Breaking the Chains
Breaking free from the chains, or limitations, that tie you up in your daily life is a multi-faceted undertaking. Embarking on such a venture, you need to focus sharply on what your real limitations are – whether actual or imaginary. A number of varied limitations are floating around in your unconscious, shaping your daily actions and social relations.
Social and cultural rules of behavior; physical limitations encountered when moving around in the geography; economic limitations posed by your revenue, fortune (or lack of such), or credit lines; legal limitations imposed by the rule of law (be it penal law or civil law) and the degree of enforcement imposed by society; or ethical limitations imposed by your own ethical standards or the collective ethical standards of your society.
If you try to break free from all those limitations at once, you will either end up behind bars or you will face a fairly quick nervous breakdown. So, you will need to find out what limitations weigh the heaviest on your mind. If you have the inclinations of a Franciscan monk, you will obviously not care about the economic limitations, since you will have made a vow of poverty and decided that material wealth does not matter to you. Your preoccupations may then be directed to spiritual ends, be it spiritual freedom or pursuit of some form of spiritual salvation. A Wall Street stockbroker may not have many economic limitations in his daily life; yet he is so obsessed by increasing his own and his clients’ fortune that he is completely tied up in the pursuit of more money.
Your aims in life tend to define the limitations that matter to you, as well as those that don’t matter to you. If you have no specific aims in life, you encounter all the limitations with indifference and end up moving aimlessly within the circles formed by these limitations. If you have aims in life, you will need to fight those limitations that stand in your way as you move to achieve your aims.
Social and cultural rules of behavior are encountered in family circles, religious circles, social classes, and other cultural arenas such as sports, entertainment, media, arts, ethnic groups, and so on. In social sciences this theme is developed extensively into analyses of social rule systems.
Physical limitations may be internal (related to your own bodily functions) or external (to be found in the physical landscape you navigate in).
Internal, physical limitations are most often clearly defined when they concern explicit bodily impairments. Ways of overcoming them are under constant development by scientific research and technological progress, as can be seen when observing how professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University manages to keep up his scientific activity. Physical limitations may also derive from psychological disturbances which affect a person’s way of relating to other people and to different social or physical settings. The social science of psychology helps people to deal with such limitations, but they are often much harder to define and sometimes much harder to overcome.
External physical limitations are much more straightforward to define, such as a road that imposes a certain trajectory for your car or a railway’s trajectory imposed by the rails. A society’s infrastructure plays a crucial role in defining and changing the limitations we are faced with on a daily basis. The configuration of nature and its climatic conditions are obviously crucial as well.
Economic limitations are defined by the resources at our disposal as a country or as individuals. Freedom of action may nominally be the same for a rich person and a poor person, but the opportunities this freedom opens up for are significantly different for the two persons.
Legal limitations are imposed on us as a result of our desire to live in social communities. From the moment two or more people wish to live together, they have to establish rules of behavior between themselves - in order to live in harmony. Mythological beliefs, ethical norms, value judgments, practical rules for cooperation and exchange are all among the necessities that even the smallest communities need for their harmonious existence. As a community expands in number of persons, it needs to move from the anarchy that small groups can live with to other forms of government. As the distance between the rulers and the subject grows, earlier informal rules of behavior increasingly become formal laws and regulations decided by the governing bodies.
It is not necessarily true that individual freedom is greater in the small, informal community – as compared to the large, more formally regulated society. Common norms, entrenched habits and obligations may be more numerous and more constraining in a small community than in a larger society where each individual may be invisible to the mechanisms of control of the larger community.
Ethical limitations are most often something we impose on ourselves from our individual beliefs of what we consider as proper conduct beyond those collective ethical norms that are already embodied in the laws and regulations. There may of course also be ethical considerations of a collective nature that are not embodied in the legal system, but the extent to which these will act as limitations in our daily lives rests on our individual attitudes and the strength of our collective consciousness regarding these ethical norms.
Social and cultural rules of behavior; physical limitations encountered when moving around in the geography; economic limitations posed by your revenue, fortune (or lack of such), or credit lines; legal limitations imposed by the rule of law (be it penal law or civil law) and the degree of enforcement imposed by society; or ethical limitations imposed by your own ethical standards or the collective ethical standards of your society.
If you try to break free from all those limitations at once, you will either end up behind bars or you will face a fairly quick nervous breakdown. So, you will need to find out what limitations weigh the heaviest on your mind. If you have the inclinations of a Franciscan monk, you will obviously not care about the economic limitations, since you will have made a vow of poverty and decided that material wealth does not matter to you. Your preoccupations may then be directed to spiritual ends, be it spiritual freedom or pursuit of some form of spiritual salvation. A Wall Street stockbroker may not have many economic limitations in his daily life; yet he is so obsessed by increasing his own and his clients’ fortune that he is completely tied up in the pursuit of more money.
Your aims in life tend to define the limitations that matter to you, as well as those that don’t matter to you. If you have no specific aims in life, you encounter all the limitations with indifference and end up moving aimlessly within the circles formed by these limitations. If you have aims in life, you will need to fight those limitations that stand in your way as you move to achieve your aims.
Social and cultural rules of behavior are encountered in family circles, religious circles, social classes, and other cultural arenas such as sports, entertainment, media, arts, ethnic groups, and so on. In social sciences this theme is developed extensively into analyses of social rule systems.
Physical limitations may be internal (related to your own bodily functions) or external (to be found in the physical landscape you navigate in).
Internal, physical limitations are most often clearly defined when they concern explicit bodily impairments. Ways of overcoming them are under constant development by scientific research and technological progress, as can be seen when observing how professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University manages to keep up his scientific activity. Physical limitations may also derive from psychological disturbances which affect a person’s way of relating to other people and to different social or physical settings. The social science of psychology helps people to deal with such limitations, but they are often much harder to define and sometimes much harder to overcome.
External physical limitations are much more straightforward to define, such as a road that imposes a certain trajectory for your car or a railway’s trajectory imposed by the rails. A society’s infrastructure plays a crucial role in defining and changing the limitations we are faced with on a daily basis. The configuration of nature and its climatic conditions are obviously crucial as well.
Economic limitations are defined by the resources at our disposal as a country or as individuals. Freedom of action may nominally be the same for a rich person and a poor person, but the opportunities this freedom opens up for are significantly different for the two persons.
Legal limitations are imposed on us as a result of our desire to live in social communities. From the moment two or more people wish to live together, they have to establish rules of behavior between themselves - in order to live in harmony. Mythological beliefs, ethical norms, value judgments, practical rules for cooperation and exchange are all among the necessities that even the smallest communities need for their harmonious existence. As a community expands in number of persons, it needs to move from the anarchy that small groups can live with to other forms of government. As the distance between the rulers and the subject grows, earlier informal rules of behavior increasingly become formal laws and regulations decided by the governing bodies.
It is not necessarily true that individual freedom is greater in the small, informal community – as compared to the large, more formally regulated society. Common norms, entrenched habits and obligations may be more numerous and more constraining in a small community than in a larger society where each individual may be invisible to the mechanisms of control of the larger community.
Ethical limitations are most often something we impose on ourselves from our individual beliefs of what we consider as proper conduct beyond those collective ethical norms that are already embodied in the laws and regulations. There may of course also be ethical considerations of a collective nature that are not embodied in the legal system, but the extent to which these will act as limitations in our daily lives rests on our individual attitudes and the strength of our collective consciousness regarding these ethical norms.