Hominids and Colored Cloth

Imagine for a moment that you are an alien. You are unfamiliar with Earth, its customs, mores, financial systems, and legal frameworks. Suppose you land on Earth and must document the habits of its dominant species, Homo Sapiens. Supposed further you are specifically responsible for documenting the United States and its economic and societal structures.

What might you find-- and how might you describe it without the context of culture?

As an alien with no prior knowledge of human civilization, society would likely seem very odd. You might be perplexed by things like "money" or "markets". You would have no conception of politics, economics, psychology, or capital.

You might be confused by the ways these highly-evolved hominids organize themselves, with their social hierarchies and conventions. You would likely see some things as unnecessary or absurd.

For instance, you might find it odd these highly evolved hominids would speak at length about the importance of their children, when 1 in 6 of them live in poverty. This would make this group of hominid children the most impoverished group in the region.

You might ask why this is so. The answer would involve a colored cloth used as a unit of exchange. You would find this cloth to be vitally important to the hominids. So important in fact, that systems developed to allocate resources using the cloth have created the problem of child poverty through mechanisms of discrimination. 

This might strike you as odd. After all, didn't the hominids create the cloth, the markets which exchange it, the products which it buys, and the social institutions which surround it?

Surely, with all their technology and knowledge these hominids might find innumerable ways to give their offspring adequate food and shelter?

Jean-Paul Sartre and Human Freedom

The above is an exercise in existentialist philosophy. At the risk of belaboring the point, it is meant to demonstrate the social constructions us humans are willing to buy into. In many ways, this ability to collectively believe in abstractions is good. Because we can create mental constructs like money, we have markets to allocate resources, airplanes to crisscross the planet, and societies which rival in their complexity the most assiduous of animals.

These constructs also cause a lot of human suffering. At times, this suffering seems unnecessary but for collective understandings of markets, inflation, wages, or welfare. There is a strong humanist tradition in critiquing these systems to expose their brutality. The French Revolution was nothing less than a collective realization that systems like monarchy and aristocracy were not inevitable. The humanism of the 20th century was further characterized by denouncing the status quo for a more perfect future.

It was in this context that French Existentialist Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote his first book, Nausea. In the book, Sartre describes his understanding of philosophical freedom. The protagonist, Roquentin, asserts his freedom by realizing he has nothing at all to live for. He sees the universe as indifferent to his yearning for cosmic relevance. He realizes his existence is not metaphysically necessary and is thus fundamentally unbound. Without necessity, Roquentin has nothing but existence for its own sake to live for. 

With nothing to live for, he is freed from having anything to die for-- he has lost all mooring to the society in which he lives. In doing so, he loses his view of society through social norms. He suddenly sees the world around him without any social shorthand or collective abstraction.

He is, in the most fundamental sense, a free man.

This philosophical freedom is a precept for political freedom. We can take our society in the abstract and see that those principles which guide us are often self-imposed. With this knowledge it becomes equally apparent that such principles can be changed. 

With this freedom, we could find new ways to exchange goods and services-- better ways which do not force children to live in poverty, nor allow thousands to live without homes, nor deny millions insurance for their medical needs. We could reshape political, social, and economic institutions-- knowing full-well we are the lathes of their intention.

Fundamentally, the political freedom of existential philosophy is creative. By temporarily stepping back and looking at society without social, cultural, and economic preconceptions, we can more clearly see the brutality which we tacitly and collectively allow.

The freedom of existentialism is realizing we need not allow it. Armed with this knowledge, our species may climb ever closer to the ecstatic ideals of humanism: freedom, reason, equality, social justice, and economic dignity.