We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. Try to save your home from the highway crowd, or to work a trade without the approval of the goons, or to open a little business without a permit, or to grow a crop without a quota, or to educate your child the way you want to, or to not have a child. We all have the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.
Interpretation
True freedom requires effort and action; many do not pursue it.
Karl Hess's quote highlights the concept of freedom as an illusion for those who do not actively seek it out. He suggests that while we believe we are free, our choices are often limited by societal norms and regulations, akin to a balloon constrained within a factory of pins. To experience true freedom, one must challenge these constraints and strive to live authentically, regardless of the obstacles.
In practice
In a speech about civil rights, you might reference this quote to emphasize the need for active participation in securing freedoms.
It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.
They [anarchists] spring from a single seed, no matter the flowering of their ideas. The seed is liberty. And that is all it is. It is not a socialist seed. It is not a capitalist seed. It is not a mystical seed. It is not a determinist seed. It is simply a statement. We can be free. After that it’s all choice and chance.
The revolution occurs when the victims cease to cooperate.
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
You are not in the world...the world is in you," what did he mean? [That is, you are not in the world," that is, there is no "you" that is real or in any world. "The world is in you" means that the world is in your "mind" and is nothing more than a figment of your programming-and-conditioning-induced imaginings.]
Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.
In one word, this ideal is that you are divine.
All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.
So when a great man dies For years beyond our ken The light he leaves behind him lies Upon the paths of men.
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