The Strange Kind of Freedom

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]You know what's amazing about reading history books is sometimes they'll show you the original text of a letter that was written in like preodern times.

[00:00:10]It is amazing how bad the spelling is in these letters. And it's not just like a word is spelled wrong, but you'll see the same word spelled in multiple different ways on the same page. It is completely inconsistent and looks kind of ridiculous to the modern eye. And you got to think most people back then were illiterate. So the letter you're reading was written by an educated person. This was one of the smart ones and this is the way they spell.

[00:00:45]I mean these days spelling is kind of part of literacy and intelligence.

[00:00:54]I'll give you a couple spelling errors here or there if you're just in a rush.

[00:00:59]But if I read something you wrote and every three or four words is spelled weird, I'm going to think you're a dumb guy.

[00:01:07]That's just part of modern logic.

[00:01:12]But what was happening with the the history text, the ancient text of somebody spelling something wrong? What was going on there was cultural because back then, like I said, most people couldn't read or write anyways. So, if you were one of the people who could write, you basically just got to do whatever you wanted to do. In the era before dictionaries, before the printing press, writing was not really standardized. You just got to you just had to make your point as long as the person who was reading it could basically figure out what you were saying. You were not expected to do things in a certain way.

[00:01:59]It was just whatever you felt like putting on the page.

[00:02:04]And you think about what it feels like to see a spelling error. Now, you can only see it because you know how to read and you know what the word is supposed to look like. But most people back then couldn't read at all. So, they had no concept of spelling. They had no concept of consistency and how something is supposed to look.

[00:02:34]If you think about this now, when you're in like a foreign country and you look at a sign that's written in a language that you can't read, you know, you're looking at a sign written in Arabic, you do kind of assume or maybe it just doesn't occur to you that something might be spelled wrong.

[00:02:54]You look at the sign and you just assume that whoever wrote the sign put the letters in the right place because your concept of Arabic is non-existent.

[00:03:05]So all you're looking at is a bunch of symbols. You have no sense that there is a system that is supposed to be followed here.

[00:03:14]But this freedom people used to have to write however they wanted to write.

[00:03:22]This was a freedom that existed in only one domain of their life.

[00:03:28]In those days, society itself was very rigid. People were forced to follow certain, you know, religious institutions. You had to believe a certain thing.

[00:03:41]Society was set up in a hierarchy, very strict.

[00:03:46]This is how we do things. This is how you live. But for that one aspect of their life which was information, you got to just do whatever you wanted to do.

[00:03:58]You got to say that this bucket of water is a bucket. There was no set measurement of what a bucket meant. It was just whatever felt right in the moment.

[00:04:10]In the modern era, we have inverted this formula.

[00:04:16]Language is now extremely standardized.

[00:04:18]We know what spelling is supposed to look like. Measurements are standardized.

[00:04:25]An hour is an hour. In America, we use inches and feet. An inch is an inch.

[00:04:32]But for the rest of our lives, the way we actually live, the things we believe, the people we surround ourselves with, we get to choose those things. That is part of living in a modern liberal culture is that you get to follow whatever religion you want. You get to believe what you want and you get to set up your life basically according to those beliefs.

[00:05:01]But the fact that we took the time to standardize these things to say that an inch is an inch and an hour is an hour.

[00:05:13]That is the foundation for science. That is the foundation for modern culture is the fact that we establish certain things and we're able to build on them.

[00:05:31]But that sense of consistency of a consistent logic of this always means this that is also the foundation of literacy.

[00:05:47]It is the system that we all agree to live on.

[00:05:56]The standardization of the printing press is what leads to mass literacy.

[00:06:01]And part of the idea of literacy as we describe it or as we the faith that we put in literacy is kind of emancipatory.

[00:06:15]It's meant to empower the reader. That's our idea of it which is that if you can read this text for yourself then you can also think for yourself and you can reason about the world. You are not just accepting things from what you're hearing. You can actually you know read and process.

[00:06:39]When you think back to the preodern era when most people were illiterate, if there was a guy in your area who could read, it was usually the priest.

[00:06:51]That was the function of most reading in those days. Was somebody reading the Bible, reading some sort of holy text and telling you about it?

[00:07:03]So if you were in the situation of being the medieval peasant and you're listening to the priest, you were kind of trusting them. You were trusting that this priest was telling you the truth about what was in the book. They were telling you the truth about how you were supposed to live your life.

