Alain de Botton on Philosophy Bites:

My sense of the Modern world is that it’s a world that is slightly - in a paranoid way - obsessed with freedom. The Western world has spent the last 200 years raising the level of freedom. That’s been a watch word for political theorists and activists, and they had a job to do… a legitimate job to do. My sense is that we’ve gone a little bit too far. We now have freedom. The individual is now not going to be told how to live. We are free to mess up our lives as we will. We’re free to succeed, but we’re also free to fail.

I argue that suggestions on how we might live - reminders of the right way to live, optimal ways to live, good ways to live - are not necessarily always limits to freedom. Our obsession with not being told what to do can cut us off from rather good ideas about what we might do. A refusal to accept that we might, at certain times, willingly want to have certain possibilities cut off  from us. That we might willingly cede our freedom for the sake of something else… fulfillment or greater effectiveness or whatever. The model of the human being which secular society is working with is one that is unfairly paranoid about influence. I can’t help but be interested in the way that religions can see a value in reminding people of ways that they want to live.

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