Contractual Freedoms
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”[1]
When we ask ourselves “What is the point? What am I really trying to achieve in life?” I think most people would answer that they are in the pursuit of happiness. We have been led to believe that all this work, all our progress and consumption will fill the void we feel inside, the vacancy where our more infinite selves once resided. It is the “American way of life.” And yet, our consumption grows because our immaterial selves will never be satisfied by the food of the material world. We are hungry, starving for something we have not only forgotten, but fear. What might we find if we looked down into those mysterious depths; would we lose our minds? At the same time, our wounding and dissociation has made us easy to manipulate as we live in a state of constant fear and survival. We want to trust authority, we want to be taken care of, made sure of our security and be sated by progress and plenty. We want to be a part of something, we want to feel that our lives have purpose. Somewhere in our quest we transmuted these immaterial needs into something we could hold on to. Filled with fear and unknowing as the past falls away and the future is unknown, we did not trust nature to provide for us. We no longer wanted to be at her whim, instead we found a way insure our own existence.
[1] Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence and Other Great Documents of American History 1775-1865, ed. John Grafton (New York: Dover Publishing, 2000), 5.