Those Who Falsely Believe

And the Seven of Pentacles

I recently encountered the following quote:

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To contemplate the quote further, I shuffled my Tarot deck and drew the Seven of Pentacles.

That dude does not look happy

The card makes a good deal of sense in relation to the quote, at least in the way that I’ve always viewed the Seven of Pentacles. The dude’s crops seem to be flourishing, but he’s never seemed happy to me.

With this card I think we need to recognize that sometimes reality doesn’t match appearance. The figure seems to know that, hence his sadness at what looks to be a thriving crop.

And perhaps it is important to ask ourselves, are we free? Undoubtedly most of us in the United States and throughout the West believe ourselves to be. Heck, here in the U.S. we widely proclaim ourselves the freest people in the world.

But is that really true? I’d like to think so, but I have this memory that makes me wonder.

I had occasion to spend a fair amount of time with a citizen of Mexico. A quite prosperous fellow who worked for a major multi-national corporation, and was quite active in his community.

Late one night, while we were driving through his home city he told me that he had, in the past lived in both the U.S. and Canada, but when the opportunity to transfer back to Mexico came, he jumped on it.

I asked him why.

He said that it was because he didn’t feel free in either the U.S. or Canada. He said that there were just too many rules. Too many things that one can’t do, and too many things that one is required to do.

His words have stuck with me for an awful lot of years now.

And in a way, based on my own experiences in Mexico, I can see how he could hold this view to be true. I mean sure, Mexico has a lot of laws and regulations, just like here. But who actually enforces most of them? Does anyone enforce the vast majority of them if one has a few bucks to pass to the enforcer?

But freedom isn’t just freedom from excessive governmental regulations.

Is the person trapped in a relationship with an excessively jealous partner free?

Is the person who faces debt amounts greater than he or she will ever be able to pay off free?

Is the addict free?

The Seven of Pentacles reminds us here that we should contemplate our lives honestly. We should ask, are we truly free? If we aren’t do we want to be? If we do, what steps must we take to grab that freedom?

How can we change our relationship? Beat our addiction? Discharge our debt? Or otherwise change whatever is preventing us from living in freedom.

The quote was published on Substack by Philosophors.

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If you can’t get enough of my scribblings, everything I wrote last week is collected here.