How one defines this will help to shape one’s ideology. Her in the States, we primarily define freedom as lacking impedance from the law. When we think of people who aren’t free, our minds go immediately to prisoners. It is most often the metaphor we seek when describing other things. For example, one might say that he is a prisoner to the sexual norms of a society. Needless to say our country has a very liberal view of freedom, something that isn’t entirely shocking given our founding.
In many other places and times the opposite of a free man is seen as the servant. The free man in this scheme is one that can offer and withdraw his labor at will. He and his family are secure in his abode. He has the ability to receive religious instruction. Last but not least, he has the ability to leisure. Under such a framework, most people in this country are not free. In particular, the poor in our country are rarely free. And while it is well and good to preach about how the poor will always be with us, the scheme of capitalism and democracy (and many other schemes while we are at) were not created so that the wealthy could be free. Simply saying it is sufficient to address the ludicrousness of the notion. People did not fight the American Revolution so that the rich could be free. People didn’t come to America in hopes that the rich would finally be free.
Before modern advancements, the poorer classes were mostly slaves. This even persisted well into the modern era. I am not one to romanticize those times or the people who lived in them. What greeted the end of those systems, be it in Russia, England, or America were the words of “We are taking away your work, your home, and your food. You are free now to acquire those things on your own.” And some certainly were able to move themselves to cities and find gainful employment. Many attempted to find a way to continue doing work for their former masters or lords. Most went from place to place, desperate to find sustenance. This is papered over as adventure in many books. The Laura Ingalls Wilder books come immediately to mind as ones where the average reader doesn’t recognize them as being the story of a family tramping and trying to avoid starvation, although admittedly it wasn’t a case of an emancipated slave. Much of culture tries to put a happy face on poverty, because if people can only be happy if they are free, we are going to make sure a happy face is on poverty lest we have to actually confront any evil in our society.
All the happy faces can’t hide the truth though. Our poor aren’t really free. My mind often moves back to this article in Der Spiegel.
“From today’s perspective, I believe that we were driven out of paradise when the Wall came down,” one person writes, and a 38-year-old man “thanks God” that he was able to experience living in the GDR, noting that it wasn’t until after German reunification that he witnessed people who feared for their existence, beggars and homeless people.Today’s Germany is described as a “slave state” and a “dictatorship of capital,” and some letter writers reject Germany for being, in their opinion, too capitalist or dictatorial, and certainly not democratic.
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