Freedom's Just Another Word for, Nothing Left to Lose

What is freedom?

Courtesy: rerevealed.com

(CALGARY, Alberta) - In the forty or so years since Kris Kristofferson wrote Me and Bobby McGee I’ve often wondered what his definition of freedom actually means—if anything at all. Musically, it’s a great song (I first heard the Janis Joplin rendition around 1971 or so) but lyrically I see it as another C/W “poor me” song.

(What happens when you play a C/W song backwards? You get your girl back, you get your dog back, you get your truck back.)

Freedom has positive and negative aspects:

Negatively, freedom is thought of as the absence of restraint. Thomas Hobbes (17th century): “Freedom is the silence of the law.” This is the essential core of freedom as defined by political conservatives and most enthusiastically advanced by 20th century conservative economist Milton Friedman.

Positively, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy: “Freedom is a condition of liberation from social or cultural forces that are perceived as impeding full self-realization.” There is a significant shortcoming to this definition as I will explore below.

Freedom Part 1: Go with the flow?

Around 11 pm on July 11, 2006, Milena Delvalle, 38, and her husband of two years Angel Delvalle, 46, were driving through the Big Dig tunnel in Boston when a 20x40 foot slab of concrete detached from the roof and landed on their car. Milena was killed instantly; her husband suffered minor injuries and managed to crawl out of the car.

In the early evening of July 16, 2009, Léa Guilbeault, 33, and her husband, Hani Beitinjaneh, were celebrating her birthday at a sushi bar in the atrium of the Marriott Residence Inn in Montréal, when a concrete slab detached and fell from the 17th floor, killing her instantly and injuring her husband. She had specifically asked to sit at the place where she died.

What these two events tell us is that we are all moving, second by second, towards our individual destiny—our death. But they tell us something even more important.

What brought Milena Delvalle to her death that night? Her husband was driving, so she was, at that moment a passive participant. But her life, itself, was not passive.

Why were they under that falling slab at that particular moment? Arriving when they did depended on Angel’s driving. If he had driven a bit faster or slower on some parts of the trip, the tragedy would have been avoided. But, before leaving home, she had her own moments. They left at a particular moment, but they could have left earlier or later if she had done or not done specific things before she was ready to leave.

Then you can go back to previous days and weeks and see the specific things she did to take her to that day and that moment when she left the house.

Go back further and see the specific things she did leading up to her meeting Angel. If some of them had been only slightly different, she would never have met and married him and found herself in the tunnel that night. The train of events in her life goes back to her infancy.

The same analysis applies to Angel’s life and how he met and married her.

We can go back in the lives of her parents and his parents and how they met, resulting in the birth of these two children. Slight differences in any of the parents’ lives and they would not have met and one or the other of Angel and Milena would not have been born—and no tunnel accident—at least for Milena and Angel.

But it’s not just these two people and their antecedents that bear on the event. Other people they interacted with affected when they would arrive at the tunnel. If, for example, they had been sitting at a red light and the driver in the next car rolled down his window and asked, “Do you know how to get to…?” and they spent, even just a few seconds giving directions—they would have arrived at the tunnel a few seconds later. Conversely, they might have actually arrived when they did because they were delayed by something like that.

I can recount an example from my own life.

Saturday evening. I was single and at home by choice. My cousin Jim phoned. He and his brother-in-law, Phil, were free for the night, their wives having gone to some function. They decided to go out to a bar and figured they would have a better time if they took a single guy with them who would “know the scene”. I was the only single guy they knew, hence the call.

I did not want to go and it took considerable insistence on Jim’s part before I finally agreed to meet them at a hotel, The Carriage House. The CH, at the time, had a half dozen drinking venues, ranging from the beer parlour, to a beer bottle lounge, and other lounges with different motifs. We decided to go to the beer parlour which was about 90% full. We found an empty table and sat down.

At the table next to us was something you had to see to believe. In this raucous bar were two women, one reading a book and the other looking incredibly bored, as if she desperately wanted to be somewhere else. Here’s their story.

Brigit was from England and this was her last night in Canada. She was staying with Helen’s cousin, Caroline. Brigit and Caroline had had a fight and were not speaking. Helen was roped into taking Brigit out for her last night. Helen, too, was not there willingly.

Still, I may not have struck up much of a conversation with her, except that there was a third, nearby, table with several boisterous young men. One of them, in talking to the two women, thought he knew something about psychology and was spouting all sorts of nonsense. I had just finished a couple years of university, one in psychology and was, besides, well read. I was no real expert, but it was effortless to point out the ridiculousness of some of his statements. Over the next few minutes, Helen ended up talking more with me and, a few minutes later, they moved their table over to ours, so there were now five of us sitting together.

