One great thing about the trip to Albania was just seeing how much the country had changed in fifteen years. The bullet holes on the walls of government buildings are gone in Tirana, the illegal construction largely torn down, and in its place are the midsized blocks of flats and cafes and bustling traffic (with newish cars, instead of the third-hand stolen diesels of yore) that made the city feel like any middle income capital. The people still seem dazed, but now the daze is accompanied by decent clothes and modern baby buggies.
Before, the country had three million people and Tirana had three hundred thousand; now, the country has slightly fewer people owing to continued emigration, but Tirana has nearly a million people in the metro area. My host told me that nearly one person in six had applied for the US visa lottery program, and many were pushing EU membership so as to increase their ability to get to Europe. On a certain level, I get this. As a country has developed out the crushing poverty that defined Albania in 1990, and after the further existential body blow it experienced in 1997, there reaches a point where enough progress has been made that you become aware of just how long the total journey is. The responses are many – for some it’s the weariness that you still need to keep running uphill, even though for over a generation it’s felt like you’ve done nothing but run. For others, it might be the idea that the “project” of one’s parents is not your project; you just want to experience the possibility of what you can see on the internet and in the media and it all seems a hell of a lot better elsewhere.
Even the bankers I talked to had one foot ready to leave – even though they are arguably some of the best off of the new generation. I tried to discreetly quiz these people about why they wanted to emigrate. Surely, I thought, they would want to complete the project, bring Albania into full status as a European place of its own. Does it have particular advantages? Yes: great food, great local produce, and more sun and a still-largely-unspoiled coastline. This could be a high end tourism destination. And while that might not be the greatest aspiration – coming from Maine, I’m certainly familiar with the existential ambiguity of being a place where people from “real” places escape to – it still offers a pathway to normalcy, to modest but sustainable success and, really, to a kind of happiness. But the people I talked to, partially because they were in finance and had some ambition and wanted to be in the “real” places themselves, all wanted to leave.
I get that. I left Maine when I finished university and it was for the same reason, or rather, a similar set of desires. I wanted to test myself in a bigger pond, and I wanted to define my own journey and my own self on its own terms, not the terms dictated by a small place. Coming back to Maine I can see the beauty and the community and the balance that can exist in a smaller place, but it took me over two decades and a lot of twists and turns to get to where I could see both the truth of what Maine offers and the ambiguities that the larger world carries with it. Yes, the bigger pond tests you and hones your skills – but the bigger pool also dehumanizes you, it relentlessly pushes everyone, even the biggest stars, to the kind of detached instrumentalism that I’ve written about before. You can’t escape it once you’re in it, and after a time, you come to recognize the humanity of what you left behind – especially as time erases some of the memory of being stuck in the provinces, with the narrowed perspective and sometimes narrow thinking that it can engender.
Other of my friends, though, view that ruthless individualism in the centers of capitalism as a kind of positive step along a longer human journey towards enlightenment. The compulsion to make individuals detach is, in their mind, the start of a process where by all of humanity will eventually become fully actualized individuals, escaping the weight of social and ontological “truths” which are imposed upon us without regard to their viability to us as individual selves, and then, and only then, will we be able to define a world where individuals are radically accepted and thus feel able to accept others as well. They are hoping for and envisioning and trying to create that omega point where the rawness and fear of being an individual crushed by an overwhelming society will flip and be replaced where being an individual is defined by a respected and accepted freedom, where society does fundamentally break down but instead of descending into a Hobbesian chaos, those newly liberated individuals – aware of the reciprocal need to both respect and be respected in that freedom – create a new system (not a society) of individuated discovery. The blessings of modern plenty, the releasing power of technology, and the expansive shifts in perspective offered by travel and increasing mutual comprehension will combine with the fully released potential of the individual mind to make something radically new, probably incomprehensible to us today, but nevertheless an evolutionary step forward beyond “early modern mankind”.
I’m not nearly as optimistic as that, but I think they may be on to something, and the younger generation wanting to leave Albania – or even more than that, the ones that have depopulated the countryside to move to the capital – represent the vanguard of individuals taking on independence and seeking to discover something more of themselves. The crowds of people at night, talking with one another but even more of them texting and writing on their smartphones or talking on Skype, are entering a broader world and they are trying to define something for themselves beyond what a local, or even global capitalist, “society” can do.
