To be free or not?

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This is an old blog post, I first wrote typed in 2005. 3 years later while cleaning my old Hard disk, I found it. Blogging was still a fairly new pursuit to me then and I was not sure if this post would be well received, hence did not post it. I know better now, that it is better to post than shove it away, so here it is.

The question is not whether we will live or die - the question is whether we will be free or not - Subhash Chandra Bose

I have been debating with myself whether to make this post or not for the past 15-20 days and finally decided in its favour. If it offends anyone in any way, I apologise beforehand.

Think of all the activities that give you emotional or physical pleasures - love, food, sex, self-praise, anger and above all physical inactivity (आलस ). Of course all of us would differ in the level of pleasure these activities give us, nevertheless it cannot be denied that all the above do give us pleasure to some extent. Notice the similarity of the above list to the biblical 7 sins and also notice the fact that these are pleasure-points that we share with animals.

On the other hand think of what gives you intellectual pleasures - you would define many activities like work and arts, but if you think deeply it is just one word - freedom! Freedom from all ailment, freedom from ignorance etc. etc.

But humans are a unique and complex species! We tend to mix up both - have you ever thought that you were better off with your parents around to take care of you as a kid than now? You were not free then - yet you enjoyed those moments more than today when you are ‘free’. I don’t mean to say that your parents kept you bonded, but simply that, at that age you could seldom do any activity without help from your parents.

My point is humans as an animal are averse to freedom; while humans as an intellectual being crave for nothing but freedom.

Animal instincts - love; emotion; anger - going out of your own control - slavery

Intellectual instincts - practising your passions; doing what you want; non-subordination; being free; not getting governed by anyone else’s wishes - freedom

Humans are basically a conflict between the animal self and the intellectual self and our behaviour is (to pick words from the Matrix movies) ‘the sum of the remainders of a set of unbalanced equations’ - we are an anomaly because we are not balanced.

All animals are balanced by their animal instincts - hence the food chain survives. One animal is subordinate to the other; the stronger one eats the other and thus the food chain. But we humans are an anomaly - a break in the food chain; due to our intellectual self we can defeat the Lion which is far stronger in physical strength.

This is an anomaly in the perfect world of nature - and so we come to the eternal truth - nature can be balanced by only one means - removal of the human species.
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