Dancing with freedom
What if we've fundamentally misunderstood the nature of freedom itself? Imagine living in a flat and deciding to blast your favourite music at full volume at 2 a.m. because, why not? It's your flat, and you're just exercising your freedom to enjoy your music whenever you want. You’re dancing around, feeling like you’re William Wallace high on freedom on your living room dance floor.
This simple act encapsulates our common conception of freedom—the absence of constraints, the ability to do what we want, when we want, without interference. It’s a seductive vision that shows up everywhere, from personal development to corporate policy. But this understanding of freedom is incomplete.
Individuals desire the freedom to choose their path, to speak their mind, to pursue their passions. Organisations advocate for the freedom to innovate, to reach markets, to operate without excessive regulation. Both frame freedom primarily as liberation from constraint. Just like our midnight dance party, we often frame our freedom in terms of what we can do without being stopped.
Yet our actions never exist in a vacuum. They ripple outward in ways both subtle and profound. Our 2 a.m. dance party that feels so liberating becomes a nightmare for the exhausted family next door trying to get some rest before their early morning shift. Or on a bigger scale, a power plant’s operations affect the river that communities depend on. What serves one person’s definition of freedom often impinges on another’s well-being. Put another way, our "better" might be someone else’s "worse" and vice versa.
When confronted with these interconnections, we often resort to what might be called "teenager thinking"—minimising consequences, denying responsibility, or insisting that negative impacts either won’t happen or won’t matter much. As we turn up the volume to 11, we tell ourselves, "It’s only one night. These walls are super thick." This approach is tempting because it seems to preserve our sense of unlimited freedom. If nothing bad will happen, or if whatever happens isn’t really our fault, then we can act without constraint.
In Being and Nothingness, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about a concept he called "bad faith"—our attempt to flee from the weight of our own freedom and responsibility. Sartre argued that humans are "condemned to be free," meaning we cannot escape our freedom by appealing to external factors, predetermined essences, or social roles. This is how "teenager thinking" lets us dodge responsibility—by pretending our late-night rave affects no one but ourselves.
Sartre wrote, "If bad faith is possible, it is because it is an immediate, permanent threat to every project of the human being; it is because consciousness conceals in its being a permanent risk of bad faith." In other words, the temptation to avoid responsibility isn’t just an occasional lapse—it’s a constant, ever-present risk in our lives. The same consciousness that lets us choose also lets us justify and excuse those choices, even when they harm others.
This self-deception isn’t just about lying to ourselves. It’s about trying to be something we’re not—someone who never impacts others negatively—while simultaneously not being who we truly are: beings capable of affecting the world around us. Just like claiming the freedom to play ear-bleeding music at 2 a.m. while denying the responsibility for how it affects our neighbours' sleep.
But true freedom emerges from exactly the opposite approach. Instead of denying or minimising the consequences of our actions, authentic freedom requires us to illuminate them fully. The path to genuine freedom lies in taking complete responsibility for our choices and their impacts. This might mean we still decide to turn our living room into a nightclub, but we acknowledge that we’ll need to write a note, get some flowers, and present them as a peace offering to our neighbour the next day instead of fooling ourselves into believing we’re exercising our freedom in isolation.
This aligns with Sartre’s call for "authentic" existence—a way of living where we fully embrace our freedom and the responsibility it entails. For Sartre, authenticity means acknowledging that we are the authors of our own choices and accepting the burden this places upon us. It means rejecting the comfort of determinism or fate and instead recognising that our choices define not only our own lives but contribute to defining what it means to be human.
Sartre would emphasise that our choices don’t just affect our individual circumstances—they help create the world we all inhabit. When we choose, we are, in a sense, proposing a vision of what human life could or should be. This responsibility is inseparable from our freedom. We can’t have one without the other.
Rather than insisting on our right to play music whenever we please, we might consider how the exercise of that freedom affects our entire building and find ways to enjoy our music that don’t infringe on others’ well-being.
This approach builds trust precisely because it demonstrates awareness and responsibility. When we acknowledge what others can already see—the full scope of our actions’ consequences—we show ourselves capable of wielding freedom wisely. This isn’t about limiting freedom but about exercising it more fully and authentically.
True freedom isn’t about doing whatever we please—it’s about recognising that our choices shape the world we share. Sartre reminds us that in choosing for ourselves, we also choose for humanity. Freedom and responsibility aren’t opposing forces; they are the same act, seen from different angles. The more consciously we bear that responsibility, the more fully we exercise our freedom.