On Freedom: The Longest Running Bait & Switch

Fri Aug 22 2025

The Brave at Heart

That iconic scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson stands on a battlefield, face painted blue, and bellows “FREEDOM!”, you know the one. The battlefield surges, the crowd goes apeshit ready to give their lives for the freedom they can already smell on the wind.

You feel it in your gut even if you’ve never held a sword. It’s cinema’s most visceral rallying cry, and it works because the word strikes something primal in all of us: the desire to be free.

But zoom out. Every “freedom” in history, whether won on a battlefield, ratified in a constitution, or enshrined in law, has amounted to nothing more than a swap of cages.

New rulers, new flags, new slogans. But the bars remain.

Freedom Was Never Absolute

The etymology exposes the lie. “Freedom” descends from Old English freodom and Proto-Germanic frijaz, meaning “beloved” or “not a thrall/slave.”

It never meant boundless autonomy. It meant exemption, the privilege of not being owned.

Freedom was always relational. A “free man” existed only because others were not. Liberty for some always presupposed unfreedom for others. The myth of absolute freedom was bolted on later, inflated into an ideal it never was.

Conditional Status, Always

Rome: freedom only for citizens, never for slaves. Feudal Europe: “freemen” exempt from servitude, but still bound to lords. Democracy: rights only for those inside the borders, and only as long as the state permits.

Freedom has never been universal. It has always been a status granted within a structure, contingent and conditional.

The Carrot Mechanism

Systems learned early on that freedom works best as bait. Religion said, obey the commandments, endure suffering, and you’ll be free in heaven. Politics said, fight the war, win the revolution, and you’ll finally be free. Economics says, sell your time, grind until retirement, and you’ll be free at last.

Freedom is never here. It is always deferred, always postponed, the horizon line that keeps you walking.

Capitalism’s Rental Illusion

Capitalism perfected the trick. You sell your hours. The system pays you wages. Then you buy back fragments of “free time”, weekends, vacations, Netflix binges, with the same currency earned through your ‘captivity’.

That’s slavery in everything but name. The only difference is optics: it’s contractual slavery dressed in democratic language, with enough privilege sprinkled in (weekends, wages, holidays) to make it feel like autonomy.

We recoil at the word slavery, proud to have abolished it. But what else do you call selling your life’s hours under threat of starvation? What else do you call a system where you must buy back fragments of your own existence with tokens earned from your captivity? Freedom didn’t abolish slavery. It rebranded it.

Freedom becomes consumption. You don’t own it; you rent it. And the rent is paid in the very hours you were already forced to give away just to survive.

Yes, you can quit. But you can only quit into the arms of another master, because the alternative is starvation.

The freedom to choose your warden is not freedom from the prison.

Choice Isn’t Freedom

Two parties, dozens of brands, endless options. The menu expands, but the walls don’t move.

Multiplying doors inside the same corridor doesn’t liberate you. It only deepens the illusion that choosing Coke instead of Pepsi, Democrat instead of Republican, Apple instead of Android, is the exercise of freedom. It isn’t. It’s the maintenance of the cage.

Freedom isn’t the ability to make a choice. Freedom is not having to make a choice.

Degrees of Freedom (The Prison Yard)

Yes, conditions can improve. A serf becoming a freeman. A woman gaining the vote. A worker winning the eight hour day. These are not nothing.

But they are still privileges within the prison.

Moving from solitary confinement to the exercise yard feels like liberation, but the perimeter remains.

Degrees of freedom are not emancipation.

The Search for Exceptions

What about revolutions? The French, the Russian, the American? All rebuilt cages with new wardens.

What about psychedelics or spiritual awakenings? The chemicals fade. You wake up to the same debts, the same job, the same constraints.

What about financial freedom, self-help liberation, entrepreneurial escape? You bought the feeling of freedom with the same wages extracted by unfreedom.

Even the longing for freedom is part of the trap. The carrot isn’t just external, it’s in our psychology. We are conditioned to keep searching for exits that don’t exist.

The search itself becomes compliance, it becomes the motivator, it becomes the recursive ‘slavery’ mechanism, and the beauty is - nobody is doing this to us, we’re doing it to ourselves.

Scarcity and Fear

Freedom is always framed as scarce: time running out, last chance, don’t waste it. Scarcity ensures obedience.

Freedom doesn’t feel abundant. It feels fragile, at risk, something you must guard, and that perception keeps you compliant. Freedom feels like that ‘ultimate achievement’, if you play your cards right, if you remain loyal, if you ‘give it your all, and then a little bit more for good measure’.

If you ‘stick to the rules’ the system will reward you with freedom.

Except when you get to the point of cashing in the system says, ‘Oh fuck, sorry - we had to change the parameters, freedom is now only achievable when you’re 68…sorry, that’s policy now.”

Gladiator’s Whisper’

At the end of Gladiator, Maximus collapses, bleeding out after defying an emperor, the ultimate middle finger to the system. The score swells with “Now we are free.”

Not as he wins, not as he secures Rome’s future. But only as he dies, visions of his dead wife and child awaiting him in Elysium.

Braveheart gave us the scream, the search for freedom, the fight for freedom, the bait.

Gladiator gives us the whisper, the truth. Real freedom never arrives in life. Only in death.

The Self-Locked Cage

Freedom has always been the story that kept us moving: shouted on battlefields, enshrined in constitutions, sold back to us in hourly wages. History has repainted the cage, but never removed it.

Revolutions redecorate the bars. Philosophies like Stoicism teach you to love them. Psychedelics and escapes fade back into the same obligations. Even the desire for freedom is part of the programming. The carrot isn’t just dangled; it’s wired into us.

The scam isn’t just external coercion. It’s self-imposed.

Like Foucault’s Panopticon, the system no longer needs a guard in the tower, the guard is…you.

You watch yourself. You obey yourself. The cage is locked from the inside.

And so the Gladiator whisper is literal. Death isn’t the metaphorical release. It is the only true exit.

Freedom is history’s oldest bait and switch, tasted in degrees, promised as destiny, but never delivered outside the cage.

The cruelest trick is that we built the cage ourselves, and call the sound of the bolt hope.