Ishmael teaches captivity because he believes living a life in containment qualifies him. This one sided view, however, does not make him a very good teacher. The definitions of freedom and captivity have very indefinite meanings, so it is hard to teach one about the subjects on a whole. Freedom and captivity have ambiguous meanings because there is no absolute form of freedom, with the absolute form of captivity being death. Each occasion either term is used, however, is a relative view of what we, as a first person observer, know.
So confinement and liberty is relative to what we see and what we have experienced. The fish can not relate to your life because he cannot survive outside the water, so he is confined to water, yet he would not see himself as confined. The man, likewise, looking at the fish could not venture into the deeper portions of the water (without scientific advances which is what the story of man’s dominance to which Ishmael alludes), and so the fish might deem the man confined, yet we do not consider ourselves confined to land. Each definition of confinement is a relative term, because no true standard for confinement is set for either object in relation to a universal picture.
This is why neither group in the allegory of the caves was confined, anymore than the other. There is no universal definition of captivity. It can only be defined when a certain goal has been identified. The circumstances interfering with the attainment of that goal, which objectively seen are just circumstantial, now become confinements to the freedom we have dictated. This goal which we choose to dictate is come about from our motivations, which are different for different cultures and individuals.
To illustrate what effect goals can have I want to look an addiction study in the 60’s done with mice. Scientists put forward two buttons. One would release food; the other would send endorphins into their brains. They found the mice would ultimately starve to death, choosing happiness over substance.
When new freedoms are introduced to a static system new goals are sought. When goals conflict, an internal struggle in the object calls for adaptation, and this struggle should conclude with a decision of settling on one goal, or if no choice can be identified disorder will overwhelm the subject.
In the mice we see that the new goal of happiness superseded the old goal of sustaining life. As a society, our current goal systems are conflicting, because the things we are doing are destroying our life. But changing goals once adapting to a system, even when freeing ourselves from relative bondage, is not always the right choice that we normally believe it would be.
I’d like to extrapolate the implications of the mice data into a hypothetical situation. What if there was a breed of human who was genetically conditioned to feel happy whenever a certain form of work was completed. Would it be wrong to liberate these happy slaves?
I have personally stated that I would not like to pursue a life of happiness and ignorance over a life of knowledge and reason. But, I would certainly not want to be released from this happy slavery. After a certain point, those who have been conditioned by a process long enough cannot separate themselves from it without difficulties, perhaps even death. This is shown in the allegory in the cave, as well as throughout real life. Animals released from human confinement do not survive in the wild. Because, like the happy slaves, any effort without the release they were normally given would make them miserable. The environment will swallow them whole and surviving becomes the real ‘work’. Everyday life now becomes a struggle.
That’s because absolute freedom is much harder to identify than bondage. Freedom allows you to dictate your own actions. As such, freedom requires effort, and after deciding a path of freedom you are then bound by other confinements. Each time you decide to do something you are confining yourself to one task with different obligations to ensure successful completion. So, the only time that is ‘actually’ free is when you are idle, but even then you are contained in idleness. You’d be just as meaningful if you were dead. But death is not only the ultimate form of freedom. It is the ultimate form of confinement.
So we see this strange duality in death; a freedom from obligation and an estrangement of freedoms. We can achieve this duality because the two terms are not mutually exclusive. They are merely relative terms given to identify a subject system of ‘have’s’ and ‘have not’s’ in an effort to equalize standing. All this is very peculiar for a race that is so ego-centric that it believes that they are the pinnacle of universal creation.