[00:07:30]literacy, mass literacy comes with, you know, the reformation.

[00:07:35]Part of the idea of the reformation is, hey, if we give people the text directly, then they can think for themselves and they can, you know, find the truth on their own.

[00:07:51]And part of the promise here or the idea is that if you give people this power, it will bring them together because then everybody gets to share in this body of knowledge.

[00:08:08]But of course, what we find is not that we find what we find is kind of the opposite of that. The reformation leads to centuries of religious war.

[00:08:20]It leads to fracturing.

[00:08:23]One church becomes many different churches and they all make a claim to the truth.

[00:08:31]What it turns out is that that priest, the central figure, the one guy who could read, that guy was kind of loadbearing.

[00:08:46]The fact that everybody was going to the same guy was kind of what was holding things together.

[00:08:55]Because without that, what you end up with is people going in different directions.

[00:09:03]People finding out their own kind of truth and that truth colliding with everybody else and you end up with fracturing.

[00:09:18]But part of living in modern life, like I said, the foundation of science is agreement. The foundation of science is standardization. This always means this. Once you establish that, you can also extrapolate from that. This means this, therefore, and then the next thing.

[00:09:45]But part of modern life is at once thinking for yourself, but also trusting.

[00:09:55]You are trusting that somebody else knows what they're talking about.

[00:10:01]You get on the airplane, you are trusting that the pilot understands aerodynamics.

[00:10:09]You are trusting that your accountant understands tax law.

[00:10:14]You kind of understand these concepts. You know what they are, but you don't know how they work specifically. And you don't know, you're not supposed to know how they work. You know enough to trust that somebody else knows.

[00:10:31]In that situation, when you get on the plane, you are kind of back in the role of the medieval peasant where you are going to somebody else who understands something and that person is your connection to the rest of the world. That person is, you know, you're talking to a doctor.

[00:10:56]That person is telling you about yourself, but they're telling you about yourself in a way that you couldn't figure out on your own, which is why you're going to them.

[00:11:06]The thing about the medieval peasant, though, the thing that makes us different from the peasant, is that the peasant knew he was illiterate. He knew it on a foundational level. He looked at somebody who was looking down at a page and he didn't even he couldn't even conceive of what was happening there. He could not conceive of symbols on a page meaning words and translating that on the spot. That must have seemed like magic to him. So there was a division. There is a natural division between the illiterate peasant and the words that are written on the page. It is insurmountable. They could stare at those words for days and not come up with anything.

[00:12:00]In the modern era, we don't have that.

[00:12:04]what we have is kind of I wouldn't say worse but it is more damaging because what we have is half of that.

[00:12:17]We can read we can look at text written on a page and know what the letters are.

[00:12:24]We can know what the words are.

[00:12:27]But there are still situations where that's not enough.

[00:12:34]Being literate liberated people to communicate, but it didn't give them wisdom inherently.

[00:12:47]We didn't democratize wisdom. We democratized information.

[00:12:53]I could give you a scientific study that was written about, you know, physics or something and you could read it.

[00:13:04]You could look at the words written on the page and you know what the words say. You could say them out loud. You might even be able to string some sentences together and know what the basic idea is.

[00:13:19]But at some point it's going to run out.

[00:13:25]Your level of understanding is going to kind of hit a wall because you're not a physicist.

[00:13:33]But the ability to read some of it is torturous, especially for a certain kind of person who wants to know.

[00:13:47]The fact that you could kind of read it is ends up being kind of a tease. It ends up making you feel dumber because you feel like you should understand it.

[00:13:59]I've seen these letters before. I may have even seen these words before, but I can't understand exactly what this means.

[00:14:08]And that's tricky. But that's part of what comes with being a literate person is being able to understand that you're not all the way there.

[00:14:22]So the question ends up being like I said the you know the pilot, the accountant, the doctor, these are the priest in this modern context. These are the experts that you're deferring to.

[00:14:43]So the question ends up being which priest is right? Who am I actually listening to? Who is telling me the truth? And who can I actually trust to tell me about myself and to, you know, get me over the hump?

[00:15:05]And this is hard.

[00:15:08]The last decade has been about people questioning things. That was the whole pandemic. That was even before that. But these are the reactionary movement to question basic assumptions, question institutions, question received wisdom and even just basic facts.

