Freedom or Dharma

Freedom is not about the absence of restrictions. This is well-understood. The accepted view is that freedom is the availability of conditions that enable one to attain one's best.

This definition, though, comes from liberal philosophizing but betrays its collectivist underpinnings. Why would some provide those conditions to others and how? The answer to this question raises many concerns, which emerge from universal practices.

The best way to achieve those conditions would be a cooperative affair, but the law of oligarchy is unavoidable there, too. And, everybody doing everything would be too taxing for everyone.

In fact, freedom is an ecosystem of morality. It is about the voluntary ownership of responsibilities. Discoursing and doing good is both a means and end of freedom. But it is not freedom as it is understood and pursued. As it functions, it only begets either aloofness or loneliness. It is about claims made on a mechanism ultimately depending upon the same human beings who hinder each other's pursuits of their best.

Dharma is the answer: you are the One who owns and owes. You are the being, and you are the becoming.

Niraj Kumar Jha

A free person is a responsible person

Liberty and duty being separate values is a common but mistaken perception. The general thinking is that liberty is conditional on fulfilling duties, i.e., one deserves freedom only when the person duly performs given responsibilities. The fact is that rights, codes for guaranteeing freedom, and duties are inseparable. Duties one performs are also one's rights and rights one exercise are also one's duties. It is one's duty to defend their nation and contribute to the national good because it is inherent in that person's right to citizenship and all that the person gets as a citizen. One defends others' right to expression and thereby they have their own right to expression. The point is that a free person is a responsible person. If it is not so in general, the idea of freedom and its mechanism needs correction. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Freedom

Freedom as an order takes the form of democracy. The idea of freedom is often invoked along with equality and fraternity. The parallelism is misplaced. The fact is that it is freedom that begets equality and fraternity, and that is to the possible best. Only utopianism or fantasising in place of philosophizing can sustain the ideas of eliminating inequality and forcing people to fraternal relations. When the idea of freedom remains essential to the democratic formations so regarded in the world, the citizens have and cherish a fair degree of respect and reward for each human being. There may be things abysmally wanting, but that is the best we can have in our present world. For betterment, we need to conceptualise and actualise more freedoms. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Folks Against Freedom

Why do people disallow freedoms that they need badly or would relish heartily? 

The fact is not generally realised that such a tendency affects common progress adversely and ghettoises folks mentally and physically. The pain of deprivation is lingering.

The answer is that people are afraid of the abuses of freedoms by others. Indeed, the unsavoury elements are too numerous for the comfort of the gentle folks.

The answer is to promote humanism.

What is humanism?

Humanism is one of the two wheels of modernity, the other being rationalism.

Let us explore their meanings and what they do for us.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Freedom is not a Natural Order

We’re free to say we aren’t free.
Reality, the heart-rending reality is -
Those who aren't free have never said
They aren’t free.
We can speak anything what we feel like.
It’s true.
By and large, there is no problem with that.
The problem lies elsewhere, my friend.
We speak and speak, and the problem is -
That doesn’t count.
And that is why we feel like not being free.
My friend, we’re free to swim,
There is clean and clear water too.
But can we swim without knowing how to swim?
Freedom is not a natural state, dear.
It is learnt and explored.
It doesn’t come to us naturally.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

What is freedom?

Freedom is the ecology which enables every person to realise his or her potential substantially. The extent of freedom people have determines the strength of their persona, their drive for initiatives and enterprise. The test of the state of freedom is that each person is in command of his or her life. None serves mere as the means to other person's end. Freedom in this sense is a mutual obligation. Free societies are progressive societies as they innovate continuously. Such societies are also prosperous and as a collective they command power. Now come to the ground level of free existence. Such societies cannot be other than capitalist ones and thereby democratic. And for such societies, nothing is more sacrosanct than an individual, her dignity and autonomy. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Freedom Challenge

Our pedagogy shackles our mind. It is the subjection of our agency to our own inferior self. At present, when even the postmodernist philosophising seems passé, we talk and walk the slavish ways we were coerced to naturalise during the millennial occupation. Whatever sparse vegetation could grow amidst the barrenness of our humanist imagination was devastated by the blizzard of Leftism - the ism of death - the death of reason, imagination and of sanity. It was like the outbreak of cholera amidst a famine. The biggest challenge India faces today is to resurrect its intellectual self. The challenge cannot be met by straight strivings as the very forces, which are supposedly meant to guard and advance freedom are arraigned, though largely inadvertently, against liberation. The catch cannot be trickier.

- Niraj Kumar Jha