My question for all of them, though – and for us, especially my friends who see this future world emerging – is what is behind that motivation to leave. I sense that for most, it’s nothing more than the oldest mix in the world, fear and greed. They are afraid of being left behind – or afraid of being judged by the old local society, with its constraining norms of behavior – and they are greedy for something. All too often it’s simply greed for material and physical satiation: let me have the stuff I see online, let me get the sex and physical fulfillment I see being chased and caught by the great and the beautiful, let me give reign to my desires in a way that older societies rejected out of any one of a number of combinations of religious devotion, the constraints of a society that had to acknowledge real constraints on physical resources, and the repression offered at varying levels by normative political systems that sought to maintain control in all spheres of life so as to avoid the risks of social chaos (or less prosaically, to ensure that elites in power don’t lose their privelege).
Sometimes the “greed” (which is a pejorative way of saying it but still, I stand by the word) is for freedom, although I’m personally of the view that greed for freedom is a misunderstanding of what freedom entails. Freedom is normally thought of by my friends as being a release from the crush of external control, exercised either physically in traditional expressions of power or implicitly through shame and shunning and emotional abuse – although most of them are as willing to judge as my mom is, the shame they convey not coming in the traditional form that only a Catholic mom can really pull off but instead in the form of casual denigration of alternative views, a sort of reactionary rejection of all things grounded in simple tradition or folkways, or what for me is the most annoying because it is at its root just tautological, labeling anything other than radical individualism as a kind of creeping reestablishment of the tyranny of the mob.
Freedom has never been that for me. Freedom is much, much harder than simply rejecting past constraints. Freedom is a discipline which requires understanding your own impact on other actors all the time – at that point you have true freedom to act in a way which brings you closer to realizing your potential while not inhibiting others in their own quest to do the same. It also requires a continual destruction of our own internal willingness to rank our own choices and desires as being superior in an absolute sense because of what they contribute to our own sense of authenticity. We can acknowledge that they are most important to us, but without a simultaneous acceptance that others will feel the same about their internal authenticity, and recognizing the damage that could occur if we all simultaneously pursue these authentic goals without acknowledging what we can see as their direct impact on other equal actors, we are simply elevating ourselves above others by assertion. We are, in other words, a bit full of ourselves. Moreover, if all of us ruthlessly focus on our own desires, we would simply replicate the horrors of the unregulated market but instead of doing so in purely material or economic spheres, we would replicate that bloody scramble to achieve in all of the more personal realms which define ourselves as selfs. We move from Dickens’ Hard Times, where we shackle fellow human beings to wool mills, to a far worse hell where we shackle our fellow human beings to endless psychic toil of being forced to carve out space for their own recognized existence against the victors’ will-to-power of their authenticity, which is understood to be superior simply by virtue of being successfully expressed. The strong, or the beautiful, or the insistent will survive; the rest will be crushed, but the ruthless logic of “freedom of authenticity” gives the winners a pleasing kind of moral justification. Their freedom leads to authentic self-expression because it was “right” by virtue of a post-hoc observation of success; the others fail to achieve their own authentic expression of self because they “failed” or their authenticity just wasn’t any good.
In other words, radical freedom without radical personal responsibility is simply selfishness. Radical personal responsibility accepts that my actions – even in pursuit of a goal of personal authenticity which we can grant as being true to one’s self – can produce real damage, and I am responsible for that damage. Saying that the other person is responsible for it – in light of a notion that they are responsible for achieving their own authentic self, and we are both subject to external constraints of which the actions of others are just one type of constraint – is not personal responsiblity, it is a cop out. We will inevitably discard things and concepts that do not help our cause – but that isn’t a blanket excuse to litter, or to waste. We are responsible for leaving no trace, as it were, not just physically in the forest when we’re on a hike, but psychically and emotionally in the personal sphere when we’re exploring what it means to be human in our own, unique, and individual way.
I was challenged on this point earlier this week, though, and it was a powerful challenge. Isn’t a demand for personal responsibility – the call to “leave no trace” when we pursue our authentic self – just another kind of an externally defined “good”? Why should I accept that ontological conception of good behavior over any other? Why, in fact, should anyone accept any ontological good, as opposed to living according to what I experience as my own internalized conception of my own good? Indeed, asserting a need to accept direct responsibility – as opposed to my freedom to adopt any other view, including simply viewing those “costs” as being external to me and thus irrelevant – is exactly what is being rejected by a doctrine of radical personal freedom. My pursuit of my own good – which is good to me, without question – should solely define my own concept of the good, and its nature as a valid good at a point in time will be demonstrated by events, rather than accepted as a preconception of the good before it has acted out.