[00:15:34]Once you start tearing these things down, you end up in kind of a weird place where it feels like the ground is shaky below you.

[00:15:47]But the idea of literacy was liberalism. Liberalism in the classic sense, individualism. If I sit down and think about this thing long enough, I can figure it out. If I gather enough texts, eventually the words are going to start making sense to me. Eventually, I'm going to find something that I do understand. And if I stack up enough of those, I can just figure this thing out on my own.

[00:16:24]But the sense of disbelief that these reactionary types are feeling, the thing that they're really getting.

[00:16:37]It's easy to write this off as being just kind of like uh dumb guys, cooks, weirdos, anti-science people who are just deni denying these things from an ego standpoint and there is something to that. But at the same time, I think that lets the institutions off the hook because the reason why this kind of reactionary thinking caught on so much is the fact that it's kind of true that it makes some points.

[00:17:19]We live in a world of institutions that have constantly failed us. every source of news, every source of, you know, communication, information, governance.

[00:17:36]We've seen it fail us a little bit.

[00:17:40]Every single institution has let us down at some point. And the problem with information, the problem with sources is that there is kind of an asymmetry.

[00:17:55]in that when you spot an institution lying, getting something wrong, you don't actually need to know the truth. All you need to know is that they got it wrong.

[00:18:11]All you need to know is they are imperfect.

[00:18:15]And from that point on, you're never going to look at them the same. Even if you think maybe they get it mostly right, even if you think these people are mostly intelligent and well-meaning, you can't unsee it.

[00:18:34]Once you've seen the in the armor, you can't look away because that is still part of your mind.

[00:18:43]But the thing about skepticism and skepticism is usually in good faith understood to be a healthy part of being an intelligent person. It is questioning basic assumptions.

[00:19:02]That is the foundation of philosophy.

[00:19:06]You say it's like this. Why?

[00:19:09]Why? What are you assuming there? And what are the assumptions about the assumptions and so on. The thing about skepticism about questioning everything is that you can't live inside of skepticism.

[00:19:27]Skepticism is a tool for examining things. But at some point to be a functional person, you do have to believe something.

[00:19:42]You took the time to tear everything down and to say what is false.

[00:19:49]But at some point you do have to put on your shoes and go to work because at some point you have to be done asking because you do have to function.

[00:20:04]But that kind of skepticism, the impulse that some people have to question things and to gather facts and do the research as they say.

[00:20:20]What you end up doing is you tear down the priest. You tear down the institution, the thing that is above you. But you don't live in a vacuum.

[00:20:33]What you do instead is you end up putting yourself in that role.

[00:20:40]You put yourself as you become the priest of the truth. You become the arbiter of what is real. Whatever feels right to me is true. I am, you know, shooting from the hip. This is what is fact.

[00:21:00]And the problem with that is that when you put yourself in that position to be the decider of truth is you become unaccountable.

[00:21:13]It becomes very hard to falsify.

[00:21:18]You become resistant to new facts because new facts make you question the old facts and it makes you, you know, it's that's the cognitive dissonance that these reactionary types end up feeling is I built a system on my own. I built my own tailor made view of the world.

[00:21:44]And if I encounter a fact that doesn't line up with my new, you know, independent vision, then that's that new fact becomes a threat. Not a new source of understanding, but a direct threat to who I am and to the system that I have built. And then regular things, the regular friction of everyday life, coming across things that you can't control or don't fully understand yet. These things get blown out of proportion and you end up in a situation of, you know, over dramatizing things, taking things personally when you weren't supposed to because it makes you brittle. You are trying to do everything yourself. You are trying to invent your own system of spelling. And that's too much.

[00:22:44]That's not how we were meant to live.

[00:22:46]And that is why your brain is breaking down under pressure.

[00:22:53]Because when you go far enough down that path of understanding the world from your own point of view, understand of having a filter on reality, a filter that you built yourself, what you will find is that the tools you are using to critique the system, the tools you are using to become come objective and to stand back.

[00:23:27]Those tools came from the system itself.

[00:23:32]You are trying to become objective. You are trying to see things from a distance but you can never get far enough to actually see it. You never actually get to step outside because when you do when you think you have stepped outside, you will look down and realize that you know someone else made your shoes. If that metaphor makes sense.

[00:24:01]The language you use, you did not invent your language. That was something given to you. That was part of a longer tradition. And that language is what connects you to the rest of the world.

