Throughout history human beings have chosen to have comfort over giving away some essential freedoms and experiences that take away their individuality and leads them towards something more of a communal mental state rather than their self-seeking life understanding. From Odysseus's crew eating the Lotus flowers in exchange of happiness and a sense of comfort to the beginning of the enlightenment ideas which spoke about the treaties of government in which people would be willing to trade in some of their freedoms away in exchange for safety and an order in their life to now the rise of complacent of people through easy manipulation of masses and easy to get lost from our goals through the use of AI in order to solve our problems and not to think and use our thoughts and ideas which are what makes us human, fast food and fast paced life. In our current lives, algorithms and fast fashion recommend our news and what we see, apps and our phones track our daily habits, and most of us click OK to security options without ever thinking why, we as an species have become mindless through what we are fed being easily managed and being seen as an asset as long as you continue to be hooked to the cheap pleasure which life has been giving people. Humanity does not lose its freedom in a moment—it drifts from it, step by step, in search of comfort, speed, and certainty. In the rhythm of notifications and algorithmic pleasures, people forget they were ever meant to choose. Like the men who ate the Lotus or the people of Anthem, we become content to live without remembering what living really is. This quiet erosion of autonomy is not new. In ancient myth, the Lotus-Eaters gave up their mission for a dreamless peace. In dystopian visions like Anthem, people surrendered their names and thoughts for collective security. Meanwhile today, we are surrender by machines that predict and strike in all our neurotransmitters of happiness in order to keep us drugged, all while the machines predict and fulfill our desires before we speak them, we fall into the illusion that we are still choosing, while each step is not a violent takeover but it’s rather a subtle drift into comfort and into forgetting who we are, making it easier for our society to become like Anthem, controlled and pleased.
In The Odyssey, the episode of the Lotus-Eaters offers an early and timeless example of how humanity willingly surrenders autonomy in exchange for comfort. The cause of this surrender its found in between the crew’s desire to escape the hardship of their journey since after years of war and travel, the alluring taste of the lotus flower promised to the crew members something that they had not found in a while; peace, pleasure and forgetfulness. It is not effectively the force that seduces them, but relief. As a result, the men abandon their mission and lose all their senses of purpose and identity in their life. They have forgotten the strength which drove them every day into going back home, not because they are imprisoned by force but because they no longer care. This effect which is the quiet loss of autonomy through voluntary ease, easily mirrors the fundamental pattern what we as humans have done since our beginnings; when the struggle for freedom feels too painful, people with end up choosing to stop fighting rather than being free. The Lotus flowers were not specifically a tyrant but rather is the comfort that precisely erases their will. Thus, the submission of the two members of the crew clearly illustrates how seductive pleasure can dull the human drive for independence, laying the groundwork for future societies that will trade liberty for ease without realizing what is lost. Just as fear seduced ancient sailors, later generations seek safety through structured societies.
In Ayn Rand’s Anthem, the dystopian society willingly gives up their induvial rights for a guaranteed collective sense of safety. In this world citizens forget their personal names, independent thoughts, and unique identities which make each person different but just rather embracing conformity in exchange for predictable safety. We can compare this surrender with the inherent human desire for harmony and protection from chaos, a desire which John Locke formalized in the Enlightenment through his concept of social contract. He believed that the people should give away certain freedoms in a trade to ensure stability and peace within a governed society. These ideas were not bad at all since they have given rise to many of the freedoms we currently benefit from today. But the danger of these ideas is not in the structure itself, but rather it is in the slow erosion of awareness of people, what starts as a rational compromise between the people and the government later becomes into a habitual submission when people stop reflecting on what they are trading a way for a sense of safety. Anthem imagines the end stage of this rather drifts, a world in which even personal thoughts and names are dictated by the state. In modern times, Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance exposed deeper the system, he explained how technology has made it extremely easier than ever to spy on citizens in the name of “National Security”. And yet there was not extreme measures taken after this discovery, people accepted this invasion of their privacy not with extreme protest but rather in the form of docile acceptance. From Locke’s ideals to Rand’s dystopia and even to our own algorithmic age, the pattern is clear: humans tend not to lose freedom through violence, but through quiet exchanges that feel reasonable and likely acceptable, until it is rather too late to remember what freedom once felt like. This surrender of autonomy through reason and safety is only one path; another, more insidious route is pleasure. In a world driven by speed, consumption, and distraction, many no longer need to be convinced to give up control—they willingly hand it over in pursuit of happiness.
