Freedom

Freedom is a word cheapened by misuse. It is invoked as if it were the license to insult, exclude, dominate, or wall oneself off from others while insisting that such enclosure is liberation. Yet what masquerades as independence becomes dependence on the harm and isolation of others, a brittle shell that requires continual reinforcement. This reflex—”I am free because I am not like them”—is neither clever nor sustainable. It is a performance of power, a vocabulary internal to its own frame, impressive only to those inside it. Economists, politicians, academics polish their idioms, but this is self-congratulation mistaken for depth. Cleverness matters less than replication, and so what circulates most is what sustains itself, regardless of substance. Universities, in my experience, were less crucibles of thought than echo chambers of people impressed at being impressed. It was hollow, a ritual of self-display without genuine inquiry.

What we see now is closer to a periodic purge of meaning, a semantic cleanse where language is flushed of nuance in favor of what maximally replicates. Freedom banners wave, yet behind them stands kindergarten cruelty, exclusion dressed as righteousness. The insecure, the greedy, the brittle, the arrogant reproduce themselves through the lowest common denominator of speech and power. But unlike older systems of tyranny that could sustain centuries within fixed rural frames, the present cannot be secured so simply. Those who mistake wealth and privilege for permanence fail to grasp the dynamics of the world that allow their thrones to exist only in proportion to the suffering they cultivate. That gradient of exploitation is obvious yet affectively untouchable, buried beneath flags of identity and belonging. So yes, the world grinds its potential into product, academia isolates its brightest, and humanity remains trapped in cycles of replication that privilege the shallow over the profound. The tragedy is not lack of cleverness but the refusal to recognize that cleverness itself has been emptied of consequence.