What Is Freedom: Lynne Tillman

Philosopher Isaiah Berlin drew a seminal distinction between negative liberty, freedom from interference, for instance, from the state, and positive liberty, freedom to self-master, or to live as you want. Berlin said both forms, freedom to and freedom from, are necessary for liberty.

After the Korean War, North Korean President Kim Il Sung established the “three generations punishment” detention camps. Punishment was handed down not just to the protester but also to the following two generations, who would be born in the camp. Punish the next generations severely, in these isolated camps, and, by then, the dictator’s theory went, dissent would be dead.

One of the grandsons was able to escape after 23 years in a camp, and reach South Korea. He didn’t question the world he’d been born into, which is usual; children take for granted their circumstances, for a while. His world had two types of persons: prisoners and guards. His birth was the product of an arranged marriage, a “gift” to worker/prisoners who had behaved well. He didn’t live with his parents, and they didn’t live together, but were occasionally given this gift of sex, or of being husband and wife. There was no idea of family, and the son had no attachment to his parents and his brother. In fact, he admitted later, with a guilt he’d learned outside of the camp, and may have begun to feel that he had turned in his mother and brother as traitors to the camp. They were executed. He watched, without feeling, he said. He did not know how to love, and now in freedom he hopes to be able to know what love is.

He hadn’t longed for freedom. He did not know what that was. What he did long for, what he literally hungered for, was food. The prisoners were kept on a starvation diet. Just enough gruel to survive, the same food everyday. They were always hungry, he said, and he thought about food constantly. The reason he risked death to escape was because a new dissenter had arrived at the camp, and told him that, in the other place, the other Korea, of which he knew very little—he also didn’t know the world was round—there was different food, lots of it, good food. Without knowing what freedom was or might be, he just wanted to stop feeling hungry.

“Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts.” – William Burroughs

The North Korean man was ignorant of any other life than the terrible slavery he was born into and forced to endure. But his body raged with the pain of hunger, it told him to risk death. He had nothing to lose.

I fear, on the 250th anniversary of this ailing union, an imperfect, embattled democracy, too few of us understand how much there is to lose.