Freedom Is Like a Disease

Or, why we fight for it, even when we don’t fully understand it

Let’s talk about freedom. It’s one of those words we throw around all the time. Everyone wants it, fights for it, but do we really understand what we mean when we talk about freedom? When we’re scared, when we fear new threats are coming for our hard-won freedoms, maybe before we jump to defend it, we should take a step back. We should think about what this freedom actually is.

A WILD ANIMAL THAT BITES, SCRATCHES, AND DRIVES YOU MAD

Here’s something interesting. In places like the old Soviet Union, they had this twisted way of dealing with people who didn’t agree with the system. They’d label them as mentally ill. If you didn’t toe the party line, if you criticised the government, you weren’t just wrong—you were crazy. They’d send you to a psychiatric hospital, like the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, where they “treated” political dissidents. They even invented a mental disorder for these people: “sluggish schizophrenia.” Imagine that. The doctors said these people seemed normal most of the time, but every now and then, they’d show signs of “inflexibility of convictions” or “nervous exhaustion” from their search for justice. In other words, if you wanted justice too much, you must be mentally ill. And then they’d “treat” you with painful drugs, sometimes to the point of knocking you out.

We can all agree this is horrifying, right? But let’s pause for a moment. What if there’s something a little bit crazy about freedom itself? What if freedom, real radical freedom, isn’t as clean and simple as we think? Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—two of the biggest names in philosophy—got this. They understood that freedom, when you dig deep into it, is almost like a disease. It’s something that messes with our lives, with our bodies. It doesn’t just add joy and opportunity to life. It shakes us up. It disrupts our peace. It’s like Freud’s idea that our actions aren’t always driven by the pursuit of pleasure or avoiding pain. Freedom isn’t about comfort. It’s this powerful force that can be destructive. Even self-destructive.

Think about it. We’re not born knowing how to handle freedom. When we come into the world, we’re raw, wild, untamed. That’s why, according to Kant, humans need discipline. Not just any discipline, though. We need to be trained. Turned from animals into humans. Because here’s the thing: animals are guided by instinct. They don’t have to think about what to do. It’s all automatic. But humans? We don’t have that. We have to figure things out for ourselves. We have to decide how to live. And we’re not always great at it. At least not at first. That’s why others—teachers, parents, society—have to do it for us until we can figure it out ourselves.