On that day, at 11.10am, Eric parked his grey Honda outside the school. The first person he encountered was his friend Brooks, who had just gone on lunch break. “Hey, how come you weren’t there for the Chinese philosophy test this morning?” he asked Eric, finishing his cigarette. “It doesn’t matter anymore.” Eric waved, then stopped for a moment and glanced at his friend: “I like you. Get out of here. Go home,” he said, then walked off towards the school. Something in his friend’s voice and the way he looked at him made Brooks heed his advice.
At 11.14am, Dylan Klebold, Eric’s best friend, joined him in front of the canteen. They were both wearing black coats; Dylan, 17 years old, had an Intratec TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol hidden under his coat, and 18-year-old Eric had a 9mm Hi-Point Carbine rifle under his. Additional shotguns, spare ammunition and hand-made bombs had been packed into backpacks and sports bags.
It was a sunny April day in Littleton, Colorado; not quite noon.
At 11.18am, Eric and Dylan glanced at each other in silence. They nodded: “Now!” Eric undid his coat, the weapon glistening underneath. At 11.19am, they fired their first shots in the direction of two random students who were eating their lunch on the grass. For the next 49 minutes, the boys lived out their dream, killing 13 and injuring 24 high school students, shooting police officers and teachers, detonating explosives and concluding the drama with a double suicide.
America shook with fear and outrage. This was the Columbine shooting of 1999, which at the time was one of the bloodiest in the history of the US. But now, 19 years later, following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown in 2012 (26 deaths), at the Las Vegas music festival in 2017 (59 deaths), and in Orlando in 2016 (50 deaths), Columbine doesn’t even make it into the top 10. Once again, in 2018, 17 people were killed in a similar attack at a high school in Parkland, Florida. All in the name of freedom.
The fatalities and casualties incurred were the price that had to be paid for the inviolable right of citizens to keep and bear arms, guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution – a stance supported by many commentators on the American political scene. “This is the price of freedom. Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are. The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection. Even the loons,” commented Fox News journalist Bill O’Reilly following the Las Vegas shooting. He wasn’t being ironic, nor is he alone in his views.
According to the Pew Research Center, 74% of Americans who own weapons believe that their right to bear arms is the foundation of freedom. 35% of citizens who don’t own weapons share this opinion. So far, no amount of deaths of innocent children has been able to change this attitude – nor, therefore, the law.
Perhaps we’re viewing it with a sense of moral superiority, but aren’t we paying a heavy price for the blind admiration of individual freedom?
The curse of the green olives
In my village in the 1980s, there was one shop. With a pair of scales shaped like a chunk of cheese, a faded red-and-white chequered oilcloth on the counter, and a saleswoman who, to put it mildly, was not characterized by great politeness, it was not a place that inspired excitement. Since the availability of goods in the communist Polish People’s Republic also left much to be desired, purchases were simple: they were made quickly (unless you were the local gossip or the village slacker), and then forgotten about completely.
I hankered after this simplicity while I was doing the Christmas shopping last year, when I found myself unable to put an actual pack of green olives into my basket. After 10 minutes of studying the shelves in the ‘TINNED VEGETABLES’ section, I still didn’t know which ones to buy – however you look at it, olives are olives, they’re salty and they’re in a jar. 15 minutes in, the impossibility of choosing was beginning to frustrate me. By 20 minutes, I had reached an unknown reserve of powerlessness and was overcome with a general dislike for olives, Greece, Greeks, all of humanity, and myself.
My experience is far from unique. Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist at Swarthmore College, created a theory based on this type of behaviour, which he describes in his book The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less. Schwartz argues that the Western dogma of maximizing choice causes suffering rather than leading to happiness. He gives the example of the health service. Doctors, as authority figures, used to tell sick patients: “In order to get better, do this, and don’t do that,” full stop. Today it’s more complicated. The doctor provides information about available treatment options, the risks and benefits associated with them, and then asks the patient what they want to do. “We call it ‘patient autonomy’, which makes it sound like a good thing. What it really is, is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody who knows something – namely, the doctor – to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus, not in the best shape to be making decisions,” explained Schwartz during his TED Talk. In his opinion, the abundance of options means that we end up feeling guilty if we chose incorrectly, agonizing over the virtues of the alternatives. Moreover, the consequence is often decision paralysis.
