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Sartre said that "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you". By that, he implied that freedom was, in itself, a paradoxical concept; humanity cannot ever be truly free because (s)he is prisoner to his needs, to the laws of nature and to the machinations of other people. The truly free person would not be alive as such, would not be constrained by physical or mental strains, would, in fact, be God.

However freedom, like God, suffers by its own terminological blandness. If you look at the Judeo-Christian concept of God, He is a person, but He is also a concept, omnipotent and all-seeing. Similarly, freedom is something that we strive to attain and somehow capture, but it is also around us all of the time. The two terms are too paradoxical to be assigned any concrete logical or poetic meaning.

Because these terms are so vague, they can be molded to suit specific political ideologies and can be used to convince people to do things they would otherwise not even think about doing. Freedom is used regularly in propaganda, from communist Russia to today's America.

Historically, freedom has been used with devastating effect to coerce the masses into believing a particular ideology. The gates of Auschwitz had "Arbeit Macht Frei" engraved on them, translated as "work will set you free", and Hitler promised freedom for the masses providing they obeyed his rule and didn't stray from the party line. Similarly, America is known as "the land of the free", a suitably ephemeral phrase used to describe a freedom inextricably tied to economic and hierarchical servility.

Freedom is used to polarize and rouse nations into setting free other nations through war and by inducing mass suffering. From the Crusades and their attempts to "civilize the natives" through coercive and violent means, to the current war in Iraq, championed by its supporters as a way of "setting free" the Iraqi people. George W. Bush frequently suggests that the war in Iraq is a necessary way to "set the Iraqi people free" by installing a cod-democracy there. However, it is clear to anybody who has studied the rudiments of politics, religion or history and applied those age-old techniques of mass coercion to the present administration, that freedom is merely being used here as a term to hoodwink the citizens of the world into believing that politicians act in the interests of the people of the planet. They don't.

Politicians have always used freedom as a powerful propagandistic tool because it exploits the inner desires of people to be free. Similarly, advertising hoardings shout "if you buy this product, you will be truly free" at us. The Thatcher and Reagan administrations, despite making considerable progress in the direction of eroding civil liberties, by strictly condemning any form of behavior that falls outside of the Judeo-Christian, nuclear family archetype, always said that they did all of this in order to increase freedom. Of course, freedom in this context is entirely nonsensical.

Nobody who is alive on this Earth is free from the social and biological conditions of living on and with the planet. While initially this sounds like a bleak argument, in actuality it is a liberating philosophy because it prevents us from uselessly striving for "freedom" when, in fact, people are always going to be as free as they currently are. Although freedom has proven a magical concept in advertising, politics and organized religion, in fact freedom means nothing but what Sartre suggests: it is merely what do you with what's been done to you.

Learn more about this author, Paul Stanway.
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