Tired of Freedom

We are truly tired of flowery rhetoric about freedom, self-actualization, and human rights. Not because these are undesirable realities or shamefully incomprehensible concepts. On the contrary, they are aspects of life that we seek to protect, enhance, and make possible for others to enjoy or attain. I am referring, rather, to the fact that, in the name of freedom, self-realization, and an elegant discourse on human rights, we have become subject to a sordid practical relativism, to living life any which way, to justifying ourselves to avoid the bitter pill of correction, of judgment, of sin. I speak as a child of my time. I have grown up amid the escalating clash of ideas, the allure of self-affirmation, and the dream of freedom. I have been told repeatedly that I must seek what fulfills me, what makes me feel good, and what puts the best of me on display for all to see. My failures are not mistakes; they are “areas of opportunity.” My sins are not moral lapses, but mere products that necessarily arise from my weakness. Whatever I decide is right, as long as it springs from the core of my creative will. But few have directed my heart away from itself, to where Truth dwells. For, while it is true that She dwells within the inner man—as Augustine says—Truth is at the same time the innermost part of one’s own intimacy and the supreme transcendent, beyond any limit of my being. True interiority is always ecstatic, always outside of itself, always seeking beyond boundaries of every kind: conceptual, ontological, moral, spiritual. It is precisely at this point that I find the issue of human rights to be flawed. They have been made to rest upon themselves; they have been given an enchanting veneer that promises intellectual and social satisfaction, a convenient standard for those of us who, in addition to good intentions, possess wild instincts. They seem like a reverse Pandora’s box: nothing but good can come from human rights, and anyone who appeals to them to justify their existential and social positions will undoubtedly obtain the best possible good, for it is the safeguarding of an unquantifiable value. Is this not the very same illusion that anything freedom decides, provided it emerges from its core of creativity, is legitimate and valuable? The fact is, if anything human is allowed to rest solely on itself, it ends up becoming sick, for we need truth for our own health.