The Bird Who Forgot the Sky: On the Strange Surrender of Freedom

Men have died for freedom.

They’ve lifted the cup of hemlock with steady hands, fallen to assassins’ blades, and rotted in prisons for refusing to yield. They’ve gone to the stake with flames at their feet, bowed their heads to the axe, and passed beneath the guillotine’s edge. They’ve rushed headlong at the barrel of a Gatling gun, thrown their bodies atop live grenades, and faced down tanks.

Men have also killed to deny freedom.

They’ve enthroned themselves as deities, raised armies from the sweat of the taxed, and conquered lands. They’ve filled gulags and prisons, silenced tongues, and bent philosophy into chains. But it is not only emperors and tyrants. It is neighbors shouting down dissent, mobs canceling heretics, and crowds cheering when an “enemy” is dragged away. It is the man who shoots a stranger dead in public for daring to disagree. The denial of freedom does not always wear a crown; it often wears an ordinary face, weary and convinced that obedience is virtue.

This is the history of freedom: men and women dying for it, men and women killing to suppress it. Whole revolutions have burned themselves into history on freedom’s promise.

And yet. 

Walk through any prosperous city, any comfortable suburb, any place where freedom theoretically flourishes, and you will witness something stranger still: people surrendering their liberty willingly, sometimes even gratefully. No jackbooted thugs, no midnight arrests, and no gulags required. They hand it over for convenience, security, and the sweet narcotic of not having to decide.

They surrender it by living under constant watch, convincing themselves surveillance is a fair price for safety. By swallowing words they believe but dare not speak. By watching wars waged in their name but without their consent. By borrowing from a future their children will have to repay. By teaching those same children that freedom is too dangerous; never letting them walk alone, play freely, or learn to risk and recover. By submitting to decrees, keeping them indoors “for their own good” and informing on neighbors who dared to disobey. By permitting “leaders” to claim emergency powers when there is no emergency. By letting their government slip their hands into private enterprise, deciding who may trade, work, buy and sell, and at what price. By allowing homes to be taxed year after year, and property rights to be degraded by ordinances, permits, and countless rules. By surrendering responsibility for one another to institutions instead of neighbors and kin. The bars are not visible, but the cage is closed all the same.

At first, it hardly hurts. People shrug, comply, and tell themselves it is no great burden. But like an addict with the first taste, the danger is not in the beginning but in the drift. Each small surrender dulls the appetite for freedom, until what once would have been intolerable is ordinary. The chains grow heavier as the spirit grows weaker, and by the time the cost is indisputable, the will to resist has been eroded.

Why would someone prefer to be told what job to take, what food to eat, and what words are acceptable? Why would someone want to outsource the choice between A and B, between right and wrong, between who they are and who they might become? Why does deciding for oneself feel so unbearable that surrender feels like salvation? The cynic will answer at once: “Because freedom is an illusion, a story we tell ourselves to endure necessity”. 

But I am not convinced.

I love freedom. To me, it is breath, it is life itself. It is the dignity of standing upright in a universe that offers no guarantees, the exhilaration of writing your own story in a world full of people trying to pen it for you. Yet everywhere I look, I see people suffocating themselves with willing hands.

Some don’t believe they deserve freedom. Unworthiness runs deep in the human psyche. If you have been told that you are insignificant, incompetent, or broken, freedom feels like a crown too heavy for your head. Better to be ruled than to stand naked before the world and claim your own life. For such a person, submission is easier than self-recognition.

Others resist freedom because it carries the weight of responsibility. Failure can always be blamed on someone else when the path is predetermined. But freedom strips away this nicety. It whispers the agonizing truth: you are more powerful than you pretend to be, and therefore more accountable than you wish to be. This is why freedom can feel unbearable; it is Promethean, a fire stolen from the gods, and powerful enough to burn. To carry it is to risk being scorched, which is why so many would rather leave it in the hands of others. And that accountability is not only practical but moral: to be free is to wrestle with questions that have no easy answers, to navigate ambiguity without the reassurance of authority, and to walk by a compass of your own making, even when it leads you into storms others dare not enter.

And then some find in opposition to freedom their only taste of power. Denying liberty to themselves or to others becomes a way to feel powerful. The one who shouts against freedom can rally a crowd; the one who enforces its absence can finally matter. If I cannot be free, I can at least prevent you from being free, and in that small victory, I discover my authority.

Freedom also terrifies because it opens the door to uncertainty. To be free is to stand on shifting ground, with no guarantees that tomorrow will reward today’s choices. Many would rather inhabit a narrow, predictable prison, cold, windowless, stripped of light and beauty, than step into the vast, chaotic wilderness of possibility. Certainty, however, suffocating, feels safer than risk.

There is also the comfort of conformity. To be like everyone else is to be shielded from judgment. To break from the herd, even in pursuit of freedom, invites ridicule or isolation. So people trade autonomy for belonging, huddling close and mistaking the herd's heat for the warmth of the soul.

For some, authority itself exerts a strange seduction. To be told what to do is to be spared the torment of decision. Rules reduce the world to black and white, sparing us from the gray that demands we think for ourselves. And so obedience becomes a balm. The ruler is welcomed not as a thief of freedom, but as a shepherd of certainty.