I don’t have a response for that, at least not one which will hold up without requiring some reference to a notion that there is a good within every sentient individual (and I could extend this to all beings in general, and to world-systems as kinds of beings as well, but I’ll hold the line here for now). Without going that far, we could separately accept that our own individuated experience is all we can know, so we have no responsibility to any other experience which by definition can’t be proved to exist – but I think that’s weak. Intellectually, you could take a completely objectivist view that everything other than our own knowledge of existence and of our sensed self is, from our perspective, merely an object. That would preserve the internal coherence of the radical pursuit of only our own senses of “the good” both for us and for our experience of the world, but it would do so at the cost of no longer understanding the world as a collection of selves.
The people I know who would tend towards such an argument, however, behave observably as if they do, in fact, believe other “beings” or “selves” exist which are morally equivalent to them. They love those other selves, they seek to understand them non-instrumentally, they seek to be understood non-instrumentally by them in a way which demonstrates their practical belief that other sentient beings exist who are worthwhile on their own terms. By observation, then, it’s not just me asserting that other people are not objects; others also face the evidence of living as an intelligent being on Earth and reject a view that the world is simply a collection of non-self objects beheld and comprehended by a wholly unique actor whose subjectivity is absolute. But surely that requires one to assert that, just as you are sentient and can comprehend an internal sense of the good for you, I can do the same for me. That is, in fact, an external assertion of meaning – which is what the “radical freedom fighters” are so sensitive to, after all. Even if the meaning experienced by others is diverse and incomprehensibly different to what I hold to be true, I still have to acknowledge that you have such a meaning. While I can assert that to me, my own reality is more real and more important, in the world, I can make no such assertion of absolute priority because to you, your own reality is more real and important than mine. My good is supreme for me, but surely your good is supreme for you – and in the absence of an ontological sorting mechanism (which, whether I think it exists or not, I agree is not knowable by us, and I wouldn’t dream of imposing one on you), we are forced to pragmatically accept that both “goods” are equal – or to say the same thing, are incomparable when viewed outside of our internal perspective. Just as I will not accept the assertion of precedence of your view over mine, I cannot rationally impose my own view as possessing greater truth value to you than what you find in your own view.
But to take this just one step further, unlesss we have reference to some good existing within us, we’re stuck in our ability to explain why our individual self-expression is good enough to justify pursuing it at all. In other words, rationally, either you accept the idea that what you are pursuing is a good (even if only in reference to you, whatever the “good” happens to mean to you), and thus accept that a notion of “the good” does exist (even if in purely relativistic form) – or you drop out of rationality altogether and say radical personal freedom is really just a license to do whatever the fuck I want, when I want to do it. And I don’t think that’s what my friends who envision personal freedom are saying, not by a long shot. They may sometimes seem to be a bit, er, laissez faire, but they would in all cases assert that they are acting in pursuit of their best idea of what their own conception of the good is – they would, in other words, agree that “good” exists, if only in a form solely understandable or fully relevant to them alone. And their rationalizations of those times where they really do, simply, do whatever the fuck they want, point to what I’d argue is their own sense that just demanding license to be sensual, or louche, or pleasure seeking for its own sake is inadequate even to themselves.
Which leads me to fear. As I said, I think many people are enamored of the vision of a world which transcends an imposed society, with its consensus for normality and its inability to allow a space for those who simply disagree and don’t wish to participate, because of their experienced fear as a member of one or more of the oppressed, or shamed, or ignored, or insulted minorities which exist in any society. This minority could be gendered, or racial, or even simply involve thinking in a way which is not deemed acceptable in today’s social normality. Indeed, more recently, it comes from the fear of loss, the existential and spiritual emptiness felt when the societal conception of “normalcy” that one embraced wholeheartedly starts to shift and move in a different direction, even though you don’t understand why. I didn’t travel in the countryside on this trip, but in talking with people in Tirana who had moved from other parts of the country, this latter sense is probably dominant there. Villages and smaller towns are being hollowed out, leaving behind an older generation that is utterly lost. The younger generation themselves left because of the former idea of fear – the fear that staying with an older consensus would leave their own true selves (gay, feminist, ambitious, artistic, curious, fundamentalist) oppressed by the need to maintain social norms. My guess is all of the younger generation has experienced real fear at moments where they wanted to say something radically different about themselves, and that fear led directly to the decision to leave, to acquire freedom via the anonymity of the city or outside the country, in America or in the EU.
