When it comes to freedom, you are your biggest barrier – Monroe Evening News

opinion

For the past two weeks I have been exploring the loss of freedom we are currently experiencing. To conclude this discussion, I would like to consider three basic and unavoidable enemies of freedom which, I have already mentioned, have kept the great bulk of humans for the great bulk of history in an un-free environment.

The first is circumstance. You cannot control where you were born, to whom you were born, when you were born, the suite of DNA encoding what you areor the social and political environment surrounding us all. I always wince when well-meaning adults tell children they can be anything they want to be -- even President of the United States. Fat chance!

My parents and teachers, in ways subtle and unsubtle, let me know I could aspire to certain accomplishments, while others were out of my reach. At 5-feet-9-inches tall, 141 pounds soaking wet, a career in professional sports was out of the question. Although postmodernism pretends you can change your being - say, your biological sex --normal people understand this nonsense for what it is.

Find the second enemy by looking in a mirror. When it comes to freedom, you are your biggest barrier. Consider Maslows Hierarchy of needs, put forward in 1943. He propounded a five-stage pyramid for human motivation, starting with the most basic needs for food and shelter, then going on to security, then belongingness. The top two move into the areas of freedom, but the vast majority of human beings in a modern society never get much beyond stage two or three. Thank capitalism and science that almost no one is forced into stage one any more.

During my years of teaching, I had the pleasure of teaching the capstone course for business majors. At the last class I held a very informal chat with the students reflecting on their years of education, and what they were seeking going forward. I was at first shocked when I asked them, given the very wide range of opportunities and choices they now had before them, that the number one criterion they sought in a job was security. Id say about 80% so chose. When I pointed out how self-limiting an insistence on job security could be, it made no difference. They were afraid, and fear will supplant freedom always and everywhere. The irony is, at least of those students whose subsequent careers I am still aware of, the least fearful students have the best paying and most secure jobs.

The third enemy is others. Although the great majority of people aspire no higher than three hots and a cot, there is always an ambitious, sometimes ruthless, handful for whom power is the driving force. Power has many benefits, not least of which is that the more power one has, the more free one is. Power enables you to bend others to your will, since those others, seeking security, will be willing to allow you to dominate their lives as long as you give them the basics.

Power has many other benefits. In a corporate setting, for instance, at my dear old alma mater,Procter & Gamble, as the new kid at the bottom of the management ladder, I was highly constrained. I lived in a bullpen with several others, all sharing a secretary (they had secretaries back in those days). First promotion came with a higher salary, then my very own office (no windows yet). I moved two spaces closer to the right-hand margin of the organization chart. After eight or ten more promotions, I could have had a suite of offices on the 11th floor, and a million dollar salary back when a million was real money.

Whether in business, in academe, or in politics, whatever other drives and aspirations may fade with age, the lust for power never seems to burn out. I guess the miracle of the amount of freedom we still have in this country is that we have much freedom at all.

Charles Milliken is a Professor Emeritus after 22 years of teaching economics and related subjects at Siena Heights University. He can be reached atmilliken.charles@gmail.com.

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When it comes to freedom, you are your biggest barrier - Monroe Evening News