Most concepts have many facets. For the most part thinkers have seen freedom as a challenge, based on a natural urge to impose some ethical structure upon the actions of human beings. In fact thinkers down the ages have concentrated on these actions as have governments as they emerged as necessary forms of control upon huge populations.
But actions are not even half the story, because they have been immersed in backward religious thinking that seeks to impose something that is not there in order to persuade human beings to see freedoms as the conduit for being better people. There can be no heaven as long as human beings propagate a hell on earth for ever other living thing and all religions are bind to some things.
But as anyone who has been incarcerated will tell you with the ancient cri de coeur, ‘you can lock-up my body, but you cannot chain my mind.’ Freedom starts and ends where all human activity starts and ends…with the mind. And those of us who think we are free should look around and wonder why so many people do so many of the same things for the same reasons at the same time of day and night. For the freedom of the mind is something that can be taken away from us before are even aware we have minds, when we are being taught.
The liberation of ideas is the only freedom.