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Ideology

Whether we (really) have a choice or whether it is chosen for us?

By Saishreya Sriram

May 24, 2022

How would one describe freedom today? Is freedom good for us? In the Brothers Karamazov (1880), Dostoyevsky says “nothing has ever been more unendurable to man and human society than freedom” (329). However, generally and historically speaking, freedom has meant the complete control of one’s possessions (sans judgement or interference from others). The only variable that (seemingly) changes is what’s deemed a possession in that circumstance – be it animals killed for meat, wives abused by husbands, slaves owned by the Confederates, etc. 

Isaiah Berlin argues – in his article Two Concepts of Liberty – that there are two concepts of freedom that exist: positive and negative. Well, let’s start with the latter. Negative freedom is the freedom from interference, restrictions, and coercion which are imposed by external entities, authorities, or people (OpenLearn, 2021). This happens when one’s TV time is restricted, or when one is being punished for dissent, or put in jail for certain conduct. Meanwhile, the concept of positive freedom is slightly complicated. It’s the freedom to do something; and any decision is a product of the battle between the two selves – our higher and lower self. For instance, if you’re a student, the higher self is supposedly working hard; while the lower self succumbs to distractions, desires, and impulses. Further, Berlin believes that true positive freedom is choosing the higher self and constraining this lower self by studying (while you have the choice to use it for distractions); it’s a “matter of achieving your potential, not just having potential” (OpenLearn, 2021). Berlin argues that positive freedom is susceptible to misuse when the higher self gets identified with a higher social group – race, religion, or state, for instance. And that the notion of being free is felt only when the lower self – that sees any limitation, disagreement, dispute, or difference from the social group – gets suppressed entirely (Kasmirli, 2019).

This can be clearly seen in the case of Martin Heidegger – a man whose mind was once deemed one of the most brilliant in the 20th century – who ended up joining the Nazi Socialist Party in 1933 to become rector of the Freiburg University. Moreover, the celebrated philosopher and the author of Being and Time spoke of revolutionizing the university, hosted propaganda lectures across Germany, and even yelled “Heil Hitler!” in his addresses (Lilla, 21). By then, it was clear that he had made his choice by himself and wasn’t in any way coerced. He’d further cut off contact with his Jewish colleagues and friends. When Karl Jaspers got the wind of it, he was alarmed. In The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, Mark Lilla describes Jasper’s interaction with Heidegger:

“After they returned to Jaspers’s house Jaspers tried to draw Heidegger out, remarking that surely his friend could not agree with the Nazis on the Jewish question. Heidegger: “But there is a dangerous international network of Jews.” Jaspers: “How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?” Heidegger: ‘Culture doesn’t matter. Just look at his marvelous hands’. . .” (Lilla 22)

I argue that Heidegger, being the venerated philosopher he was, had the freedom to make the right choice –in this case, not join the Nazis– yet he made the indisputable evil choice. His higher self as German had dominated and achieved mastery over him, allowing no leeway for doubt or dissent. He made self-justifications for all that constituted the Nazi rule and their legitimacy and saw Germans as higher and Jews as inferior, infernal, and deserving genocide. 

The irony here is that what impinges on your freedom is actually the freedom of others. A stark example in this case is the ideology of the Confederacy who defended their freedom to hold slaves as part of their culture, as it was defended by the United States Constitution. What got legitimatized was “. . .that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition” (Stephens, 1861). 

In making sense of how evil got bureaucratized, engulfed, and even unnoticed in the everyday, Hannah Arendt argues,in her report Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964) , the existence of the banality of evil. According to her, evil came from. a fundamental failure to think or “non-thinking” (Butler, 2011).  However, I argue that only after the positive choice of ideology – by removing individual difference or dissent – evil can be accepted as a part of everyday life and become banal. 

It is quite evident, and inevitably observed in totalitarian regimes, that the state intervenes on one’s negative freedom. In 1983 a Soviet officer saved the world from a nuclear war, when he wasn’t supposed to. Yes, that’s right. When the USSR’s missile attack system got a warning alert with a display and instruction asking him to “LAUNCH”, Stanislav Petrov and his team went against the protocol, suspecting that to be a false warning (Matthews, 2019). The scale of casualties or even the planet’s survival from a nuclear war would have been unimaginable. Even though he was right in his judgement, he was continuously interrogated and was never even acknowledged by the Soviets. Had it not been for his display of individualism, there wouldn’t even be a world to imagine – let alone incarcerate him for treason.  An example of another  whistleblower closer to memory would be that of Dr. Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who tried issuing warnings about the COVID-19 outbreak on 30th December 2019. Four days later, he was accused of “making false comments” and that he had “severely disturbed the social order” (BBC News, 2020). Anything that disrupted or damaged the social order as perceived by the CCP is punished. His death sparked immense outrage across China. 

