The Flipside of Freedom
When excess agency oppresses and responsibility is the remedy
Social science literature has a steady repertoire of buzzwords at its disposal that make for punchy headlines. “Agency” is just one of these popular picks, a familiar staple in the feminist critiques and neoliberal analyses that clutter academic journals. It has spiraled in virality in the past few decades, a testament to the freedom-rich, responsibility-deficient age that we inhabit. What is agency? It is the ability to act in the way one wishes to. It is the social power of freedom. It is the weightless, horizon-unspooled land of choice and opportunity. It is a consequence of tolerance and an essential ingredient of the democratic society. ‘Agency’ is this academic golden-child that no one knows of any way to think about except as a western trophy deserving unequivocal celebratory applause.
You see, we suppose that the greater amount of freedom sloshing about the better off we will be. But we do not stop to question whether freedom ought to come packaged with sister ideals that provide it with the tension that renders it productive--that will sharpen and challenge it in small but necessary ways. Ironically, state-sanctioned freedom must be supplied a philosophical container by the unique individual in order for it to register as liberating and not oppressive.
What does this mean? A couple things: that perfect freedom does not liberate. That man is not content with boundless agency. That social power is not the only currency to acquire in human society. That we hunger for something to tether us to the earth, to ground us in moral duty or the heaviness of self-imposed obligation. What we lack is the cultural championing of responsibility. It has become an orphaned ideal, left trampled in the dust by progressive doctrine, technocratic leadership, and woke sensibilities. We have molted the national husk of responsibility over time, having grown suspicious of its seeming oppression.
In this neoliberal light, responsibility is felt as an albatross around one's neck. We associate it with the sludge of conformity that “plagued” the first half of the 20th-century and as an undesirable symbol of Freudian-style repression. We suppose that duties within our communities, families, (and even to ourselves) are but goblins of our imaginations that wish to subjugate us. This has remained a popular conception because not only have we lost the ability to believe there is anything nurturing about responsibility, but on the other hand we have also lost the ability to critique freedom in any way at all except to say that more of it must be good.
Meanwhile, we are suffocating from this weightlessness, crushed by a smorgasbord of choice, and plagued by lukewarm cultural meaning. Furthermore, we are left unnerved by the creeping ambivalence of values and lack of regard for historical legacies, and ultimately bereft of any sure-footed language to communicate our unease.
How did we get here?
The powerful, personal-liberation currents of the 1960s present themselves as vital ingredients in the soup of our current cultural moment. During this bygone era, political freedom delightfully expanded to include the liberation of lifestyle. It was a heady, experimental decade where conformities toppled and judgements dwindled. The exciting ascendancy of the individual occurred, riding the tides of personal authenticity, self-enlightenment, and the me-directed life. Sexual expression blossomed and emotional divulgence gained greater appreciation.
At this pivotal juncture the romanticism of the western individual was transmuted from the stoic, duty-driven man to the expressive, agency-driven man. The world, in many ways, was unfurling in opportunities while simultaneously collapsing the rift between the ‘private self’ and the ‘public self'. Over the coming decades, the Self increasingly disengaged from an ethos of character and gravitated instead towards one of personality.
Character constituted the continual sharpening of a moral ideal and the satisfaction that came from one’s honorable interactions with the world. One must admit that once a staple in the western vocabulary, it smacks of our grandparent’s generation today. Personality, on the other hand, is a nod towards the sparkly exaltation of unique identity, the ennoblement of our subjective desires, and the rise of “my truth” doctrine.
In centuries past, the Self subsisted on sacrificial and obligatory sentiments. Individuals were both enlivened (and pressured) by their perceived duties to others, to future generations, and to God, and these responsibilities constituted the center of the universe around which the individual revolved. This configuration ultimately underwent a radical reversal, but it was not one without a long history precipitating it. Where we stand today, the individual personality occupies the sun around which all of its attendant concerns orbit. And it is individual psychological satisfaction that has become the goal of the day. Freud’s pleasure principle has come out to play and handily captured some cultural acclaim, wouldn’t you say?
Inabilities to Critique Freedom
The question becomes, have we swung too far? Are we slopping around in the decadence that is the consequence of excessive agency? A caveat on “too-much freedom”: Complications arise not from a mere quantity of freedom but from its lack of structure. Having felt the smothering weight of social duress, expectation, and intimidation lightened in recent history, and in some ways removed, it has now become our choice to give form to the flux of our own freedom. Understand: this is a responsibility all the same but it is one that often fails to consciously impress itself upon us.