I understand this fear, but bolting for uncharted waters can only go on so long, and in our new world of hyperconnectivity, you’re going to run out of places to hide more quickly than you might imagine (trust me, I know). A century ago – or even fifty years ago – you could head to America and no one would ever see you again. And even in America, you could change coasts and, if particularly fearful, change your name (that’s the whole point of the show Mad Men, or at least its first few seasons), and you could thus outrun anyone from the old neighborhood or the village upstate who might otherwise try to assert the power of the clan or the village or the parish. Not today: at some point you will have to turn and face the consensus that you fear and simply assert your own desire to be your own self. Society hates that, of course, but what I find is that often the way in which people reach that point of self-assertion involves a simultaneous rejection of all elements of society – in other words, a judgment cast on society that society itself is wrong. That’s fair enough, of course, and probably a correct statement of what the affected individual feels – but pragmatically, it’s not exactly a well-calculated tactic. Society’s judgment is what caused you to run, after all – flipping it around and judging society right back will probably have just as effective a response from society. Either society will crawl back into a hole – which maybe is your point, or the character of your desire for revenge upon society – or more likely it will assert itself right back with all the force it can muster.
Which brings me back to the idea that radical freedom carries with it radical personal responsibility, in this light however that a more measured and pragmatic response to finding oneself at that moment where no further flight is possible, would be to assert one’s personal sense of meaning while simultaneously accepting the worth to the other of their own, different viewpoint, even when “the other” is society as a whole rather than another person. I gotta be me, to quote Steve Lawrence (or Sammy Davis Jr., depending on which version you prefer), but that doesn’t mean I have any beef with you not accepting it or doing something different for yourself. More than that: personal responsibility means you require nothing from society whatsoever, that you can assert your own need for authenticity without any “need” for anything in return. That requires an amount of personal strength that may be unreasonable to expect from most people – but again, that’s radical personal responsibility. It’s not easy, it may take some practice and training to develop the personal strength and fortitude required, but it doesn’t make it any less necessary for this kind of radical freedom to be achieved without simply triggering an endless cycle of assertion, counter assertion, and conflict.
Moreover, I think that same negative cycle is exactly what would play out in a world where radical personal freedom and the pursuit of individual authenticity existed without the simultaneous acceptance of radical personal responsibility. My authenticity will sometimes compel me to take actions which hurt you – say, when I left my marriage to pursue a kind of freedom that was, really, necessary to me, not only to feel happy but to feel capable of being fully alive as my own self. My ex-wife and my son rightly confronted me in this, taking the role of the other which counterasserts their own desires for self-expression and actualization. My first technique was to basically say “I’m important and your desires for me are not,” and it was predictably a failure. It was lucky that the ex-wife and the son were patient, and it was good that I had friends that reminded me of my own strength. We broke the cycle of assertion and counter-assertion, and I accepted my own role in picking up the pieces – but asked in so doing to be respected for what I needed. But even that was too much: the divorce counselor helped me see that all I had to do was say what was authentic to me, and accept what “authenticity” meant for my ex-wife. Not to ask that I be accepted, but instead, just a simple acceptance of her reality even though it wasn’t something I could embrace for myself any longer. And only once I had done that did my ex-wife adjust, and since then (with a few fits and starts on both sides, but hey, we’re not perfect) has been nothing short of brilliant in allowing me to express who I need to be while still appropriately asking for me to accept my own responsibility to her and to my son.