The more insidious form of negative freedom that gets violated today is done by the private sector. Shoshona Zuboff diagnoses this new economic order as surveillance capitalism that is defined as “A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales” (Zuboff “Age of Surveillance Capitalism” 8). Simply put, it profits from catering buffets of our intimate secrets, vulnerabilities, and behaviours for businesses to know us better, to know what to sell us, and when to do so. Surveillance capitalists sell certainty. They are not just assaulting our attention, but even aiming to manipulate and modify our behaviour. Ergo, it’s not simply our right to privacy that is violated, but even and especially our right to autonomy and agency. 

While these technology companies know us inside out, we don’t know an ounce of what they know or collect about us. This creates, what Zuboff calls, an epistemic inequality wherein one’s fundamental epistemic rights to learn about what is learnt about one’s own life don’t exist. Only if we knew this was under attack, we’d act on it. For instance, a right to breathe doesn’t exist because breathing hasn’t been denied yet and thereby, doesn’t need to be a law (Zuboff “Caveat Usor” 177). 

But how does this occur? Surely, we would have noticed this and put a stop to this. However, surveillance capitalists have succeeded in their models by confirming to their consumers that they are the center of the universe, making them conform, and always claim that these platforms operate on individual freedom. Facebook was perceived and portrayed as the innocent app that “connected” friends and acquaintances online. Moreover, people have no real alternatives to these services, and they aren’t aware of the extent of its operations and their implications (Zuboff “Caveat Usor” 209). And most of all, the truth is boring. In that way, these private entities, supposedly championing themselves as representatives of the free markets that democratise information flows, actually exist only for their own freedom to operate and dominate us. George Orwell’s words echo: “Freedom is slavery”. 

However, the real genius of surveillance capitalism isn’t in violating our negative freedoms. It’s in making us believe we violate our positive freedoms – rather making arguments like we ourselves violate our right to privacy.

We now see a reality that is chosen for us, transforming us into Trumans while these companies run the show, create our universe, and derive profits from our failure to even comprehend – let alone question  – what’s behind the dark screen. In Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred’s character says that “Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.” This creates the unfortunate yet inevitable social amnesia of not knowing how one arrived here. Surveillance capitalism is actually well underway in propagating not just the utopia of certainty – but an ideology of certainty in itself. Moreover, as Offred’s character in The Handmaid’s Tale poignantly captured: “Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.” In this way, we are fed an illusion of understanding more than we actually do. 

In a commencement speech in 2005, David Foster Wallace made a case that education is “. . everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over. .” (Wallace, 2005) of reality. I believe, not just education, but real freedom as well as awareness. It’s the awareness of who benefits from different ideologies. It’s the awareness of all the ideologies that are presented to us so that we don’t lose every display of individualism, every doubt, and all irony.

Works Cited

1. Atwood, Margaret “The Handmaid’s Tale” 1985
2. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor “The Brothers Karamazov” 1880 
3. Biddle, Sam “In court, Facebook blames users for destroying their own right to privacy” The Intercept 2019 https://theintercept.com/2019/06/14/facebook-privacy-policy-court/
4. Butler, Judith “Hannah Arendt’s challenge to Adolf Eichmann” The Guardian 2011  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/hannah-arendt-adolf-eichmann-banality-of-evil 
5. Kasmirli, Maria “Tools for thinking: Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts of freedom” Aeon 2019 https://aeon.co/ideas/tools-for-thinking-isaiah-berlins-two-concepts-of-freedom 
6. Matthews, Dylan “36 years ago today, one man saved us from world-ending nuclear war” Vox https://www.vox.com/2018/9/26/17905796/nuclear-war-1983-stanislav-petrov-soviet-union
7. News “Li Wenliang: Coronavirus kills Chinese whistleblower doctor” BBC 2020 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795 
8. OpenLearn “Two concepts of freedom” Open University Accessed on 29 May 2021 https://www.open.edu/openlearn/ocw/mod/oucontent/view.php?printable=1&id=1747 
9. Stephens, Alexander H. “Modern History Sourcebook: Alexander H. Stephens (1812-1883): Cornerstone Address, March 21, 1861” Fordham University https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1861stephens.asp 
10. Wallace, David “This is Water: By David Foster Wallace” FS 2005 https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ 
11. Zuboff, Shoshana“Caveat Usor: Surveillance Capitalism as Epistemic Inequality” SSRN 2021 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3809169 
12. Zuboff, Shoshana “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future At The New Frontier of Power” 2019
    

Saishreya Sriram is a Research Assistant at the Department of Computer Science at Ashoka University. She is a Young India Fellow ‘21 whose interests lie at the intersection of liberal arts, and tech — especially digital humanities and new media.