The Choice is Yours?

FREEDOM. Freedom is the right to choose, speak, do, think, live, feel, and worship as you please without being subject to the restraint of being run roughshod over while exercising your civil rights. It is a liberty to be set aside from government restrictions or influences against your will and consent.

Give you liberty or give you death. Good old freedom, just like the old Smith and Wesson, will have to be pried from your cold dead hand but not while you are alive and still have breath in your body. Sounds good but rhetoric or reality? This is still America, home of the free and the land of the brave. I am sure you would be damn if you will let someone tell you what to do or scare you into doing something you don’t want to do.

You have every right to exercise your right to freedom and individuality. To do as you dam well please or not do as you dam well, please. It is called freedom, and it is our civil liberty to protect and exercise. Has there ever been a time when we were without it, no aside from that time?

A noble illusion of fundamental proportions. Freedom is an abstract concept manifested in reality. An illusionist performs tricks that usually influence the mind to distort reality by deceiving the senses to perceive or incorrectly interpret something. The most common illusion is the optical illusion, where the brain is tricked into accepting stimuli which it misinterprets or perceives as its creation when it is actually being manufactured.

One of the most incredible illusions is love because you cannot touch it, but it is undoubtedly felt and experienced; however, it only exists in a non-physical realm. The physical realm is lust or an expression of love’s biological needs. Love is expressed in a physical realm which makes it real, but it is really an illusion of the mind that manifests in the metaphorical heart.

It is the brain’s perception and the release of endorphins associated with a person, place, or feeling that creates blissfulness. Ever wonder how you can be so in love with someone and then later despise their very existence?

The shattering of the illusion where the spell was broken completely alters your perception of who they were to you, thus a broken heart that no surgery can repair. No physical damage can be detected, but it sure as hell is felt, and no one can tell you any different.

The same is true of hate and, yes, freedom too. Feelings are illusions and perceptions of reality, and feelings can’t be wrong, just inappropriate, misguided, or unwarranted. But this is not a love discussion, but it discusses the love of the illusion of freedom.

This optical illusion of freedom and how it impacts one’s perspective makes everything true within the existence of your universe according to your sphere of perception. A perspective seeking to assimilate with those who reinforce that reality. It creates an identity that becomes the basis for your personality and beliefs within that reality. A shared illusion of like minds similarly inclined to create validation.

Freedom is one of the biggest illusions that an individual practices which may have little or no basis in reality except to be contextually measured by the reasonable degree of restrictions or lack thereof. The illusion resides in the perception that makes it a reality, like love. Even when you exercise freedom, it is only seen in the form of a deed or gesture, which we recognize as the essence to choose.

Outside forces govern every facet of life we choose but we do not determine what is comprised within the margins of that choice. For example, Let’s say you choose a profession. When exercising your freedom of choice within the confines of that choice is criteria that you must confirm to loosely or otherwise that are fixed restrictions of that specific professional choice.

There may be educational requirements, time requirements, dress code, appearance expectations, drug testing, necessary equipment, and any number of mandatory conditions. They remain outside the realm of your freedom to choose if that profession is your choice and pursue it.

You may wear safety equipment, or if in law enforcement, you wear a bulletproof vest and carry a bat utility belt with lots of equipment. It is department-issued equipment, and you are required to have it, including body cameras requirements nowadays. All of which I am sure does not permit your freedom to be exercised regarding compliance, but you must, and you do.

So you consent, submit and conform to the restriction of your freedom in exchange for exercising that freedom to be included in the choice you have freely chosen to pursue. It is just the price of playing the game, but there are rules to the game that you will follow. You have the freedom to choose not to follow them, but you do not have the liberty to not follow them and still be involved.

That raises the question in a practical analysis do you really have the freedom to choose? Or do you have the freedom not to be involved or participate? To make it simpler, does everyone on the job have the freedom to show up whenever they feel like it? Or is there an expectation of being on time that will be adhered to if someone chooses to enforce it? Still, it is not your freedom of choice to not be on time and not face any consequences.

You may choose who you want to marry, but do you also have the freedom to select why they married you? Once married, there are rules and expectations of protocol that require the compromise of individual freedoms within the confines of the marriage. Even if you have untold freedoms within a marriage that all parties are aware of and consent to, laws and community restrictions impede your choices.

Restricting your freedom in a way that it would not if you were not married. For example, the limits and conditions within the given hall pass or permission structure determines if you have cheated. Suppressing your desires, emotions, and thoughts because of the decisions associated with the consequences of your choice to marry restricts your Freedom. When you speak of Freedom, it is a relatively theoretical concept.

