In our most recent post, guest writer Nick Weising talked about the FIRE movement, a group dedicated to building plans for early retirement. This movement is rapidly growing in popularity—early retirement is one of the most common financial goals today.
To me, it seems that the pursuit of early retirement comes down to one basic idea: The pursuit of freedom. Proponents of FIRE see this as a path to reach complete independence, independence that is not rooted in work.
Nick argued that many FIRE proponents miss the point of this freedom: Often, they find that in retirement, there’s little to do other than sit around playing video games or binging TV—and, if that’s your goal, there’s nothing stopping you from doing that right now.
Although this might be a misuse of freedom, I believe that the core of FIRE makes sense: They see life as a long pursuit of freedom and look for financial means to achieve this. If their idea of freedom doesn’t work, what’s a definition that might make sense? What sort of freedom are we after?
Freedom As No Limits
We often think of freedom as just bucking the rules and following the heart. It means listening to whatever you think in the moment and acting without limitations. Total freedom would mean acting with nothing stopping you—no rules, no obstacles.
From this view, the only things stopping freedom are obstacles outside yourself. These have to be external things, like an unjust law or someone forcing you to act a certain way. Freedom is a matter of keeping the path in front of you open. So long as nothing gets in your way, you will always be free.
If freedom is about your circumstances, then the pursuit of freedom means trying to control the world around you as much as possible. Someone looking for this kind of external freedom should look to change and dictate the various circumstances of life to their benefit. This might mean looking for more power, be it financial or political. This might mean chasing after an ideal life away from these obstacles—the FIRE movement is a great example of this pursuit.
But it always means something negative. This kind of freedom means getting rid of something. Real freedom comes when there’s nothing left to get rid of.
But if we think that freedom is an essential part of being human, what does this mean? If it’s true that freedom just means getting rid of obstacles, then that means that what makes humans unique is something that we don’t have. We’re unique because we’ve gotten rid of something, not because of something in our nature.
We want something more from a definition of freedom. We want to find something that speaks to the fullness of our humanity.
A Positive Definition of Freedom
Instead, when we’re looking to define freedom, we want to find a unique capacity that humans have. We want to find something that sets our action apart from others. One answer stands out here: The ability to make free, rational choices.
Real freedom isn’t just getting rid of these obstacles. Real freedom is the ability to make a choice from reason. The difference between human action and animal action is that we don’t do what we do simply out of instinct. We can set our own goals, decide what’s right, and choose how to pursue what we want.
Importantly, this kind of freedom is not based on circumstances. Though circumstances change how we can express that freedom, we never lose this basic ability to choose and to act out of reason. It’s something fundamentally internal.
The real obstacles to freedom, then, are not circumstances but ourselves. The real obstacles to freedom are flaws in ourselves that stop us from making these free, rational choices. And the solution to create lasting freedom is to overcome these flaws.
What stops us from acting freely? The two components of a free choice seem to be reason and self-control. It’s reason that makes our choices free and not simply determined. If we don’t act from reason, then we simply act from something like instinct or compulsion. We don’t have the opportunity to choose it.
And, naturally, we need to have the capacity to actually take these actions. It’s not enough to have the perfect free choice conceived in your head if you can’t put it in practice.
Freedom and the Virtues
There are all sorts of flaws we could have that would stop us from achieving either of these. Reason can be hurt by ignorance, imprudence, or pride. Something like intemperance hurts self-control; naturally, if you can’t stop yourself from doing certain things, you don’t really have a free choice. Other things like cowardice could hurt this as well: If, in key moments, you find yourself unable to act, you again lack that complete sense of freedom.
All of these things have a common denominator: They are solved by virtues. Ignorance, imprudence, and pride are solved by wisdom, prudence, and humility. Intemperance and cowardice are solved by temperance and courage. All of these obstacles to internal freedom are fixed by developing habits of excellence.
The worst sense of unfreedom comes from living without any kind of self-control. Someone who truly has no choice in their own actions is the least free of all. This isn’t a matter of circumstance or anything outside of us. Instead, it begins when we feel that no matter what, we can’t decide what we want to do. Whether it’s a failure of reason or discipline, it creates a sense of powerlessness that nothing can overcome.
Virtue is, in a sense, the requirement for freedom. To make a free choice, we have to overcome these obstacles within us that stop us from using our full humanity. Though our circumstances might affect how we practice this, the capacity for freedom never leaves us so long as we keep our humanity.
Though it’s certainly valuable to take control of our circumstances, this is not where freedom starts. It’s possible to have total control over everything around you and yet still feel totally unfree. If you don’t start with getting rid of these internal obstacles, it doesn’t matter what you do to the external ones. In the end, all the money and power in the world can’t give you power over yourself.