In Steve Cutt’s animated short film Happiness, we can see modern individuals that rush through life as rats in a big bowl, they seek joy from possessions, speed and surface pleasures. While behind this cycle of control there is no tyrant, only systems too efficient to resists to. Artificial intelligence through ultra curated algorithms now predicts and serves our desires before we are even aware of them. Ads appear before we know what we need. Videos autoplay before we ask. It all seems as if our choices are shrinking into curated suggestions. The tragedy of this is not that the people are manipulated, it is rather that they do not want to think. As life is becoming faster and easier, thinking to people might feel like a complicated operation. We as humans have outsourced labor since the industrial revolutions but now, we also outsource the decision-making process, curiosity and even self-knowledge. We as humans are dissolving our autonomy not under pressure but rather for convenience. As the Lotus Eaters we are accepting a sweet treat rather than seeking our own future and individualism. The cost of happiness rather becomes the death of thought. In surrendering those things is when we love everything that makes us human.
It might seem that surrendering some autonomy is not only inevitable, but it is also necessary for human survival in a functioning society. Traffic laws, legal systems and shared codes of conduct allow individuals to live in a similar place with relative peace. Because even freedom without any form of structure will drift dramatically into chaos. Jogn Locke’s was not the structure for a tyranny at all but it was rather a rational agreement meant to protect liberty through order. But om reality living completely under freedom of doing anything you might want can become a threat to both self and others. Even artificial intelligence, when it is used in a good option has the potential to make our human capabilities better, by helping us understand problems we might not understand. The problem starts in the failure to notice how much is being surrendered. It is one thing to choose structure and the other is to forget that freedom was ever yours. When we as humans act with active compliance to higher forms of power in our daily lives it’s what erodes our freedom. When people stop questioning, when they stop thinking, and when they confuse comfort with consent, autonomy is not simply exchanged, it is lost. The danger is not in structure itself but it starts in the moment when we stop asking where the line between protection and control is.
Humanity does not surrender freedom all at once or in a forcefully matter, we give it away little by little, in myths, in laws, in convenience, in comfort. From the moment Odysseus’s men tasted the lotus and forgot their home, to citizens in Anthem who forgot their names, to the modern person that is deliberately letting AI do the thinking for them. Throughout human history each generation has its own quiet surrender. Locke believed in balance, in surrendering with awareness for a structured form of peace, but today it is vanishing. We do not see how apps do not care about our privacy anymore, we just click “agree”. We do not debate ideas but we rather scroll and hear what we already think of since our algorithm knows our mental biases too well. We do not fight for knowledge, we find it in someone’s elses work or in a more convenient place. The reason why we do things is not always evil. It often comes from our psychological need of having a pattern in our lives. But the effect is always the same, we are drifting further from ourselves. What this cycle reveals is that our human nature does not seek freedom as much as it seeks peace- and that when peace is too easy, freedom begins to rot. True autonomy is not the right to “choose” what we are given, it is the effort of remembering why we must. And in our current age of algorithms and artificial ease, remembering may be the hardest tasks of all to do.
Bibliography:
Cutts, Steve. Happiness. Vimeo, 2017,
Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles, Viking Penguin, 1996,
https://melissasmitchell.weebly.com/uploads/4/3/0/6/43067145/odysseyfagles.pdf.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett, Cambridge University Press, 1988,
https://assets.cambridge.org/97805210/69038/sample/9780521069038ws.pdf.
Rand, Ayn. Anthem: Student Edition. Signet, 2007.
Snowden, Edward. Citizenfour. Directed by Laura Poitras, HBO Documentary Films, 2014.