The Purpose of Freedom

Freedom is a mental phenomenon, we do not consider physical object to be able to choose different actions. It may seem that the main purpose of consciousness is to be able to choose and to design. Do we design our own life? Sure we make major choices, the career we want, the relationships that may lead to families and where we are going to live. But these choices take power, or knowledge, I've had an illness that greatly reduced my ability to design my own life, no job, no relationship and no money. I had to free myself from the disaster of illness before I had the power to make positive choices, even being free from drug use is a daily battle, although it is getting easier. In order to feel an able part of society I needed the self-belief and confidence to take on more meaningful jobs.

The power to choose is often considered knowledge, and I guess all choices come down to belief. The belief that it is good or right or better, but mostly our lives are defined by other people, they have to consider you right for the job or they have to want to be in a relationship. Understanding the nature of power goes further than knowledge, knowing the balance of political power is not the same as executing it. I have socialist beliefs that at one stage I thought meant I would be a good prime minister or that politician's needed to listen to me. Being able to produce social justice is different to having a political ideology. Power is interaction, knowledge is design and freedom is an awareness.

The question remains, can we use our awareness to create better interactions? It is not about 'winning friends and influencing people', the better phrase would be 'peace, love and happiness'. Often the term tolerance is used, be 'tolerant of everything except intolerance', really we want all interactions to run smoothly, creating a shared power, maybe even a classless society, possibly the aim of reason is to make us all mutually aware, that we all have a share is the design of society. Sometimes people think utopia means all believing the same thing and that would be boring, but if everyone brings their own designs to the table, the freedom that would generate means we would all be happy, debating, discussing and negotiating.