The morning sun will break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our steps in the way of peace.
— Luke 1:79
And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
— John 8:32
We cannot free ourselves from our chains. Our liberation must come to us from without: we have to be forced free.
When alcoholics or other addicts finally bottom out and their very desperation forces them to ask for help, they are at last ready to be shown the way into freedom. Similarly, for some who have been thrown into prison by the powers that be — for example, Kevin Cooper and Jimmy Santiago Baca, both of whom I have discussed in previous posts* — it has been just when their despair reached its peak that they have found themselves altogether unexpectedly set free, irrespective of the prison-bars that continued to surround them.
How things appear to us is at first and for the most part no more than an illusion our own emotions — socially conditioned as those emotions themselves always are — project outside us. Like the bars of prison cells, illusions don’t just surround us. They entrap us.
Our natural preference is for the devil we think we know over the devil we think we don’t know. We have and hold onto that preference under the illusion that, by ourselves, we can distinguish between the two.
However, what looks to us like the face of a devil when we are in terrified flight from it may well show itself in truth to be an angel’s face when we finally fall down exhausted, and let what we have been so strenuously fleeing at last catch up to us.** Our exhaustion itself finally forces us free of the very illusion that set off our panicked running in the first place.
Our illusions perpetuate themselves. Only in crisis do they vanish, like smoke in the wind. What looks to us like a disaster may, once the veil of our illusions is parted, show itself in reality to be a blessing.
* * *
Plato knew all that. He captured it all in his allegory of the cave in The Republic, an allegory he puts in the mouth of his teacher Socrates. In that allegory, at the bottom of the cave a bunch of prisoners sit enchained, with their heads fixed so that all they can see is the back wall of the cave. There is a fire midway up the cave behind them. In front of the fire is a person-high parapet behind which people carry, on their heads, statues of things outside the cave. The fire casts shadows of those statues on the back wall of the cave, where the enchained prisoners can see them — and become enthralled by them. Of course, the prisoners themselves, chained as they are, take the images they see projected on the wall of the cave to be reality itself, even though in truth is it only the random play of shadows of simulacra of realities.
Through his mouthpiece Socrates, Plato points out that, were one of the prisoners forced to turn around and begin ascending away from the shadows and into the light — first into the relatively greater light of the fire, and then into the bright sunlight of the world outside the cave — that newly released prisoner would experience complete and recurring disorientation. His eyes would literally be blinded by the light itself. He would long to return to what appears to him to be the safety and certainty of his old life of total entrapment.
Just like such a prisoner, we must all be forced out of the darkness and into the light, and once there, we will strive to return to the darkness to which we have since birth been accustomed. We do not accept freedom easily. Furthermore, once we are forced free, we long to struggle to return to our chains.
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As we experience it, what frees us always comes to us from the outside. Plato tells us that through his allegory. Jesus tells us the same thing in a different way in the Christian Gospels. So does the Buddha in the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Heidegger says the same thing in his own manner in Being and Time when he interprets the voice of conscience as the call of the authentic self to the inauthentic self, the self we are when we are lost to ourselves in our everyday preoccupations. That same call is read as the call of our own unconscious in our dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, myths, and fairy tales, as such psychoanalysts as Freud, Jung, and Fromm read them.
It does not matter which way we read the message, or in whose voice we hear it spoken. The message always remains the same, despite all differences in how that message is delivered.
The message is that we can never free ourselves. Our freedom must always be thrust upon us. It always comes to us against our will — a will that is, as St. Augustine experienced and said in his own voice and language, a free will in bondage.
The harder we try to free ourselves of the chains of such bondage, the stronger those chains grow. The longer the chains become, as well. They are forged link by link and yard by yard, as the ghost of his erstwhile partner Marley says to Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Only such visitors from beyond can bring us the message of delivery from our bondage. Only such ghosts can force us to go free.
Erich Fromm
* https://www.traumaandphilosophy.com/blog-1/2018/11/26/liberating-imprisonment for Cooper; https://www.traumaandphilosophy.com/blog-1/2019/1/14/the-power-of-non-compliance and https://www.traumaandphilosophy.com/blog-1/2019/1/21/from-striking-back-to-witnessing-the-freeing-power-of-words for Baca.
** I have also written about such experiences in any earlier six-post series “The Kiss of Medusa and Trauma’s Return: Thought-Play.” The first post of that series is available at https://www.traumaandphilosophy.com/blog-1/2018/4/23/the-kiss-of-medusa-and-traumas-return-thought-play. From that first post one can move on to the remaining five in the series.