“The one thing that everyone wants is to be free…not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one’s living and has to fear want and disease and death…The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.”
So wrote Gertrude Stein in September 1943 while living in the rural countryside of Nazi occupied France, but read out of context, her words resonate still because they cut to the heart of the nature of living creatures, humans as well as animals. Deep down, all living things want to be free.
We live in a world where levels of controls are in place that prevent many if not most living things from living freely. On almost every plane of existence, living things are controlled. We are captured in space, we are surveilled and monitored, our work options are limited, our speech is curtailed, our sense of our own value is diminished. We exist as data points now and the source of future data points, employed for the profit of some and a means of control for others. Our safety is threatened but not guaranteed. We trade our freedom for safety out of fear. In the end, we are extinguished as living beings, wild and free. We are worse than tame — we are cattle in a data farm. Is there any longer a reason to exist at this point?
People everywhere want to be free, but everywhere they are in chains — of their own forging.
