Freedom (G.B Shaw)

Natural jobs are the things we must do to live, such as sleeping, eating, dressing and moving about. Because we must do them, we also have to do the work needed to provide for them. This means labour begins with the need to satisfy these natural needs. If another person controls the food, clothes, house or work that we need, that control can turn into slavery. So, the link is: natural needs lead to labour, and when labour and its products are controlled by others, slavery begins.

The object of all honest governments ought to be to prevent people from being imposed on and to protect them. In the chapter, Shaw says that governments should keep people from being exploited. But what we actually find is often the opposite: governments enforce slavery and call it freedom. They may regulate that slavery, but they still keep people dependent and under control.

The master class is more deluded because its members are educated in a way that flatters them. Their schooling teaches them that they are superior to ordinary people and that the system is fair because it gives them a privileged position. Since they already agree with this flattering picture of themselves, they are more completely taken in by the false history, dishonest political economy and snobbery than the workers are.

According to Aristotle, the common people will accept law and order and government only if the rulers are made to seem highly superior. He says they should be beautifully dressed and decorated, robed and uniformed, speak with a special accent, travel in first-class carriages or expensive cars, ride the best-groomed and best-bred horses, never do any menial work for themselves, and be made very rich so that they appear almost godlike.

Reasonable laws, when impartially administered, increase freedom because they protect people from assault, highway robbery, and disorder generally. In other words, such laws do not merely restrict; they also secure people’s safety, and that protection gives them more real freedom.

Individual freedom gets restricted in several ways. Nature itself restricts us because we must sleep, eat, work and obey our bodily needs. Then the laws of the land restrict us for social order. More seriously, the chapter says our freedom is restricted by landlords and employers, who can control where we live, what we do, how we dress, and even whether we remain employed. Economic pressure, police power, taxes, and social conditioning also limit freedom.

Most people find it easier to conform, imitate, and follow a self-appointed guru because they are not free to think deeply for themselves. They are enclosed by tradition, family ideas, school teaching, and social pressure. Thinking independently needs alertness, inquiry, and effort, and most people do not have the inclination or energy for that. So they prefer to depend on someone else’s authority.

The inward struggle is the conflict between what one wants to do for oneself and what one is forced or trained to do by tradition, parents, teachers, and society. One part of the mind wants freedom and discovery; the other part has been shaped to obey, conform and imitate. This inner conflict causes pain and sorrow until it is resolved.

The slavery of man to Nature is different from the slavery of man to Man. Nature’s demands are unavoidable but kind: if we must eat, sleep, or work, Nature makes these things pleasant or necessary for survival. Man’s slavery over man is unnatural and hateful: one person exploits another through force, fraud, trickery, or social systems. Nature’s slavery is based on necessity; human slavery is based on domination and cruelty.

In the personal sphere, people are controlled more directly by landlords and employers than by politics. A landlord may decide whether you can live on his property and may even interfere with your religion or vote. An employer may dictate your clothes, working hours, and can dismiss you anytime, pushing you into unemployment. This personal control is often stronger than the power of a political dictator.

Shaw debunks several misconceptions about freedom:
- that a free person can do anything he likes all the time;
- that having a vote makes a person truly free;
- that democracy automatically means freedom;
- that the land of the free is actually free;
- that political changes alone are enough to create freedom;
- that freedom means something different from leisure and more money.
He argues that real freedom is limited by nature, work, law and economic dependence.