Freedom fails, too, in the face of fear of failure. When I am free, my mistakes are mine alone. When I am not, I can blame the system, the leader, or the society. To surrender freedom is to shield the ego and hide from the humiliation of personal failure behind the safety of external control.

Worst of all, years of conditioning can hollow out the desire for freedom entirely. Families, schools, jobs, and authorities can teach us that our choices do not matter. After enough time, this becomes the truth. Freedom no longer feels stolen; it feels unattainable. The cage is not resisted, because the bird has forgotten the sky.

This forgetting is also civilizational. Like so many forces in nature and history, freedom moves in cycles. It is cherished, squandered, surrendered, and then, through upheaval, rediscovered. Revolutions do not spring from novel ideals but from neglected ones, remembered. These cycles stretch across lifetimes, eighty, a hundred, sometimes a hundred and fifty years. I have not lived through one in full, but I’ve observed the in-between: the complacent certainty that liberty is permanent. That no people would ever yield what their ancestors bled to win. 

And yet, always, the erosion begins. 

Freedom is dizzying because it strips away excuses. Sartre called it “vertigo”: the sudden recognition that there is no script, no fate, no given meaning. That the path must be chosen, and chosen again. To surrender freedom is to silence the vertigo, to hush the abyss whispering beneath the floorboards of life. 

But even silence has a price. What you bury in the abyss eventually rises in the shadow. With autonomy comes the responsibility to admit our envy, greed, and cruelty. Rules, dogmas, and authorities allow us to project these darker impulses outward, to blame the sinner, the heretic, the enemy. Submission spares us the intimate wrestling match with our own darkness.

Even our evolutionary wiring conspires against freedom. For most of human history, survival meant conformity to the tribe. To break ranks was to risk exile and death. That ancient instinct lingers: the collective feels safer. Freedom threatens the tribal bond, and so, at a primal level, it feels like danger.

Identity, too, is endangered by freedom. Who am I if every path is open, and every boundary negotiable? Many prefer a fixed identity, even one imposed from outside, to the dizziness of infinite possibility. A role, a tradition, and a rulebook provide a comforting outline to the self. Without them, freedom threatens to dissolve us into ambiguity.

And there is the strangest yearning of all: the desire to lose oneself in something greater. History is full of people who sought transcendence through submission to a deity, a nation, a leader, or an ideology. For some, freedom feels too small, too mundane. They long to surrender, to dissolve their will into a collective body, to be carried by the flood rather than struggle as a solitary swimmer. The highest ecstasy, for them, is not freedom but fusion.

So perhaps the mystery dissolves. Freedom is rejected not because it is weak but because it is impossibly strong. It demands everything: self-knowledge, responsibility, courage, patience, and the willingness to walk without a map. To love freedom is to embrace uncertainty, befriend your shadow, stand apart from the crowd, risk failure, and endure solitude. No wonder so many flee. 

But every argument against freedom contains its own refutation.

You say freedom brings uncertainty? Yes. And uncertainty is the womb of possibility. The alternative is death-in-life, the suffocation of never becoming more than you already are. Every love, every discovery, every moment of genuine aliveness emerges from the unknown. To choose certainty is to choose the grave while your heart beats on.

You say freedom burdens us with responsibility? Yes. And that burden is what transforms us from animals into creators. Responsibility is not punishment but privilege, the power to sculpt reality through choice. To flee responsibility is to escape your agency and become less than human.

You say freedom threatens identity? Yes. It threatens the false self built from others’ expectations and your own fears. But it offers something greater: the chance to discover who you actually are rather than who you were told to be. The self you create through freedom may surprise you, disappoint others, or fail spectacularly, but it will pulse with authentic blood.

You say freedom isolates us from the tribe? Yes. From tribes built on conformity and fear. But it opens the door to genuine communion: relationships chosen rather than assigned, love offered rather than extracted, respect earned through truth rather than purchased through agreement. The free person can meet others as equals rather than fellow prisoners comparing the comfort of their chains.

You say freedom demands impossible courage? Yes. And courage is what separates the living from the merely breathing. The coward may survive longer, but the free man lives fully while surviving. Every day of authentic choice outweighs years of comfortable cowardice.

The deepest truth cuts through every objection: freedom cannot be given or taken by others, only recognized or denied by yourself. Even the slave chooses how to meet slavery: with despair or hope, resistance or surrender, dignity or degradation. Even the prisoner chooses what to do with the vastness of inner space that no wall can contain. Even the person trapped by circumstances chooses their response, and that response, however small, is where freedom lives.

The dictator who crushes political freedom cannot touch the freedom to think, hope, or refuse inner capitulation. The poverty that narrows material choices cannot limit the choice to maintain dignity, offer kindness, and find meaning in suffering. The trauma that scars the past cannot determine how you meet the present moment.

And so the final question remains, hanging in the air: What is life without the recognition of this terrible, beautiful freedom? 

Even choosing not to choose is itself a choice. Even in surrender, we remain responsible for surrendering. And even in the deepest prison, we retain the final freedom to say yes or no to who we will become in response to our circumstances.

Men have died for freedom. They passed us this flame. Always and forever, the question is the same: Will you keep it burning? Will you be free?