Shortly after we spotted another couple we knew and we all adjourned to the beer bottle lounge, a much quieter and pleasanter place. By closing time Helen and I had had a lot of fun and decided to go somewhere for coffee. She drove Brigit to Caroline’s, I followed her home, then drove us to an all night restaurant. The next night we went to a movie.

Three months later we were married and three years after that Ben, our only child, was born. That’s how Ben came to be. If he has children, they can trace their existence to that night at the Carriage House. Of course, they can also trace it to how Helen’s or my parents had met, or as far back as there is knowledge. This may appear trivial, but it is the exact opposite. This describes the interactive lives of all the billions of people in the world today.

It takes no imagination to come up with as long a list as you want of different things that could have happened to prevent that “chance” meeting. If Helen and I had not met, the lives of virtually everyone on the planet today would be different.

In chaos theory, the so-called butterfly effect says that a butterfly flapping its wings in China may cause (or prevent) a tornado on the other side of the earth. This happens because outcomes are totally dependent on initial conditions and, over time, expand their influence. Here’s a real life example.

Modeling weather patterns on his computer, meteorologist Edward Lorenz wanted to look at a sequence more closely and took what should have been a reasonable shortcut. Instead of entering the numbers from the beginning, he entered those from the halfway point. Although the computer stored numbers with six decimals, the printout showed three decimals. One part in a thousand shouldn't have been consequential, but the model began to diverge, first a little, then a lot. In other words, if we start a sequence with five decimals, we will get different results, than if we start with six decimals. The longer we let the processes run, the more widely divergent will be the outcomes. All the apparent precision of science notwithstanding, we really cannot predict very far into the future, or see much into the past, because the results depend entirely on our choice of initial conditions.

When you look at the lives of people from this perspective, you realize that everything in the universe is connected, however infinitesimally. The unavoidable conclusion is that for Milena’s death to have been prevented, everything in the universe would have to change, however infinitesimally.

(Note: If you find yourself unhappy/frustrated/dissatisfied at a particular moment in your life, by holding on to those negative feelings, you are resisting the whole universe!)

This view of interconnectedness is something physicists recognize. “The only thing that’s real is the whole of spacetime” says physicist Brian Greene in The Fabric of the Cosmos. Considering all of spacetime as the only reality, he goes on to say that

“events, regardless of when they happen from any particular perspective, just are. They eternally occupy their particular point in spacetime. There is no flow. If you were having a great time at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1999, you still are, since that is just one immutable location in spacetime. It is tough to accept this description, since our worldview so forcefully distinguishes between past, present and future. But if we stare intently at this familiar temporal scheme and confront it with the cold hard facts of modern physics, its only place of refuge seems to lie within the human mind.”

Freedom Part 2: The human mind?

The key element in freedom is our consciousness. We can consciously decide our actions. Or so we believe. This assumption, however, has been shown to be incorrect.

In 1965 German physiologists Hans Helmut Kornhuber and Lüder Deecke reported their discovery of what they called the brain’s readiness potential, which is a measure of activity in the motor cortex of the brain leading to voluntary muscle movement. Simply put, when you decide to do something, like flex a finger, before you start to flex the brain begins its preparation. This is not a surprise, but what was a surprise, was the length of time before the flex—nearly a second (.55 sec)—that the brain started up.

Twenty years later physiologist Benjamin Libet set up an experiment. Subjects looked at a TV screen with a rotating spot that revolved in 2.56 seconds. They then flexed their fingers voluntarily, at whim, and said where the spot was when they made the decision. Libet then had three pieces of data: when the conscious decision to act occurred; when the act occurred; and when the readiness potential began.

The results were unequivocal: The readiness potential starts 0.55 second before the flex; consciousness starts 0.20 second before the flex. Thus, the conscious decision thus takes place 0.35 second after the readiness potential begins. That is, 0.35 second passes between brain start-up and the conscious experience of deciding to flex.

First the readiness potential starts. Then, a half second later, the person becomes conscious of initiating the action. Finally, 0.20 seconds after that, the action is carried out. The desire to carry out an action becomes a conscious sensation long after the brain has begun to initiate it.

On the other side of the measurement, psychologist Arthur Jensen carried out experiments in which subjects had normal reaction times of about 0.25 second. He wondered if any of his subjects could increase their reaction time. None could. As soon as they tried to increase their reaction time to more than a quarter of a second, it leaped to at least a half second. Human beings can react tremendously quickly but they cannot voluntarily react a little more slowly. If they want to react a little more slowly than they do instinctively, they have to react consciously—and that takes a lot longer because bringing consciousness into the process adds at least 0.20 seconds to the reaction time.

Our actions begin unconsciously! Even when we think we make a conscious decision to act, our brain starts a half second before consciousness even appears. Our consciousness is not the initiator—unconscious processes are!

