Freedom

You know, we are animals, in part.  It is our ability to think, to weigh options, to invoke principles and heuristics, to foresee, which makes us different.  Thus, it is only in making decisions, in choosing courses of action–for reasons, which are some combination of intellectual or emotional or intuitive–that we rise above our animal nature.

The reason I was saying this is that I in a phase of my life where I am having to make a lot of decisions, and I am thinking back to Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.  I can understand the impulse to surrender freedom, to become a part of a herd.  We speak of a “herd instinct”, but I wonder how often we realize the literalness of this metaphor?  To be in a herd is to feel safe, to feel protected.

And do you not instinctively want to be in the middle of the herd, and not exposed on the periphery?  That is the image, the feeling, that I get.

To be free it is necessary to learn how to feel calm and safe without a herd.  It is necessary to be able to make calm decisions, and to do so even when no one supports you, and even when everyone opposes you.  This is the essence of the learning that we need at this level of existence.