This follows on from my wish to give freedom to others.
Audience too. That’s the crucial point. I want my work to be accessible enough, to have enough space in it to allow someone else the freedom to collaborate with it emotionally.
Freedom. I think this is the beginning of finding my language to express the social value of the arts.
Freedom is a funny old thing. When corporations started offering people choice, using choice as a marketing tool (“Have whatever colour phone you want!”) it felt like freedom.
Freedom of Expression
… which resulted in lots of companies having to go that way and offer choice, and then lots of people were trying to sell you the idea of ‘freedom of expression’, and with that healthy market competition came
Freedom of Choice
Always with the word ‘freedom’ attached to it, because it sounds so positive. So much like a human right.
But freedom of choice brings with something with it:
Responsibility
Choice is overwhelming because choice makes you choose, and choosing takes effort. You have to take responsibility for the process of choosing, and then for the choice you finally make.
This is, after all, the era of lawsuits, of disclaimers, of putting the responsibility on the customer because we put the choice into the hands of the customer. They wanted it! They asked for it!
Barack Obama put a spin on it. It’s your own personal responsibility, he said, to make your country great again. You can make that change happen. You have you the choice to have the power.
But our power now lies within us as a grassroots movement, because the whole having-the-choice turned us into a collective: the thing that the biggest group of individuals wants is what will be provided, so we all gotta stand up and ask for it.
(… democratic socialism? Social democracy? Soc-racy? Socrates? Not being political. Just playing with words. I don’t really do political.)
But standing up and asking for it gives us a sense of social identity. Doesn’t it? I mean, it makes financial and political sense, but I’m one of the people who voted for Obama (being American by birth) and I feel socially connected with the US for having played my part.
For having mattered.
I stood up and was counted.
This leads onto grassroots.