Freedom Part 3: Family ties

I quoted The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy above: “Freedom is a condition of liberation from social or cultural forces that are perceived as impeding full self-realization.”

What this definition misses is the dimension of family forces that guide, affect and sometimes actually control our lives moment by moment—we being completely unaware of the unconscious influences. In family dynamics the past routinely invades the present, for good or ill. I’m thinking of families I know where the siblings are all grown adults in their thirties, forties and fifties. To hear them bicker, however, is like listening to children because none of them have been able to let go of the past. In adult terms, they are still fighting over childhood slights, injustices and grudges.

As psychiatrist Theodor Lidz writes in The Person: “It is in the family that patterns of emotional reactivity develop and interpersonal relationships are established that pattern and color all subsequent relationships.” The result says psychiatrist Jill Savege Scharff is that "Every family system, healthy or unhealthy, is imbued with or invaded by the past that is woven into its fabric."

Our family background is another restraint on any freedom we believe we have. We are not really our own people, but rather psychological extensions of the family from which we came.

Freedom Part 4: Our higher consciousness

So far, it seems that I am arguing that we have no freedom at all. What I am actually arguing is that we have no freedom in the conventional sense that we think we understand. I believe we have a higher freedom. Let me give a personal example, one that I’m sure you have similarly had more than once in a variety of circumstances.

My son Ben, introduced above, was in grade 2 and having serious problems. He was, no one doubted it, a bright boy. But he sometimes came home for lunch near tears. All the other kids could understand things, he said, but sometimes he couldn’t. He just couldn’t get it! What was wrong? He was so frustrated.

The school psychologist tested him and said that there was nothing wrong with him. What we needed, he said, was family counseling. We tried that for a couple of sessions, but decided that family problems were not the issue. We hired a private psychologist at our own expense and Ben was diagnosed as ADD—Attention Deficit Disorder (also called ADHD). The school psychologist did not return our phone calls.

We started talking to other parents who had children with various learning problems and began to hear the horror stories about the wall the school system had erected against any parent who questioned their authority.

One parent we talked to said we were entitled to see and get copies of Ben’s complete school records. But, we were told, don’t tell them you’re coming, because sometimes things can get “lost”. Just show up and ask to see the records and request copies on the spot, after you’ve looked through them.

That’s what I did. I was sitting with the school administrator a few days later waiting while the copies were being made. At the time, I made my living as a journalist and freelance writer. I had no fear of silence. She must have been uncomfortable with the silence because she suddenly blurted out: “Mr. Johnson. Have you ever had to sue anyone?”

Without hesitating, I said, “I’m a journalist, I don’t have to sue.”

“Ah,” she replied, “I guess that’s true.”

Now, the point of this story.

I answered immediately with no time interval to consciously think out and form a response. There was no consciousness involved. It was not me “consciously” responding. Where did that answer come from? Thoughts of suing, or even writing about the situation, had never even entered my mind, so it wasn’t an answer waiting to be spoken. Where did those spontaneous words come from?

Consciousness is essentially about our talking to ourselves. We keep a running dialog going in our minds as we go move through time. We have blank moments in our lives and those are periods where the internal dialog has stopped.

You’ve certainly experienced times, particularly when driving, when you “zone out” and suddenly find yourself farther along the trip or even at your destination with absolutely no recollection of the intervening time.

This, I argue, is about our real consciousness. When you are talking to yourself in your mind, who is listening? I suggest that it is the real you, the higher consciousness in charge through a connection with your body.

This is where I drift off into areas where I have no substantive conclusions or opinions. I tend to agree, however, with astronomer George A. Seielstad:

“With intelligence, nature has created a way of observing itself. We who are parts of nature and also blessed with the intelligence to observe it constitute a self-referential paradox…. Since we comprehend what it means to be alive, we are the ‘sensory organs; with which the living universe monitors its own ‘physiology’, if you will—taking its pulse and measuring its blood pressure. Without us, the universe is ‘blind’. Our ‘vision’ into the future enables the universe to continue to live.”

To be continued in a future installment.

===============================================

Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which explains why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue, although a lot of his views could be described as left-wing. He understands that who he is, is largely defined by where he came from. The focus for Daniel’s writing came in 1972. After a trip to Europe he moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. Alberta, and Calgary in particular, was extremely conservative Bible Belt country, more like Houston than any other Canadian city (a direct influence of the oil industry). Two successive Premiers of the province, from 1935 to 1971, had been Baptist evangelicals with their own weekly Sunday radio program—Back to the Bible Hour, while in office. In Alberta everything was distorted by religion.

Although he had published a few pieces (unpaid) in the local daily, the Calgary Herald, it was not until 1975 that he could actually make a living from journalism when, from 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman (1979-1993), Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting with the CBC. You can write to Daniel at: Salem-News@gravityshadow.com