What Does it mean When We Say “Freedom” ? by Panos Papadimitropoulos / Void Network

It is common knowledge in the areas of social sciences, especially social anthropology, that reality constituted symbolically, that the meaning that people give to the world does not reflect a deeper essence of things but is the product of the relationship between what we are talking about and the importance we attribute to it. In this sense, two people can understand the same situation, relationship or event in different ways without necessarily mean that one of them understands the ‘thing’ “correctly” while the other “wrong.”
“Logos” are the words and the meaning we attach to them. As a body of knowledge or opinions about something, “Logos” follows a specific reasoning, but is also a symbolic figure, a way to talk about things in a particular categorization of the world. The various misconceptions or misunderstandings that we see every day especially in the public political discourse stemming in part by it: that different people use the same words or terms to speak about different “things”. What does the word “State” means for someone who runs to avoid the police attack on a demonstration and what means for a minister lying to an expensive limousine? What does “security” means for a 15 years old and what for a police officer? What does it mean when we say «Freedom»? Or «Equality»? Who determines what «Freedom» is and how this becomes Free Action? Especially on historical experience and interpretation, usually a set of meanings is what determines the one or the other understanding of a specific event. Thus, the neo-conservative reflexes of some may be led them to understand the recent uprising of last December as a symptom of a society in decline and a state unable to respond to the will of those who run on ‘absurd’ wrath against property. On the other hand, the libertarian way of approaching the same events observe in them a much-needed break with forces that oppress the individual and the society. The dominant logos of the government and the corporate media-“consequential and moralistic from above” – conflicts with the heterogeneity of those who still dare to speak for the revolution, a process that in Western political culture is equivalent to a different society. The collision of these two “worlds” illustrates the ways in which the meanings are subject to constant renegotiation according to the motives, purposes and ideas of the people. At the same time we observe that culture is a set of meanings which stem from multiple reasons and experiences that create multiple ways to exist in the world.Culture is itself an area of conflict, change and devising of existing meanings. “There are so many ways to live!” … Are they? Although we can not act or think outside the cultural-historical context in which we live, we can gradually transform the content of the «words» of this world through our actions and decisions. In this way we can walk towards the reclaiming of our lives.
‘Community’, ‘comradeship’, ‘mutual aid’, ‘solidarity’, ‘play’, ‘dissent’ are some of the “words” to which we have to give new content because they can probably give rise to actions, thoughts and feelings that will warm our hearts again and bring us closer to the people we love, closer to the social conditions that we want to live. In the age of solitude, of apathy and isolation of human beings our culture may be transformed more fertile through the words and acts of the lovers, the insurgents, the furious for life and freedom, the utopians and the daring dreamers.