Modern freedom is a fetish, a faceless god we worship without question. We have been taught that to be free is to owe nothing to anyone, to depend on no one, to carry no burdensome ties that might limit us. Freedom is defined as absolute autonomy, infinite possibility, the sacred right to be bound to nothing. A family, a partner, friends? Better not. To have bonds is to lose our freedom, to surrender parts of our time, our being, our independence. We are told that this is a loss. We are sold the idea that fulfillment lies in detachment—in the ability to walk away whenever we choose, in the possibility of living without roots. But isn’t that, in itself, just another kind of emptiness?
Neo-fascists are winning elections in the name of freedom. Empires are built on the promise of total freedom: free markets, free speech, free choice—the Holy Trinity. We are told that freedom is the cornerstone of modernity, the highest aspiration of the enlightened individual. But what kind of freedom is this? Freedom for what? In late capitalism, freedom is little more than a market slogan, a neurotic tic framed as the official purpose of human beings: free competition, free trade, the freedom to consume whatever we want, to go into debt without limits, to self-exploit with enthusiasm. Byung-Chul Han was right when he observed in The Burnout Society (2015, p. 8): “We no longer live in disciplined societies; we are captives in the achievement society and its positivism.” In this narcissistic society, nothing is impossible if you only wish for it strongly enough. This shift from external discipline to internal self-exploitation reveals the fundamental paradox of our contemporary freedom.
Self-imposition? The new dogma. We no longer need overseers because we lash ourselves with endless to-do lists, overstuffed calendars, and the relentless obligation to monetize even our free time. We exercise not because we enjoy movement but because we must achieve the best version of ourselves. We read not for pleasure but to add another book to our Goodreads list. We learn new languages not out of curiosity but because they might be valuable assets for our LinkedIn profiles. Everything must be useful. Everything must generate value. We turn our hobbies into commodities, our skills into products, our lives into merchandise displayed in digital storefronts with the hashtags #LivingMyBestLife #CEOofMyself #GoodVibesOnly.
We believe we are free because we avoid relationships of interdependence, but we are only condemning ourselves to alienation. We are social beings, yet we behave like islands. We fear community. After all, it requires commitment because it threatens our libidinal fantasy of total independence. Adorno and Horkheimer warned in Dialectic of Enlightenment that modern reason, in its obsession with domination, has led us to a total instrumentalization of life. Everything must serve a purpose, be measurable and predictable, and fit into the machinery of efficiency (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002/1944). Freedom is just another mechanism of control. They gave us the illusion of autonomy, but it only made us more docile, more malleable, and more functional to the system.
Huxley saw it before anyone else. In Brave New World (Huxley, 1932/2006), the perfect dictatorship does not require repression or censorship because people are too entertained to realize they have been enslaved. Machines bombarded with distractions, immediate pleasures, a constant flow of dopamine. Today’s soma is not a pill, but it is everywhere: in social media, feeding us an endless stream of stimuli; in wellness culture, telling us that happiness is just a matter of attitude; in the promise that success depends solely on how hard we work. Are you unhappy? Smile. Not successful? Work harder. Feeling sad? Take some pills and get back to work!
Han describes in The Expulsion of the Other: “We live in a society where anything that does not fit into the mold of productivity is discarded” (Han, 2018, p.4). Weakness, stillness, contemplation, connection with others—these are seen as system failures. They sell us the image of freedom as independence, but what they have truly done is fragment us, strip us of everything that makes us human. We have been made to believe that happiness lies in being alone, in depending on no one, in being accountable only to ourselves. But in this pursuit of total autonomy, we have only become more isolated, more exhausted.
The paradox is brutal: the more we chase freedom, the smaller the cage becomes. We are told that freedom is the opposite of dependence, when in reality, true freedom can only exist within the community, in mutual (re)cognition, in the fabric of relationships that sustain us. We are not autonomous beings; we never were. We are social beings, and denying that truth only condemns us to loneliness and exhaustion. So, what is left for us? We cling to the idea of freedom as if it were our last refuge—but perhaps it is time to redefine it: not as the absence of bonds, but as the possibility to choose what binds us. Not as the elimination of restrictions but as the ability to find meaning within them. Perhaps true freedom is not about fleeing from all that ties us down but about choosing our own chains.
References
Han, B.-C. (2015). The Burnout Society (E. Butler, Trad.). Stanford University Press.
Han, B. (2018). The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today. (W. Hoban, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (G. Schmid Noerr, Ed.; E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1944).
Huxley, A. (2006). Brave New World. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. (Original work published 1932).
