Limits and prices of Freedom

A fragment

I believe that humans are born free. I also believe that they are born into slavery, where they can never reach or be allowed to reach their full potential. I believe that freedom is a high ideal worth striving for, even if the path toward it is paved with failure and pain. I believe that those who walk this path must eventually recognize their own limits and accept living within them.

In fact, of all the two-legged beings I have ever met, the most interesting ones were those who had stopped fighting windmills. Those who had become aware of their own limitations and ceased chasing dreams that were never truly theirs. They were not helpless slaves who, like caged animals, resigned themselves to fate and unwillingly served foreign tyrants. And then there are those who take it a step further, who challenge the gods themselves and refuse to accept any status quo - true anarchists.

The majority of all two-legged beings grow up with completely twisted values and lies, never understanding the mechanisms behind the games of enslavement and exploitation. They see what the media presents to them, believe it, and try to control games they did not create. Games in which they must submissively conform just to be allowed to participate. They do this by accepting ridiculous bribes and tiny privileges, only to drown in their frustration afterward, complaining day in and day out about how miserable their lives are. 
As absurd as this is, it is also understandable. 
Deep down, they feel that they have cheaply sold off their birthright to a certain portion of freedom, and they actually believe that contracts and obligations bind them. They fail to see the dishonesty and lack of honor in the game they have silently agreed to play. The longer they remain trapped in these games, the less they can recognize the true source of their suffering - that it all stemmed from a single decision: the decision to ignore their own hearts, to deny their own truth. They believed the clever lie that they needed permission to be free, instead of simply claiming their freedom.

It is a long journey to uncover the entanglements and deceptions that have replaced the chains and bars of slavery. The system has been perfected over centuries to the point where hardly anyone recognizes slavery for what it is, and most find it completely normal to be robbed of their freedom. The illusion was created that things had to be this way, that there were no alternatives. That everyone, sooner or later, had to swallow the bitter pill. Sooner, the better. Sometimes, a brief grace period was granted: a few months between the end of school torture and the beginning of work torture, during which young people were allowed to see a little bit of the world. A little bit of traveling, just enough so they could say they had seen the world. Before being thrown into the yoke of their own choosing. A yoke available in every flavor and color preference. That is what has been and continues to be sold as freedom by the masters: the choice of form and color of one's own slavery.

The perversion of this system has become so dense that few ever question whether there might be an option beyond the choices offered. The lie is readily spread that others know more than the individual. They call themselves experts and claim to have analyzed everything, though, of course, only within the boundaries assigned to them. This is the key to understand: within the system of slavery, everyone exists in a hierarchy of servitude. The small privileges granted help mask the reality that there are countless perspectives beyond their tunnel vision. What is right for one person does not necessarily have to be right for another. Let alone be universally applicable.
The choices presented to me were never particularly enticing. What may have set me apart from other two-legged beings was the voice of my heart, constantly telling me that something was wrong. Or rather, my refusal to ignore that voice, even when it only manifested as a vague, persistent feeling. Unfortunately, it gave me no answers, no hints about the right path. It only told me that something was off, and it took years to figure out what that was. I cannot say with certainty that everyone who chooses the path of freedom must go through the same experience or take as long to find their answers. It was my path, and it took years to fight my way through the layers of lies.

In a way, it felt like being buried alive and having to dig my way out of the darkness, never knowing when I would see daylight for the first time. That was the reason why my first years were particularly painful, frustrating, and full of sorrow. Being buried alive is not a pleasant feeling. You have nothing but a vague sense that there is a direction, and you dig toward it. Without certainty, without security. This very uncertainty keeps many slaves from ever attempting to dig themselves toward the light. Because it is terrifying to claw through darkness without knowing when or if success will come.

Perhaps I was just particularly stubborn, particularly desperate. Or maybe the trust my parents had given me played a role. They had been slaves as well, so they could not show me the way. But they had given me love and trust. And when I decided to dig my way to freedom, they trusted me. They trusted that I knew what I was doing. My journey to freedom was filled with setbacks. Moments when a world I could never love tried again and again to drag me back into slavery with its claws. It was not that I never received invitations to freedom; I simply did not know how to accept them. Like many other areas in life, achieving freedom is less about actively trying to attain something and more about actively rejecting outside influences.

