Back To The Basics

It's amazing how relative all of our experiences are. It causes me to wonder about how much objective reality can possibly exist across people, when so much of my personal reality can be affected by my present surroundings. I'm beginning to think that human beings are more myopic than we are rational, but because we fail to recognize this to be the case we have tricked ourselves into thinking that we're primarily rational. And we ARE, I think, as long as we agree to stay short-sighted. Everyone has been in the position where they were SO cold that all they wanted was to be warm, and then after about 5 minutes inside a house with the same sweater on that they were wearing outside, they're sweating and ready to open the door for some cold air. It's because you didn't actually want to be WARM. What you wanted was to be warm-ER. And in your quest for immediate gratification, you overdid it. Because frankly, we're not very good judges of what we need when we're uncomfortable. The human desire for self-gratification overwhelms the natural penchant for moderation just about every time.

I think people get this way about food too. People think they're really really really hungry, and then they eat too much and they feel sick and they're really really really full. Equally unpleasant experiences. And while the latter experience is generally more avoidable than the former, with remarkable consistency it follows the former as if it were the necessary consequence of getting very hungry.

The reason why I began thinking about this was, like most situations where I begin thinking about things these days, while I was sitting in jail. Without getting into any details, I was talking with a guy about some options for getting moved in jail because of some issues that were going on, and one of the options was to be placed in a highly restrictive setting that we'll call "lockdown." There are pros and cons of being on lockdown, depending on your situation, but one of the most obvious cons is that there's potential for you to end up in a cell, many times by yourself, for up to 23 hours per day. When talking with this guy about his options, and getting to that one, he had a lot of questions about the conditions on lockdown that I did my best to answer. The way we were talking about it, it was as if we were talking about going to jail. Here's the thing- he's already IN JAIL. He's been in jail for quite a while now. But the little things, like having a day room, having time out on the yard (even less than weekly, in the least restrictive option), 15 minutes of family visitation per week, phone privileges... the prospect losing or changing any of those things really made me feel like we were talking about sending a free person to jail.

What it really made me wonder was how much freedom -I- have, and what would have to be taken away for me to feel like I've lost it. If there's jail within jail, could there also be jail within freedom? Or freedom beyond freedom? Like many musings, this brought me back to my favorite concept - value (I know I love value for a number of reasons, chiefly because a housemate of mine once told me so) . I think freedom is defined not as your abstract ability to do whatever you want, but your ability to access things that you value. I'm not permitted to own or use heroin, based on the laws of Louisiana (and the US, for that matter). I don't feel like my freedom is restricted in any way by this prohibition, however, because I have no interest in ever owning or using heroin. Some people think differently. I'm not allowed to go into stores unless I have a shirt on, based on common convention and municipal regulations. I do sometimes feel like my freedom is restricted by this, however, because if I had it my way people would never have to wear a shirt unless it was cold enough to warrant one for the heat retention. Again, some people think differently. At any rate, that rule restricts my freedom, while heroin laws do not.

But does the requirement to wear a shirt restrict freedom, in the abstract, any more than the restriction from using heroin? I don't think so. Or, to be more nuanced and less clear, I think that you can't answer that question because freedom doesn't really exist in the abstract, or if it does, it can't really be qualified, only quantified. A place with 5 restrictions might be more free than a place with 55 restrictions. But it's hard to say that one thing is NATURALLY more restrictive on freedom than another. It depends on what people value. If heroin were made legal, I would be no more free than I am right now, because a right that you don't exercise isn't a right at all.

So I find myself thinking that I may have an abundance of freedom, because I can do just about all of the things that I want to do. In fact, there are a number of things that I am free to do, but choose not to. But I wonder if the amount of freedom available to me has limited my ability to conceive of other things that I would value more, if I only had more freedom to do them. If it were easy to sprint, we would have no use for jogging.

Caveat- this, like all posts on this blog, is experimental. The stream-of-consciousness musings that help me try to wrap some of life's less-ordered parts into a more manageable package. I try pretty hard to separate my personal identity from my ideas, so feel free to disagree publicly or privately. In a few days I might disagree too.