True choice is always a choice for the best.
A person never chooses the worst of two options if he understands both options in full, and it is only when he fully understands his options that he can be counted as actually choosing between them.
And so, presented with a genuine choice, a person always chooses the better. And if this simple principle is true, then the more genuine choices a person has in his life, the better things he will choose.
But you see, choice is restricted not only by external circumstances: it is also restricted by the internal circumstances of being human. Drives, desires, impulses and instincts — these inner forces are just as constricting as the material circumstances outside us.
The problem with the modern idea of freedom is that it focuses on material emancipation but not inner emancipation. Modern freedom ends with the individual’s desires: a liberation of the individual from all forms of physical slavery so that they may pursue their wants and needs unimpeded.
But this limited notion of freedom has completely forgotten the most ancient form of slavery, the form of slavery which the ancients knew quite well: the slavery of our own passions. If we are to talk about freedom, genuine freedom, we cannot end with external slavery: we must account for the slavery of our inner lives.
To locate genuine freedom — a choice that is truly unrestricted and unconditioned — we must go deeper than the modern notion of freedom. This genuine freedom is freedom from internal as well as external compulsions. And what may seem like slavery to the modern notion of freedom may actually be freedom in this truer, deeper sense: a freedom from our own rampant desires as well as the rampant desires of others.
Once we can secure some degree of freedom from our own instincts and impulses — either by satisfying them, abating them, resisting them, channeling them, disciplining them, or otherwise consciously directing them — then we will have expanded the domain of possible choices available to us. And, having more choices, we will be able to choose even better things.
The word choice itself can be misleading. Nothing is free. The way we act when we are free is predictable; this alone undermines the idea of pure freedom or choice. And the predictable thing that happens when we expand our genuine freedom, freedom from internal demands as well as external demands, is a demand for yet greater things. The more immediate concerns, now fulfilled or transcended, open our minds to greater and more general concerns.
And so, it is far more accurate to say that freedom, genuine freedom, is merely an opening for better things to happen. The freer we become, the better things we consistently choose, and the more that good choices, moral choices, begin to come out spontaneously from us.
Freedom taken to its fullest expression always turns out to be moral. Freed from both external and internal compulsions, we begin to turn towards service to others; we search for significance to our lives beyond our own selfishness; we accumulate power, wealth, and wisdom not merely for ourselves but in order to create structures and systems for the benefit of others.
Freedom in this genuine sense, rather than its liberal modern sense, is equivalent to the good. Freedom is not a prerequisite to the good, as it is classically conceived, a mere preliminary stage in moral action — it is good, if it is genuine freedom.
And so, when we pursue the idea of freedom in full, freedom of choice begins to look less and less like the model of rational self-interest or political libertarianism and more and more like a transcendental ethics. The less conditioned we are, the purer we become, and our purest unconditioned existence is revealed to be, in the final analysis, pure goodwill.
A thought experiment might illustrate what I mean. I am not convinced it will prove my point to you conclusively, because the reality I am talking about must be qualitatively felt and experienced as well as rationally argued. If you have never felt this goodwill at the bottom of your existence, you will be exclaiming for ‘Evidence! Proof!’. And yet, you probably have been living in the shadow of your own goodwill without even knowing it. That said, there is a danger in not unacknowledging your basic goodwill, for when it goes unacknowledged too long, it easily goes astray.
But here is the thought experiment: imagine you were a being whose every single need was met. You had no conceivable desires or preferences one way or the other. You are absolutely free, in the purest sense of the word. If you like, you can give this situation a scientific spin (science fiction is the modern mythos, after all) and imagine you were built a flawless mechanical body that could not be harmed, could not decay, and could not want in anything.
Now, in this fantastical condition (the ideal condition, according to some), imagine you were presented with the following choice: should life in all its variety go on, flourishing and proliferating, growing in variety and abundance, and generally striving towards some beauty or harmony, or should the universe simply be obliterated into a vacuum?
Remember: your every need is met. This includes internal needs: you have no hang-ups, no grudges, no conceivable spite towards mankind, no debt to settle. You also have no desire and no personal gain to be had from existence itself. In effect, you might as well be dead, though you do as a matter of fact happen to exist. You are utterly free: nothing at all could motivate you towards one choice or the other choice. And yet, your hand is forced in this one instance: you must choose one or the other, existence or non-existence, with no third alternative being possible.
Now, this thought experiment has many parts to it, and keeping them all in your head at one time may be a challenge. Ironically, I’ve had to introduce many conditions to help you imagine a totally unconditioned state. I’ve had to put in limits and boundaries to this hypothetical situation in order to get you to think about what true freedom would be like — this is because of how rare freedom actually is, and how difficult it is for us to imagine freedom without distortion by some idea of compulsion or conditionality with which we are familiar. We are very much used to some form of slavery, benign or otherwise.
But if you are able to really put yourself in that unconditioned state for a moment, to hold in your mind everything I mentioned, to imagine that you have no personal inclinations, no vested interest, and yet you still must choose, I bid to you, that contemplated honestly, you would choose life.
This is a rather cold and clinical argument for something which, when felt, is very near and dear to our lives. If you knew the warmth it gives you continually, this goodwill of yours, you would instantly recognize it as a friend and not an object of pure philosophy. Every day, you move through the world, from errand to errand, task to task, with the hope that your very existence is premised on the bringing about of goodness into existence: on the choice, as said in Genesis, that the world is good.
Without this foundational goodwill at the very center of your being, your very existence would become a contradiction against itself. Lacking this goodwill, you begin to believe that life is not worth living, because it is meaningless or chaotic or unfair, and soon your life will catch up to your belief. Suicide is the end result of this denial, and depression is the road towards that end. By believing that existence is not, in itself, good, it is only a matter of time before our consistency to that belief leads us to eliminate our own existence.
That elimination begins first as a withdrawal from the world. We care less, feel less, see less — our senses retract. Gradually, the retraction continues from our external senses and to our inward organs: we develop bowel diseases, auto-immune disfunctions, as our organs lose any organizing principle or motive force to keep them functioning holistically. Finally, embittered by the emptiness of our experience, and the futility of living and suffering without a greater meaning, we end with the final elimination: the negation of all things good, the active rejection of what others celebrate as noble and beautiful and true, and the desire to see it all driven into dirt. It is in this sense that the ancients believed, quite rightly, that evil comes out of an absence of good.
And so, this was a long and roundabout exercise in bidding you to recognize that the freer we are, the less conditioned we are, the closer we are to the ultimate goodness that drives existence itself. This ultimate goodness is what justifies that something exists, rather than nothing. Goodness does not originate as a social category or construct: that is like saying a tree begins with its buds rather than its roots. Goodness is the root, the very origin of life, the very ground of existence itself, out of which all things have emerged.
And when we tell each other to ‘be a good person,’ to do good things and make good choices, we are in reality telling each other to make all our actions and choices congruent with the foundational assumption of all things, the foundational life-creating choice that existence is good — implying, of course, that there exist alternative choices: choices that lack this assumption of the goodness of existence: in other words, choices towards evil.
Either we are living in congruence with the fact of our existence, and thereby the fact that it is good and necessary, or we are contradicting the fact of our existence by denying that existence is necessary, or meaningful, or good. This simple binary accounts for very many of the differences in behavior and opinion in the world around us.
END.
