will find plenty of people in the free Kingdom of Sweden to whom the suffocating sentences above apply.
If you buy the hypothesis of ever-present negative emotions being avoided through our choices and interactions , you can see that these emotions, and the reasons we may have for feeling them, set the limit for our degrees of freedom . We act, think and even feel within certain constraints derived from the emotional dynamics of the society we live in.
And in a way, this is often more important to our sense of freedom than the legal rights we enjoy. After all, are we free to practice our sexuality if people spit on us on the streets for being gay or call us sluts? Do we have relational freedom if people tell us it’s our own fault we got raped or beaten up by our spouse? How freely can we express ourselves in the face of the scorn of people we care about?
Emotions are social by nature, especially in humans. I feel something, pleasant or unpleasant, because of how you treat me or interact with me. If I’m turned down, I feel shame; if I’m scolded, I feel guilt; if I’m threatened, I feel fear. Other humans have the ability to produce intense emotions in me: you can mesmerize me with your sexy body, disgust me with your odors and unwanted sexual advances, comfort me with your touch, exalt me with your words of appreciation, frustrate me and depress me with your lack of response.
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