Freedom to be Miserable

Transcript

So I was thinking about this phrase, the freedom to be miserable.

A few months ago I finally finished after many years of intending to finish it, I finished reading Brave New World.

Fascinating book which is prophetic in many instances. Very interesting to note, I think in the latest edition of Brave New World in the introduction written maybe around 1960, the introduction that is. Huxley talks about how the necessity is decentralization.

I was thinking oh this guy clearly very ahead of his time. Now decentralization is very much a buzz word with cryptocurrency and other technologies. We use these sites that have videos uploaded into an interplanetary file system and other things distributed.

Information distributed to databases so we can resist censorship.

And there Huxley was talking about these things so many decades ago.

There is a particular passage where I guess His Fordship, the manager of one of the important factories in the Brave New World.

He is giving a little history and he says “Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.”

And I thought about that. Its so well written, so how can I say he’s developed such a wonderful context in this book where this character can say these things as if they are completely ridiculous and of course everyone will agree with him being in this conformist world where empty happiness is so valued or drug induced happiness.

Everyone takes Soma, a few times a day to feel good and feel relaxed or to journey in their mind to other fantastic planes but they never really look inside and one of the main characters is looked down upon, people see him and think “That fellow likes to spend time alone”.

He just recoils in horror like how would somebody want to do such a thing?

Which is actually an important tenant in brainwashing, you never want to leave somebody alone.

You always want to have someone accompanied so they never get to thinking by themselves. This is an important way that society maintains itself.

I think quite often about this passage after having read it, the freedom to be miserable and the liberty to be a round peg in a square hole.

I was thinking the other day again about Cracked, that book that is a critique of the psychiatric industry and this is of course the kind of things that Huxley was predicting that people would just take these pills and they don’t have to feel sad anymore.

But what a tragic loss?

In my darkest times it was misery that accompanied me. It was misery that helped me know something was wrong. It was misery that inspired me to rethink or repent or go back to the drawing board of the soul and imagine how things might be.

These things are true.

Somebody told me if I don’t take these pills then I just feel awful. I said your assumption is that feeling awful is bad. Maybe feeling awful is great, perhaps maybe feeling awful is one of the best things that has ever happened to you.

You don’t know where that bitter seed might take root and what jungles might sprout forth from it when you plant it well with that power of introspection, with that freedom of being a round peg in a square hole.

Knowing perhaps there should be something better, perhaps you don’t fit in, perhaps even there’s something entirely false about the world that surrounds you. Perhaps there is something wonderful that waits when you dig through that hardened soil of apathy, indifference or nihilism and you find sweet misery.

What lies within it? Yes, absolutely and indeed, the freedom to be miserable is one of my favorites.