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Freedom in a Consumer Society

One, who can not disobey, his obedience is slavery. One, who can not say "no", his "yes" is valueless. One, who has lost all the alternatives of life and has stuck around one mechanical duty, has no passion for life. He loses interest in the freshness and newness of existence. The moment work defines and restricts the identity of a person, his "potentiality to be" the supreme eternal life is reduced into insignificance. 


Modernity has produced only two alternatives, if I refer Soren Kierkegaard, either we have too much alternatives so much so that we are confused in which direction we should move on, or we have no other alternative but to restrict ourself into little identity, which is carried on like a "prisoner syndrome", whereas prisoner identifies prison as an emancipatory institution at least better than a fast moving world and its insatiable cruelty. 


Human being is automation unless there is freedom to reflect upon our own opinions, if it is just an internalisation/introjection of external authority or one has actually independent conscious vision to see what is his/her own voice? Freedom has been earned and realised by a long struggle of the humankind and to lose it means to lose humanistic values and ideals. In our time, media is changing our consciousness and making us conform to a set pattern of thought. Unless one is aware about the dangers of conformity, freedom is meaningless. One must be cautious enough to reflect upon the biases, which are cultivated in a "mass culture" (Adorno). Such tendencies are anti-thesis to the humanistic ideals like freedom, equality, love, compassion, peace, and happiness. The real freedom is to know which opinion of mine has root in the conditioning of society. Can we know our own opinions beyond the popular opinions of the masses, propagated through education? Can we say that we are far away from the real education, i.e. self-realisation of our potentiality and actuality? I find answers in affirmation. Unless, I find my own quintessence, what society has to say about me has very little significance. What books are offering are merely narratives coming through history and society, but truth is not far way from my own sense and sensibilities. It is our conditionings, restricting us to see anything new and fresh around and within us. It is education, which is making us data and ensuring that we keep consuming information and becoming information. This vision of education is making all of us alike like a perfect product in uniform shape and colour, likely to be exploited in a highly fictitious market. How can we remain consumable product as well as free conscious human being at the same time? One has to lose one to gain another. It seems, we are opting first choice over other in a perfectly "consumer society".

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