FREEDOM HAS ROOTS

Yesterday we watched a man chase a freedom with no frontier and become a monster. Today Camus offers the sober alternative, in a line from the closing pages of The Rebel. Every human freedom, he writes, at its very roots, is relative.

That word, relative, sounds like a downgrade, as if he were taking something away. He is doing the opposite. He is telling you what real freedom is made of, so you can stop chasing a phantom. Total freedom, freedom answerable to nothing, does not exist for human beings and could not be borne if it did. Every freedom we actually have stands in relation to something, to other people, to limits, to a value we did not invent and cannot cancel. It has roots. That is not its weakness. It is what makes it freedom rather than mere force.

Think of the difference between a kite and a loose plastic bag. Both are up in the wind. Only one is flying. The kite’s freedom comes from the string, the very thing that looks like a restriction. Cut it, and the kite does not become more free. It falls, or blows away. The string is what turns wind into flight.

We keep imagining that if we could only sever every tie, every obligation, every relation, we would finally be free. Camus says we would only be the bag. The rooted freedom, the relative one, is the only kind that actually goes anywhere.

Today, look at one of your strings, a commitment or a relationship you sometimes resent as a limit on your freedom. Ask whether it is the string or the storm. More often than we admit, the tie we strain against is exactly what is keeping us aloft.