Proof of this comes from research carried out by Vanguard, a mutual fund company based in the US. Their analysts were amazed to discover that the more pension fund options an employer made available to choose from, the fewer people signed up for them. For every 10 funds offered, 2% fewer employees registered. With 50 funds, 10% fewer employees participated. In other words: people were voluntarily forgoing several thousand dollars a year from their employer. Why? “With fifty funds to choose from, it’s so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you’ll just put it off till tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and then tomorrow and tomorrow, and of course, tomorrow never comes,” explains Schwartz. This may all seem like a typical first world problem, but the effects of an overdose on freedom can be much more serious.
Who’s finally going to set things right?
In October 2016, the editor-in-chief of the large Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság, announced, to the delight of his employees, that they would be celebrating (with pizza) the move of the editorial office to a new building. The directors planned the move to take place on a Sunday. But on the Saturday, the journalists at Népszabadság noticed that they couldn’t access their business emails, nor could they get into the newsroom, and the newspaper’s website had disappeared, unbeknown to the directors. The paper had been shut down. The official reason was financial problems; the unofficial reason was that the left-wing Népszabadság, which was critical of the government, had fallen prey to the prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who currently has about 500 media titles in Hungary under his control. This conflict is just one in a long line of skirmishes over the future of democracy in Hungary, which is among the group of countries that have taken an abrupt turn to the right – alongside Poland, of course.
“Modern European and American history is centred around the effort to gain freedom from the political, economic, and spiritual shackles that have bound men,” writes Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom. “One tie after another was severed. Man had overthrown the domination of nature and made himself her master; he had overthrown the domination of the Church and the domination of the absolutist state. The abolition of external domination seemed to be not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition to attain the cherished goal: freedom of the individual.”
But freedom quickly turned out to be a bitter pill to swallow. Instead of the ‘end of history’, the constant growth of prosperity and the progress of democratization, today we see nation after nation putting their fate, with relief, in the hands of “strong leaders”, “fathers of the nation” (and, frankly, populists), sharing the dream of a ruler who will “finally take care of everything” and “set things right” – whatever ‘everything’ and ‘right’ mean. In the collective subconscious, the figure of a righteous father behind the wheel of the country provides enormous comfort: he removes from society the burden of deciding, the necessity to participate, the unbearable burden of choice.
The prize winner’s mother
The assumption that we have full freedom of choice when it comes to partners, lifestyle, place of residence and careers is relatively new (to find out just how new, we need only discuss this topic with our grandparents and great-grandparents). It’s also hard to defend. What if we asked the woman who’s been married three times, each of her husbands having descended into alcoholism, about this freedom? Or all those families where no woman was able to experience happiness in her marriage; those where teenage suicides were an inescapable fate; those where, from time immemorial, anyone who was financially successful developed a serious illness; those where working yourself to death was considered the norm; those where generations of men have been unable to show love to their children. All those families where destinies are repeated like stage roles played by ever-changing actors.
Maybe we’re not the architects of our own fortunes at all – what if someone else is wielding the pencil, and we’re just watching the sketch be drawn out? Maybe we’re being moved by invisible, mysterious forces, which we try to name, to convince ourselves that we’re in control of them, just to be less afraid. Sometimes, our actions are motivated by such simple causes and such basic needs that we’re ashamed to admit it. That’s when we use the excuse of freedom.
When I started working as a journalist, I was convinced that I was going against my parents’ expectations. That’s until I remembered that when I was at nursery school, I used to show off by reading aloud from newspapers, which was a source of great pride for my mother. Since newspapers were associated with my mother’s joy, was it even possible for me to subconsciously choose another profession? When I started studying psychotherapy, I was sure that this time I was doing it purely for myself. That’s until I realized that my mother had dreamed of one of her children studying something related to medicine. At the end of the day, my sister hadn’t become a nurse, so the responsibility fell to me. Was I capable of choosing differently… and are we ever?
When J. M. Coetzee received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, he quoted in his banquet speech a conversation with his partner Dorothy Driver, who had said to him after the announcement of the nomination: “How proud your mother would have been. What a pity she isn’t still alive…” “Dorothy was right,” said Coetzee. “My mother would have been bursting with pride. ‘My son, the Nobel Prize winner.’ And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes, if not for our mothers? ‘Mummy, Mummy, I won a prize!’ ‘That’s wonderful, my dear, now eat your carrots before they get cold.’”
Translated by Kate Webster
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