Not every situation will have this kind of benign response loop, and I get that. Sometimes you will do the right thing – assert your own needs for self-actualization and authenticity while still acknowledging and accepting the separate and different needs of the other – and the other will be immature, or scared themselves, or assert a power relationship in an attempt to simply bully you into backing down. This is what we see far too often, whether it’s in the reaction-response of media to assertions by religious or rural populations disrupted by social change or the response of Trump and the NRA to high schoolers who have just seen their classmates shot in front of them. No doubt when that happens, a decision to leave the frame entirely, name change and restraining order in hand, is perfectly valid. I’d argue, though, that we rarely do a good job of approaching that conversation in the right way in the first place, and therefore we don’t really have the right to say “it’s their fault” yet when that is the case. We may well deserve forgiveness and charity because what it takes to make us assert our needs often builds over time and over a stressful, wearing set of prior events, and we aren’t as strong as we need to be when the time comes to turn and confront society. But even there, we have to understand that asserting our own needs, at the cost of ignoring or devaluing the needs of the others who are otherwise reluctant to grant us the room to exercise our freedom to be, is a tactical decision that engineers its own failure.
Another way of saying this is that if you want radical personal freedom, if you want to create a system of being (instead of a society of forms) that has room for you and for others to define your own independent and radically different kind of truth on your own, continuously and dynamically in time and in space, then you have to create it – you can’t ask the society you find yourself in at any given moment to create that space for you. That takes strength, and that strength is the essence of personal responsibility. Creating that space requires taking responsibility for the space you inhabit, including the damage you may cause to others in the act of creation. You retain the freedom to join with others in love and in help, but you accept their freedom to not accept your love, or to accept the love of others but deny it to you. That doesn’t mean that your notion of truth is wrong, or that others are by definition going to deny you the freedom to accept it – but it does demand that you take responsibility for the ripples of consequence of your truth. Without that responsibility, there isn’t freedom, there is only either license – which is what leads to the nasty, brutish and short lives of Hobbes’ state of nature – or a kind of radical objectification of other selves which stands in contradiction to your own desire to be seen as a self worthy of recognition.
In Tirana, “freedom” is still relative. While the country long ago discarded the state control systems of totalitarianism, they were largely replaced by the implicit oppression involved in what is still a deeply corrupt state. While the days of police demanding bribes on the spot are largely gone, they aren’t entirely gone, and the memories live deep still. The older generation is still somewhat shellshocked by the replacement of a state which told everyone what to do – and while not free, there was some comfort in that – with a radically capitalist (if quite criminal) environment where you are forced to decide what your role will be and then to fight for it. The pursuit of material basic needs is still a real conflict for most – Albania is not a country that will be debating a universal basic income any time soon – and there is no freedom in that, there is the trap of wage slavery even if there is a veneer of trying to justify that with the expansion of media and other sources of immediate pleasure.
I’m not sure we’re close to seeing an ideal society of personal freedom emerge yet anywhere, let alone in an emerging Balkan democracy still shedding the demons and shadows of totalitarianism and civil collapse. But fifteen years since I first went there, the progress is astonishing. It’s incorrect to call it a new country; it is a new society emerging from the shell of an older one, with new issues and questions but unquestionably more evolved, more free, and more capable than what existed before. I understand how even that progress can make younger Albanians so impatient for what’s next that they want to emigrate to find it. As someone who has seen what else modern society has put together, though, I’d caution them to pause and reflect whether they’ll find it by moving away, or whether a stronger strategy would be to simply focus on developing the internal strength to believe in what they are doing in place. And to use that belief, that confidence, to then face down the remaining demons, and the new demons that will emerge out of the new society, without fear and with an empathetic understanding of why society became so worried about resisting their desire for freedom.
That journey is not simple, and I don’t know where it will lead in Albania when so many of the people who you’d assume would have the capability to steward that shift just want to get out. The country could be left with those who have muscled their way to the top of the heap and now simply wish to maintain the status quo, and those who can’t leave or are too scared to do so. But the situation for those of us lucky enough to be in the rich and innovative parts of the West may not be in better shape – especially if our conception of freedom is so wholly personal that it rejects or ignores the freedom of others to pursue their own narrative. I’m not saying that I’m any good at this, by the way – yes, the divorce has taught me a lot, but I cringe to think of how readily I still fail, either in demanding others to accept something or, worse and more recently and painfully, in lacking the strength to be me in the first place, and then in failing to accept another’s need to be themselves because I’ve not made the first move required in obtaining my own freedom. I’m still learning. But I think I’ve come to the point where emigration isn’t an option, and turning away from the other isn’t on offer either. I need to get stronger, but here I am. I’m not free yet, but I’m closer.