 

 

In practice, it can leave you feeling trapped in a situation that circumstances don’t allow you to walk away from while yet being free to do so. This freedom is not just the physical restraint of your movements but also demands the constant consumption of your time and any accompanying restrictive commitments. Compromise and unfulfilled desires become standard concessions of your expression.

A narrowing spiral occurs once a decision has been made, presenting the various possibilities of any decision according to the universal law of cause and effect. Hence, every decision alters the current circumstances while presenting another set of more limiting circumstances specific to that decision. Another set of expectations to restrictively adhere to. 

This will require another choice that will lead to a more definitive selection, which lessens the spectrum you have to choose from within that choice. Thus, your Freedom of choice essentially and eventually reduces your Freedom to choose other options. A diminishing course of action is developed.

You can exercise no freedom beyond or outside of your control or awareness, knowing only that which is within your grasp, understanding, or choice. You adhere to most social and religious standards that were not of your creation but claim the right and Freedom within that range selected and provided to you while never assuming you never had control over the initial selection.

Choices are generally made for you, and you then choose from that variable. The illusion is you were not influenced in a predictable way to conform.

Your level of conformity is guided by your morality in judging or condemning anyone outside your radius of compliance. To censure their act or choice beyond your level of courage to not conform as you did. Is Freedom then displayed by your right to be the same or different?

The prevailing social model of schooling, education, employment, and happiness is not a structure of Freedom but conformity and rewards within that system for compliance. You follow the rules and make sure others follow the rules that you dare not violate, but who regulates the rule-makers if not themselves, surely not you.

Raging against the system would seem selective at best and counterintuitive at worst, considering how many times you reinforce the system by your actions. For example, for the many who refuse to get a Covid vaccination, how many have the required childhood vaccinations and flu shots? How many have given their children these shots in exchange for the convenience of school indoctrinations and societal group conditioning? 

The consistency of your choices and protest is not an expression of Freedom but conformity. Not to judge vaccinations but to illustrate the context of the choices made that limits selection or liberty. Imagine if the government ordered a microchip to be inserted in every person in this country above ten years old.

This microchip would monitor and record your every move, your close associations and interactions, your appearance, your habits, and personal behaviors, predict your thoughts and actions, and any normal facet of your life, including your location and movements. As a result, this microchip could probably have long-term effects on your health and influence your psychological inclinations.

 The implications of this microchip are only limited by the imagination or denial of its purpose but would, over time, become an addictive dependency. Your every move is scripted or record by your very own unique compulsion to incorporate the microchip into your life.

Remember the Freedom of the Smith and Wesson to be pried from your cold dead hand before you surrender your Freedom. No need to worry because it has voluntarily been replaced by a cell phone, Ipad, smart TV, Alexa, and Siri.  The technological convenience extends far beyond these personal agents of surveillance to the public arena. Ever wonder how do these devices respond when you call them if they are not listening? How do they hear if they are not actively listening and recording?

Cameras everywhere have you mostly convinced it is for safety purposes or convenience. Not only do you provide information on yourself, but you also do so on everyone you know when you are addicted to social media, recording your every move, encounter, and with whom. If not willingly, then, by the proximity of cell towers pinging when you move in a way to trigger the triangulation for optimum phone service, or that is what you believe.

Information is the new currency to control, predict, manipulate, program, and monitor your whole existence with your full cooperation and consent. Electronic and video surveillance initiated, submitted, and operated by you.  You then indoctrinate your children when you use these devices to teach and raise them because you can’t be bothered. It is too stressful for you to deal with your very own children but the machine will.

So you send them to school for teachers to deal with what you have deemed an impossible task beyond your capabilities. Now multiply that times a classroom size. Where is the Freedom to escape the social engineering at every turn that is innocently woven into everyday life for your Freedom not to be an illusion?

Now you have voluntarily done what the government could not force you to do and somehow speak of your Freedom being taken. It is not being taken; it is being given by stroking your fears and catering to your conveniences. So it is amusing to hear someone speak of a microchip in the vaccine when you keep one with you constantly, even when you are sleep.

You tell it secrets you don’t share with anyone and even trust the entirety of your financial transactions to it or a cloud. By these illustrations, Freedom would seem compromised in will and exercise by you.

 Three questions arise. Why would it be necessary to put a chip in your body that does less than your cell phone and other gadgets to monitor your existence, affairs, and encounters? Second, is your love of Freedom real, or has the definition of Freedom changed? Third, is conforming to Freedom under the misconception of liberties the same as the illusion of Freedom? Freedom is choices but are the choices freely?

 

Thurston K. Atlas

Creating a Buzz