Freedom
must always start with one’s self.
Within your mind there exist barriers set up by your life’s education
that keep you from understanding what it is to be free. Freedom itself should only be
understood by the means of natural rights, the rights and liberty you are born
with, but in the world we live in, this description is simply not
feasible. We have to look at
freedom as something to be obtained, and the only definition that now works for
freedom is to no longer be confined or imprisoned. We must break those barriers that exist in our mind. To do this, we must first learn to love
ourselves.
Love
your life. Love your worth. Love your ability. Once you start to learn to respect
yourself, you may also feel a little helpless. Part of the reason is that fallacies will be
everywhere. The most powerful
fallacy being the one thing that has been schooled into you since birth: that
there is a greater authority over your life than yourself. This of course is a completely unnatural
thought that has been pushed into your mind and will probably be one of the
hardest things to unlearn. And
unlearning is the key to freedom, a struggle you will most likely go through
for a lifetime because the greatest traps have been set in your own mind. The strongest opposition may be your
belief system, which is in fact not always your own.
This is where an
ultimate respect for your own body and mind becomes so important, and for the
most basic of reasons, you are the sole owner of both. Being that you are the proprietor of
your life, you must accept that ultimate responsibility lies in your own
hands. To all others,
responsibility for your life is a voluntary option. Another person may help you and take care of you, or they
may not. In the case of others,
this same option belongs to you as well.
When you give a dollar to a man you do not know, or even a pint of
blood, there is a social contract there, but one in which you wrote and signed
yourself. There were no other
hands involved. There was no
force. The decision to give came
from your own volition.
Personal
liberty is not only loving and respecting yourself, but it extends to that
which you have built and sustained from the work of your hands and mind. It is also knowing yourself. If you think you can better the world
by being productive, then you must take that path. If you think that you can better the world by being
charitable, then you must do so.
It doesn’t matter because when you take ownership over the means by
which they come to fruition, they are one and the same. But you cannot think that you can
better the world by taking away another’s liberty, for if someone were to take
yours, then you can only be hurt.
A part of your life, your worth, and your ability is stolen away, and
most unfortunately a part of your mind is caged without escape because it
becomes “just the way things are.”
Taking possession
of the property of others through coercion is wrong. Liberty is not created for you by anything written on paper
or because a collective of people allow it to you, it is with you at birth, and
once you understand how authoritarian force hurts you, you can start to
understand how it hurts the world.
Once this personal liberty is an active component of your own life, the
love of freedom and the freedom to love will start moving to all aspects of the
world around you, because while changing the world may not be an option,
changing the world around you is.
Without coercion, without aggression, without force, your most viable
tools become reason and respect, and of course a little love never hurts
either.
