“Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his treatise on the Social Contract, and how right he was! Although slavery stands abolished in most of the modern world, unfortunately this abolition is limited to the slavery of one man to another. We still have masters, more than a few of them, and the slavery to these masters is worse than that practiced during the ancient or medieval times. This is for two reasons. First, these masters are not tangible or as easily perceivable than the human masters. And second, this slavery is not forced on us, at least not in the sense that the word is normally used; we choose it and accept it, we even believe that it is a necessary part of the existence of modern man. Most of the time, we don’t even notice that we are slaves.
To fully comprehend this lack of freedom, all we need is a glance at the life of any random person or group of persons. For want of a better example, let’s take a normal working day in the life of a normal modern middle-class man. We’ll call him Mr. X.
Mr. X is jerked out of his sleep at seven o’clock in the morning by the blaring alarm of a clock by his bedside. He does not want to wake up but feels that he has to lest he is late and consequently left behind in the race that is our world. Frequently, he does not get out of bed instantly, he stays in it for as long as his nerves will allow him, constantly feeling the passage of time as if it were a physical phenomenon and finally has to get up against his body’s cries for a little more relaxation. Already getting late, he rushes through the rituals of a bath, a shave and other related activities essential for his hygienic upkeep, followed by a quickly gobbled breakfast, essential for his physical health. He immerses himself in the rush hour traffic and crossing the exact same route that he has been crossing for the past many years, gets to his office. Although he almost always gets to his office on time, he still spends his journey with a constantly nagging fear that he might be late. The thought never crosses his mind that if and when he does get late, the actual effect on the organisation he works for, or the universe in general, will be minimal to the extent of being trivial. He does not like this fear or the route or the rush hour traffic but feels that all these things are necessary evils. He spends his working day going through more or less the same routine as every other day, but this fact does not prevent him from giving an unsettling amount of importance to what he is doing. He does it because it is necessary for his survival in the job.
On his way back from office, he once again becomes a part of the evening rush. He hates the traffic on the road just as much as the people in the other cars hate him but he can’t help it. It is, he knows, a necessary evil. Once back home, he has to fulfill his obligations to the family and the society. He has to attend dinners and weddings, make social calls or receive guests, take his family shopping or just spend quality time with them. He alsomust keep himself fit so he has to have an exercise routine. At the end of the day, if he has some time and energy left, since he must also keep himself abreast with current events as well as ensure that he gets some entertainment, a channel surfing session begins where he watches a little news, a little song and dance, maybe reads a little and then dozes off into an exhausted and mostly comfortless sleep, some time after midnight. The clock keeps ticking and at exactly 7 a.m. the next morning, the alarm blares again and the routine continues for an indefinite period.
Change a few facts here and there and this depiction fits almost any life. Notice the words in italics in the above account. ‘Necessary’, ‘essential’, ‘must’, ‘has to’, ‘obligations’, all betray an absence of free will. They depict acts done on the pretext that they just have to be done. Look at your own life, how much time do you spend doing things that you want to do? And that does not include the things that you have long accepted as necessary evils and then convinced yourself that you want them.
We spend our lives as slaves, with many masters. Social pressure, time, routine, law, family, peer pressure and traditions are just some of our masters. If any of the readers feels that he or she does not live this kind of life but is a free individual whose decisions are solely based on free will, I would suggest reading the next part in our next issue and we’ll see if this feeling is justified.