There are many kinds. One example:
Just after Christmas, I saw a person in ripped sweatpants and a stained jacket shambling along a main road in Biddeford, Maine. It was the quality of motion that caught my eye – a trudging, struggling forwards movement that conveyed resentment and defeat. And held out at a purposeful, purposely eye-catching angle, a cigarette: the only thing alive or alight in the picture and seemingly, the one thing worth display and pride.
I’ll say right now that I have issues with cigarettes. They killed my father; that’s the main one. But they also claimed a huge percentage of his meager income before they did it.
Ideas can be jails and jailors (just as other ideas can be liberty and liberators). An idea that once signified rebellion, independence, sophistication, and an attractive un-pin-down-ability, an idea carefully honed to a fine sheen by advertising companies and wheeled out to entice and ensnare – well, an idea like that is like a set of shackles many step right into of their own freewill. It costs them dearly in health and in material comfort, but this persistent, unexamined idea of freedom, rebellion, and sophistication, clamps them into something akin to ritual sacrifice.
Yes, there is addiction and yes, the body participates in this slavery after a time. But this kind of enslavement begins as curiosity and attraction to an idea. Cigarettes are hardly the only example of this.
Enslavement is sold to us in the guise of things we rightly desire: ease, belonging, love, security, power, and freedom.
The beguiling fiction is that purchasing this thing (cigarettes, this car, these jeans) or accepting this arrangement (a job, a relationship, a certain role) will give access to our desires and will preclude the need for further struggle or thought. With scarcely a moment’s consideration, we trade liberty for security, health for “cool,” honor for acceptance, clarity for someone else’s agenda and enrichment.
It takes decades for us to realize that “all set” is a swindling illusion. We learn that there are no middlemen between us and the freedom or love we desire. Only we can create and experience these things and doing so requires us to choose, to exert our strength, and to grow.
It takes keen, questing eyes to spy our own enslavement, and it takes great clarity to decide to no longer be so cheaply purchased.
The truth is, we are each kings and queens in our own lives. We’re free already. We’re more powerful than we sometimes allow ourselves to know. We are grander and more magnificent just as we are than the hawkers and brokers of enslavement want us to realize. It’s never worth abdicating this natural sovereignty in exchange for an illusion, no matter how it’s gilded.
Let’s eschew enslavement. Let’s be discerning about the ideas we allow into our minds and the people we allow to claim dominion of any kind in our lives. Let’s remember that the skeleton-key to all shackles waits in our own pocket in the form of choice and awareness. When we wise up to what’s happening, we can use that key to unlock the heavy iron, step out of the chains, and walk free and unfettered once more.