[00:24:17]The concepts you have of reality, the basic concepts you have of what it means to exist in physical space and to be, you know, your own body.

[00:24:32]Those were also given to you.

[00:24:35]And by the time you were old enough to question them, they were foundational.

[00:24:42]These are not things that you can avoid.

[00:24:45]These are things that you can kind of sense in the way that you can look out from your eyes and kind of sense what the rest of your face looks like.

[00:24:59]But you can't actually see it.

[00:25:02]You can't actually step outside of it.

[00:25:06]nor should you really want to because they the idea of being able to get outside of the system that's something that you only think you want what I'm talking about I mean the the centrality that's a word I always come back to the feeling of individualism of this is how I see the world and this is you know I have put myself in a position of deciding the truth. I am the priest of truth.

[00:25:50]Every religious tradition has some description of this phenomenon.

[00:25:59]Every religious tradition kind of the point ends up being addressing this problem. Addressing the problem of centrality.

[00:26:08]In Buddhism this is attachment. In Christianity this is pride. Pride goes before the fall.

[00:26:17]But these traditions, the reason they have lasted as long as they have, the usefulness is that they are not telling you to do away with this entirely.

[00:26:34]Non-attachment does not mean labbotomy.

[00:26:40]It does not mean turning off your brain because your brain is part of who you are. This is part of what it means to exist is to have thoughts.

[00:26:51]In Christianity, it's understood that human beings are imperfect and that people have an ego and that pride is part of everyday life.

[00:27:04]But what these traditions try to tell you, the real point that they're making is loosening up.

[00:27:14]It's being able to understand that you have attachment, but you don't have to be controlled by them.

[00:27:23]You don't have to see things that are out of your control as a threat. The outside world is not imposing itself on you. The outside world is the world that you're a part of.

[00:27:40]But the desire to get past that, the desire to transcend the conceptual framework of everyday reality and to see the truth.

[00:27:59]This is very seductive for a certain kind of mind.

[00:28:08]Um, a certain kind of, you know, philosophical mind. The desire to step back and to see things the way they actually are.

[00:28:20]Part of the idea there is that you are able to step back far enough where you can just look out and see it.

[00:28:31]But the feeling of freedom, of intellectual freedom, seeing things without category, seeing things without labels, without standardization, seeing things objectively.

[00:28:53]The thing to understand about this idea is that it is natural. This is part of what it means to have an independent mind is that desire.

[00:29:08]But I think the thing that ends up tripping people up is thinking that it's supposed to be a permanent state that you achieve liberation and now you're just liberated.

[00:29:22]And that is where you end up going wrong because those religious traditions also account for this.

[00:29:31]They are designed to give you a glimpse of what is going on over there. You achieve this through meditation. You achieve this through mystical experience.

[00:29:44]But part of meditation is stopping.

[00:29:51]Part of religious experience is coming back. You go to the mountaintop and you talk to God. And then at some point you come back from the mountaintop and you go back to your regular life. That is not failure on your part. You were never supposed to stay at the top of the mountaintop. You saw it for a little bit and then you come back.

[00:30:18]I'm not into like uh psychedelics or whatever, but for people who are people who take Iawasa in Peru or wherever, you're supposed to do it in like a controlled environment. You do it with a shaman. You do it with a guide, somebody who is there to bring you back because you're not supposed to go there forever.

[00:30:47]Real freedom, and I've talked about this a few times now, genuine freedom is not an enjoyable thing. That is not a particularly desirable state.

[00:31:02]Genuine freedom is madness.

[00:31:07]It is the raving lunatic on the street.

[00:31:11]It is the guy who is no longer in control. Because when you see a crazy person, what you are looking at is a person who is experiencing reality with no filter.

[00:31:30]That is genuine freedom. Freedom from category.

[00:31:36]Freedom from attachment, from coherence.

[00:31:40]That is white noise. Every frequency coming at you at once in a way without structure, without a system.

[00:31:54]And as it turns out, we do need a system.

[00:32:00]Because the system is not designed to keep you from something. The system is designed to connect you to everything else.

[00:32:13]It's designed to give you a container to experience reality. It's not meant to constrain you or to keep you from seeing it because seeing it is not doing it.

[00:32:30]Freedom is on the other side of the window.

[00:32:36]But the window is something you look out.

[00:32:41]The walls of your home are not keeping you from the outside. The walls are structural. You need walls because everything can't be a window.