I sometimes think of freedom when I'm on the highway. Luckily I'm not in it every day but when rush hour hits there's no freedom, it's just dog eat dog for the most part. There are also thousands of others on the same highway that I am on. Lots going in my direction, and lots going in the opposite direction. At night you can observe a sea of red lights in the lane I am in., and a sea of white lights on the opposite side of the highway. It happens nearly every day and night for a few hours in every major and minor city in the world. People get frustrated and dismayed at the way others drive and the sudden traffic hazards that constantly present during the commute. No Type I for Earth.

Like crabs in a bucket, they just have to try and draw you back down into their despair when you reach the rim of the bucket and turn back to offer them a hand up, they haul you back down. Live free and at least you can say that you lived before you died, that you didn't just shuffle around in a crowded bucket waiting for your turn in the pot of boiling water.

I think freedom of choice, freedom from fear, etc are natural states. If anything, natural selection has caused us to pay way too much attention to real and imagined existential threats and to pretty much ignore non-threats, including boons, as irrelevant to survival. So fear and anxiety and avoidance are, regrettably, the state we gravitate toward unless we push against it deliberately.

So while I don't believe we were made, there is a sense in which we're optimized to "forget that we are free". Because that makes it more likely we'll survive. The problem is that natural selection optimizes for survival (and in fact only survival long enough to reproduce); it does not optimize for enjoyment. That is work we have to do for ourselves.

"We are free to be who we are without fear or guilt."
I wonder if that would have worked as a defense at the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy or Peter Sutcliffe?

The only freedom people have is to suffer the consequences of their actions and more importantly their inactions.

the idea of being "made" at all is a false ideology. this sounds very nice and it's not an unkind thing, but we were not MADE, and not everyone was born and raised the same way, either. also, if you're black and you walk down the street, unarmed, breathing, you can be fearless if you want but a cop just MIGHT shoot you dead just for the hell of it. how free would you be then?

g

loss of attention leads to enslavement