“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Monday, June 2, 2025 at 3:20 PM
The above quote is from Goethe, pronounced Gur-tuh. Goethe was a famous German philosopher, poet and author (1749-1832). He still remains relevant today for his philosophical and social views, in Germany, and worldwide. He viewed the world differently than most of his contemporaries, and garnered a huge following.
Of all of his famous quotes, the above is the one that is his greatest, in my opinion. We can go back to, I was going to say, to the Bible, but to me most of those stories in the Old Testament were allegories, the same as Homer’s Iliad is. But we can go back to Ancient Rome and gladiators who thought that they were free, but could never escape their past. Or when serfdom was ended in the Dark to Middle Ages and the conditions remained the same. Or when Lincoln or Lenin or the British or Mao, right down to Trump, preached about how they were fighting for our freedoms. They were all lying and had ulterior motives, except for Lincoln; his life was cut short, so we will never know how he would have dealt with free blacks and their state within the State.
The illusion of freedom is one of those nectars we sip so delicately and deliberately, until we get intoxicated by an idea that Brer Anancy invented to give us false hopes. We will always be slaves to something. A lover, wealth, religion, violence, sex, you name it, it keeps us enslaved and stuck.
In America, we are always talking about how lucky we are to live in a free society. We use the word freedom without any afterthought, as if though it were a fact, guaranteed. How can any society that is so regulated ever claim to be a free society? And now, with MAGA in charge, our freedoms are becoming more limited every day. But think about it. We need a license for almost everything that we do to survive. We need IDs, we are fingerprinted for certain jobs, we have to prove our qualifications to get certain jobs. We live in state of emergencies, curfews, we are drafted to serve in wars we know nothing of. Most of all, this is universal; in fact, there is no society in the world where one is not enslaved to some extent, where one can be truly free. And I’m not talking about not obeying the laws of the land. What I’m saying is that in my opinion freedom is elastic, unreliable, aspirational.
Goethe wrote that quotation at a time when the world was still relatively young, relative as to what the world has now become, with technology and information and innovation so advanced. Even Goethe would probably believe that we are truly free, if he were to come back today.
He would be mistaken. All the technology and information and advances have made us a much more enslaved society. We are captives to our zeitgeist. We are almost robots. Give us and AI another 10 years, and let’s see how we are doing.
We will probably be marrying the perfect partner, brought to you by OpenAI, or Nvidia, or Microsoft or Amazon. With Amazon, your lifelong partner could be delivered at your doorstep within 24 hours. That is, if you can afford it. AI would have already replaced you in the workplace. Wat a thing!
Who would’ve thought that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would have inspired such nightmarish musings from this little boy from Belize?
Glen