When I speak of taking freedom instead of asking for it, it is actually much simpler than it sounds. Because freedom is a birthright, buried under millions of rules and demands. Those who stop feeding into these rules and demands, who stop accepting them, will see that there is no need to remove debris or garbage. Because these demands have nothing to do with their own lives. They have no existence, no energy of their own. They only persist if they are nourished. If they are no longer fed, they vanish, as if they had never been there in the first place.

There are belief systems so deeply ingrained from an early age that people truly believe they are real. And of course, there are always those who can and will profit from this. It is built upon one of the fundamental principles of this world: how can I extract energy from other living beings? And let’s not pretend this is something only the evil bipeds do. Even the beloved songbirds do it. Life itself seems to be structured upon this predatory principle. So who could blame bipeds for perfecting it? You have to be a romantic dreamer like me to seriously attempt to break free from this cycle of mutual dependencies. And even then, it only works up to a certain point.

Freedom also means examining what is necessary for survival. Freedom ends when the body demands water or food. Freedom ends when extreme heat or cold calls for shelter. Freedom ends when the body dictates what it needs. Was it my choice, a conscious decision, to inhabit this body and not another? Who knows. For the duration of my life, I am part of this body, or rather, this body is part of my spirit, and we try, hand in hand, to make the best of our coexistence.

No matter how much I have tried to achieve harmony with other life forms outside this body, it has only ever worked temporarily. Freedom also seems to mean coming to terms with being alone. I did that years ago. Since then, my path to freedom has mostly been about avoiding entanglements and staying vigilant against those who would entangle me.

In bipedal systems, little attention is paid to how free someone is or what sacrifices they make to establish their own maximum freedom. It makes me think about how little bipeds concern themselves with freedom, or that they mostly believe freedom is something that only affects people in other or uncivilized countries. I am astonished that success is measured by how entangled someone is, by how much material wealth or power they accumulate, and not by how well they manage to let go of it.

The days pass, and I see what phantoms the bipeds chase. And I cannot bring myself to join these races.

Here lies an aspect of life’s illusion that is truly isolating: if a (relatively) free heart is surrounded by prisoners and prisons, how free can it really be?
The internet is a frightening reflection of everything I encounter in the real world. A daily hunt for illusions, driven almost exclusively by completely absurd motives. Behaviors I also observe in the physical world.

During the COVID lockdowns, I traveled alone through wintery Europe by bike, with a tent and a sleeping bag. I did not meet any other cyclists with tents and sleeping bags. Nor did I meet any pedestrians carrying the same. Naïve dreamer that I am, I believed there must be plenty of young rebels searching for places of freedom, like me. People willing to endure cold and rain rather than let themselves be locked away in their home coffins by imaginary powers.
I was alone.
I cycled through dead cities, dead villages, on roads still carrying rolling coffins with masked, fearful drivers behind the wheel. It wasn’t that I thought my path was the only right one; I had simply believed that among millions of people, at least a few would choose freedom over fear of death. That, like me, they would see an opportunity to turn an imaginary threat into a real possibility, a chance to find a path to freedom.
And suddenly, I had to realize that there was another limit to my freedom, beyond the constraints and needs of my mammalian body: it is impossible to find freedom within systems built upon dependencies and slavery.

I never intended to live alone as a hermit in nature. But when I arrived there, I realized that the further I distanced myself from the bizarre games of bipeds, the greater my freedom became. At the same time, the pressure of self-responsibility grew.

Understanding that every system not chosen or created by me inevitably led to strange dependencies, entanglements, conflicts, or prisons was a depressing insight. How deep otheres accepted their slavery was even worse.

Today, I see that bipeds are driven by all sorts of things. Freedom is not one of them. To strive for freedom, one must first recognize how unfree they truly are. To even be willing to see this, one must question their own comforts and ridiculous slave privileges.

One would have to sit down in front of a mirror, just once in their life, and try to recognize who is truly looking back at them. And I believe so few do this because what actually stares back is a lost, confused child, wandering aimlessly, driven by countless false lights, ready to sell its own soul for the satisfaction of its lowest urges, ready to cast stones at whoever is offered up as guilty, and worshiping itself in vain self-glorification.

And of course, slaves do not like to be reminded of their enslavement.

Which is why I continue to love most those who do not put on a smile amid all the lies and sorrowful entanglements. It is the outcasts of society, those who have nothing and are nothing, who hold my heart. Where they are, whether they chose their lives or were forced into them, is a testament that they were not willing to sell their freedom or their souls cheaply.

This text is dedicated to you. You know who you are. I embrace you.

(Vigor Calma, 2025)

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