The illusion of "autonomy": a reflection on freedom and comfort

In the grand repertoire of human ideals, few enjoy such unanimous prestige as freedom. It is invoked in solemn speeches, proclaimed as the fundamental pillar of civilisation, and woven without hesitation into the moral grammar of every modern society. Yet today there is an unsettling paradox that, I believe, more and more people are gradually coming to realise: the more a word is celebrated, the more prone it is to becoming an empty shell.

Just try it: repeat a word quickly, over and over until you tire of it, and you will see that at some point it stops making sense. This is known as “semantic satiation.” Today we have something of that: we talk about freedom everywhere and, often, we don’t even know what it really means, because each person seems to have their own definition, and along the way the true essence of freedom is lost.

We tend to regard autonomy and/or freedom as an irrevocable achievement, and most people stay alert for when it is abruptly attacked, ready to defend it. However, we run the risk of overlooking the fact that its loss rarely happens dramatically, and that, more commonly, it is lost slowly and silently, as its substance is gradually hollowed out.

For centuries, the threat to freedom had an unmistakable face, because the danger lay in coercion, in explicit censorship, in power’s monopoly over thought, in the persecution of dissidents, and in the violence of a state that sought to shape citizens’ lives according to the worldview of those in power. In the face of that head-on domination, the cause of freedom was conceptually clear: one resisted, one kept watch, and there was a clear distinction between the repressed individual and the oppressive authority. And while it is true that these forms of subjugation continue to exist in various parts of the world, reducing the problem of freedom to the survival of traditional tyranny is a rather short-sighted, and dangerous, view of our modern society.

Today, the erosion of personal autonomy stems from a far subtler and more effective mechanism, because power no longer simply prohibits from the outside; it works through the environment that organises life from within. How? Through a culture that makes the exercise of one’s own judgement tiresome and unnecessary. Following somewhat in the line of Michel Foucault, contemporary freedom, rather than being violently cut down, is administered, cushioned, and progressively anaesthetised by an excessive craving for comfort, security, and overprotection — discipline.

We live in an ecosystem designed to minimise friction; we delegate to automated systems, institutional experts, and prefabricated consensus the task of filtering reality, anticipating our needs, and steering our decisions. And everything seems to be getting worse with the rise of artificial intelligence, which has boomed in recent years. What this leads to is that, on the surface, we have never had so many options, yet, in practice, we have rarely exercised choices so devoid of substance; because comfort dulls our judgement, insofar as judgement often becomes a nuisance, a source of conflict. We grow used to being led because being guided is infinitely easier than bearing the weight of uncertainty that comes with making decisions for ourselves.

Indeed, in line with this way of thinking, in which we are not adults but children who need to be guided and are therefore in a constant state of fragility that some outside party must attend to — under the pretext of protecting the individual from any harshness, discomfort, or conflict — institutions and the social climate seem to have been configured to treat the citizen as a permanent minor. Thus, guardianship multiplies and the margin for risk shrinks, without anyone noticing that true human maturity is forged in environments that make demands on the person, not in sterile ones where freedom has no contact with difficulty.

Freedom demands the possibility of making mistakes, of bearing the consequences of one’s own decisions, and of sustaining a disagreement without immediately seeking the shelter of a higher authority. Whoever is protected from everything ends up incapable of standing on their own, and that induced weakness is then used to justify new forms of intervention. In fact, as Tom Palmer aptly explains in Self-Control or State Control, it even undermines people’s self-esteem, because they come to believe they are incapable of fending for themselves.

At the same time, the drive for conformity exerts a pressure to fit in that also translates into silence: into not thinking critically or, at least, not expressing it, out of fear of community rejection, panic over moral stigma, and the fatigue of holding a dissenting view against a unanimous chorus. Today, the social cost of thinking independently has become excessive, so many choose to adopt the voice that guarantees acceptance. Thus, freedom of expression remains intact in the law but atrophies in everyday life, because uniformity has taken hold as the safest survival strategy.

In this scenario, there is nothing left but to remember that freedom is, above all, a demand of character. For autonomy to be real, it requires people willing to endure the solitude of their own judgement, to cultivate intellectual patience in the face of the immediacy of slogans, and to take on individual responsibility as an inescapable duty — because freedom without responsibility is a contradiction. It requires the sober capacity to answer for one’s own actions without shifting blame onto social abstractions or the guardianship of some organisation, least of all the state, however well-intentioned they may seem.

It is simple: no constitution or institutional design will sustain freedom if individuals give up the moral muscle needed to live it. If we prefer the cushioned peace of permanent protection to the risk of relying on our own judgement, we will have surrendered the most valuable part of our human condition without anyone needing to take it from us by force. Freedom endures only where there are citizens who believe that the discomfort of thinking and deciding for themselves is worth infinitely more than the consolation of a comfortably furnished obedience.

Originally published in Spanish by ContraPoder.