Do We Want To Be Free?

Siobhan Lyons discovers that free will doesn't come for free

- Siobhan Lyons

In the BBC America series Killing Eve, Russian assassin Villanelle breaks out of jail with another inmate. Upon exiting the escape vehicle, the inmate appears anxious, and asks: “What should I do?” Villanelle replies: “I don’t know.Run. You’re free.” But the inmate simply replies: “I don’t want to be free.” Villanelle looks understandably perplexed. She has, after all, been struggling for freedom – from police, from employers, from obligations and from circumstances – all of her life. But her inmate’s response is not all that strange. Morgan Freeman’s character Red, in The Shawshank Redemption, gives us some insight into the experience of being institutionalised: “These walls are kind of funny. First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.”

One of the most enduring philosophical questions concerns the tension between free will and determinism. The question of whether the future is predetermined or whether we are active agents occupies the minds of philosophers, insomniacs, bank tellers, robbers, nurses and perhaps dolphins, and it remains uncertain whether or not we have any choice in thinking of such things. Red’s thoughts on being ‘institutionalised’ are important here, since the question of whether we should want freedom is so rarely asked.