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Universalization of Freedom and its Multiple Faces

At a time, when the society finds itself around misery and suffering, people find attraction in self-glorification and the collective imagination often terrorizes a beautiful-autonomous mind, willing to dance, love, and pray. There is always a danger of collectivism which stifles the independent mind and its creative urge to inquire about truth, happiness, and beauty. Collectivism and individualism, the two extreme terrains, often interact with each-other and play a significant role in making and unmaking of each-other. Freedom is hardly possible in a lonely desert. It is very much conceived and imagined in the terrain of collective imagination. Rousseau differentiated natural liberty and civil liberty; one epitomizes the possibility of unrestrained and unrestricted competition and the other one is all about liberty with fairness and equity, which also symbolizes the liberal commitment of classical political theorists, from Immanuel Kant to John Rawls. 


I often think what it means to be free? Free from whom and what? Freedom for a poor is dissimilar to freedom for a woman, who is living in a puritan sense of patriarchal society. Freedom for a wage labourer is existential in comparison to freedom for an industrialist. Freedom for an artist is different from freedom for a prisoner. Yet, I find many universal theories of freedom, often formulated within a narrow window of wishfulness, which governs the discourse of moral and political world. Does it mean that universalization is unrealistic? Is there any possibility of knowledge without theorization and conceptualization in universal sense? Yes, it's possible. Many a literary writings, weave the characters in certain specific socio-political reality, which do not portray to be universal. It is just an another little story, an expression of personal anxiety and disposition, which creates the writer and her works. Freedom is not a single thing to own and posses. Freedom has multiple faces, some are being expressed and many more are awaited in que. If I have story to express, do have I any necessity to wait for a theory to express what I am feeling to? Expression is always already an invention; even if one is susceptible to public ridicule, freedom is sacredly too significant to be censored, though it is often censured by my own super-ego more than society around me, as perhaps rightly expressed by ingenious Erich Fromm, we have internalized and introjected the external authority in own own mind, which functions as a super-ego within us (Fromm, 1976).

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