We stagger about, entertaining the multiplicity of paths not taken and fighting off the existential demons of our watery, transient sense of life purpose. We have adopted the view that unfettered personal expression and unrestrained panoplies of choice are the road to enlightenment but are confused when we find ourselves immobilized before this daunting and vaguely unfulfilling task. Here in the West the glories of freedom have been lyrically extolled for hundreds of years but we forget the all-too-human hunger for responsibility, structure, and meaning. In our new dispensation we must voluntarily choose to curb our freedoms, as no one can do this for us. (And if we reject this task, we will seek to become enslaved by some other force.)
The brilliant French philosopher Chantel Delsol remarks on the peculiar vacancy of freedom in her book Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World.
“But freedom is nothing but an empty form awaiting content. The freedom to be oneself, to define one’s own norms, is not sufficient to structure the subject, since it is mere openness and condition. It opens up possibilities but does not define them. It is the atmosphere, the backdrop, the framework in which the individual can shape himself, but it does not itself shape him. In fact, it is not the freedom to be that the individual wants, which would make him merely a subject in the world who knows himself. The axis around which the subject shapes himself positively is, rather, responsibility.”
Delsol notes something interesting worth repeating: The individual does not shape himself around the axis of freedom, but rather, the axis of responsibility. Hence why boundless agency does not quench our thirst and why its weightlessness can ironically turn oppressive.
At this juncture we enter a strange, unsettling upside-down zone of human functioning. An excess of agency can become a ripe cultural soil for heavy-handed political structure. Throwing up their hands, a population unable to constructively channel their freedom through self-selected (but necessarily sacrificial) aims will instinctively search for that role in the external sphere. As I am fond of putting it: if they are unable to locate purpose with-in they will search for purpose with-out.
The German social psychologist Erich Fromm was one of the most important illuminators of this phenomenon. He writes of Weimar Germany’s easy engulfment by domineering Nazi ideology in his famous work Escape from Freedom:
“We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for.”
They sought for ways to escape from it. As always, totalitarian movements can be forestalled by a strong and alert populace with enough iron with-in, sufficient that they are not vulnerable to accepting the genesis of autocratic rule, some of which is awfully appealing, purpose-dense food for the masses.
Make no mistake: the totalitarians work in conjunction with the people (many of whom are perfectly complicit and compliant and are recruited as enthusiastic worker bees for the regime.) They begin with feeding the masses something they are hungry for, paving the way for more and greater subjugations to come. In this way, the totalitarian regime externalizes responsibility and purpose.
This was a particular vice of the 20th-century with its staggering tally of one hundred million dead. In some ways, we are conscious of this mistake and shudder in historical memory of the previous generations that regrettably absorbed ideology and mythologized its leaders to this fatal extent. And although we may not be stampeding to the next dictator in today’s century, our malaise manifests in a different way—in a curious widespread disorientation, in historically-elevated rates of anxiety, in an allergic reaction to diagnosing good/evil in modern life, and in the dominance of subjective truths.
Responsibility is Nurturing
It seems we are good at one thing in our contemporary era: removing ostensible impediments to our sacrosanct freedom. We wage war against “societal expectations” with practiced indignation, crucify traditional norms as artificial social constructs with abandon, discredit religion as a primitive security-blanket, and water down definitions to spare ourselves their judgmental and unpalatable conclusions.
Some of this impulse stems from the Freudian and Marxist legacies that doused us in a cynicism that society had repressed and corrupted us and that freeing ourselves from their sneaky oppressions was paramount. This mode of thought neatly parallels the Rousseauian notion of the “noble savage,” a bite of fairy-tale idealism that supposes man was subverted by civilization’s constraints and demands rather than dignified by them.
As has become clear, we are not sated by the mere business of stripping-away oppressions. Instead, we are impoverished by our diminished ability to accept responsibility with grateful hearts, decisively choose our personal aims, and shoulder the burden that duty necessarily entails. What we would do well to understand is that responsibility in tempered quantities is more liberating than perfect freedom is. And it is us that must give form to our freedom, you see, sculpting it into something meaningful and life-affirming. Arguably at the heart of it all are the mysterious yearnings of our beautiful humanness, most at home in a balancing act with the lightness of our liberty and the heaviness of our accepted burdens.