Meet Shmily, he is 23 years old and lives in Williamsburg. He is part of a very insular community known as Satmar Chassidus. He spends his day praying, studying religious texts, helping out with the three kids at home, and then more praying. Shmily’s whole world exists within a few blocks of the home where he grew up. His synagogue is on the corner, his grocery store is a few minutes down the block, his children's school is across the street. His entire life is based in the community with virtually no outside exposure. His friends and acquaintances live similar lives, share similar opinions, and are similarly confined to this world of several blocks. No one in Shmily's community is fluent in English, only Yiddish, Shmily included. None of them had any kind of secular education. The very notion of attending a public school would have resulted in excommunication from his community.
In Shmily’s community, voting in general elections is absolutely encouraged. For Shmily, every political opinion, including choice of candidates, begins and ends at the pulpit. His rabbis choose candidates every election, and the community votes accordingly. News of the outside world, as well as Shmily's entire political worldview, come from the sermons his rabbi gives on the sabbath. By default, he has no choice in where he gets his information from and is therefore locked into the biases and viewpoints of his authority figures.
Shmily is effectively in a cult. He is who we all imagine when we think of someone who lacks freedom. But does the average American, who has the opportunity to be exposed to more viewpoints and perspectives, actually have more freedom?
Meet Michael, he is 45 years old and lives in San Antonio, Texas. He has a diverse social group and considers himself to be extremely open minded. He has the complete freedom to go anywhere he wants, talk to anyone he wants, read anything he wants, and pick which news outlets to follow. Michael is who we imagine when we think of a free man. He uses that freedom to expose himself to the narratives and viewpoints he considers the most accurate and sensible. In the past, Michael has spent time flipping through the news channels on TV to get a sample of all the different viewpoints. Nowadays, he's settled on a channel whose analysis he considers to be both accurate and trustworthy. He has done away with listening to other commentators and news sources, as none of them compare to the analysis of his chosen network. Since this was a free choice on his part, he still considers himself a free thinker.
Michael’s circumstances are different than that of Shmilly’s. He has more choices and is therefore generally considered much more free. Due to his freedom, people like Michael are perceived as open minded. In contrast, people like Shmily, due to his lack of freedom, are viewed as close minded. However, are Shmily and Michael really that different?
Despite Michael's illusion of freedom, he has ended up just as isolated as Shmily. Both Michael and Shmily block out the influences of all other viewpoints other than that of their authority figures.
True freedom requires constant effort and is easily lost when that effort is not applied. If someone like Michael were to make the effort to become truly free, it would not be simple. First and foremost, it would require opening himself to a broad range of sources for news and political discourse--most importantly, those that conflict with each other and with his own views. It's a terrifying task to subject your opinions to such thorough intellectual critique, but this is what is necessary for real intellectual objectivity. The more sources he reads, the more he’ll notice how some he previously considered trustworthy are still lacking in their thoroughness or, in fact, even outright deceptive by using logical fallacies and other forms of rhetorical manipulation.
No one writer can ever truly remove their biases from their writings, so sticking to a single source, however trustworthy, will always result in a limited and skewed range of thought. In order to be truly free, one must be informed about all potential opinions, aware of all arguments, and able to completely make their own decisions based on the facts.
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