Endless prisons

Abstract

The text addresses the complexity of freedom and prison from a philosophical and reflective perspective.  Although each individual perceives himself as free, in fact he is always imprisoned by different concepts and conditions imposed by society and by his own mind.  The prison metaphor unfolds in several layers: when freeing oneself from one, one often finds oneself imprisoned in another, perpetuating a cycle of escapes and new imprisonments. As a result, lucidity about our condition as captives can be as illusory as it is liberating, because those who think they are free often impose their own prisons on others, without realizing that they are trapped in their own beliefs and ideas. The search for freedom can be an incessant search for new forms of imprisonment, where escaping from one reality only puts us in another prison, less noticeable at first glance. The reflection extends to political, social and religious life, suggesting that many aspects of society are structured as invisible prisons, where laws and norms function as bars that limit individual freedom. Death is seen as a point where all prisons dissolve, but it is also questioned as an idea that shapes our existence within the very prisons we create.  However, the text challenges the traditional idea of freedom by suggesting that, even in the quest for emancipation, we may only be moving between different forms of confinement, without ever achieving true absolute freedom.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.56238/sevened2024.018-014