Do you love freedom? If you do, you might be an American. If you don’t, you must have missed the memo. History ended in 1989, and now we’re just tying up loose ends. Rebuild Russia. Defeat terrorism. Ensure China’s rise into a “responsible stakeholder.” Solve climate change. Free ourselves from Middle East oil. Make peace between Palestine and Israel. And don’t forget immigration reform because everyone else does.

Well, what does the future (after we’ve tied up loose ends) look like? The inevitable triumph of liberal-democratic capitalism? Not in order of significance though; right now, America’s a cocktail of capitalist-democratic-liberalism, with Ayn Rand’s fingerprints everywhere. Sweet but with a weird aftertaste. At least we’re free, though. Better than the billion people living under authoritarian communism or the other billion living on less than a dollar a day, and especially the other billion living in some sweaty sandy area in the Middle East under corrupt theocratic-monarchies.

Then why do we have such a huge anti-depression pharmaceutical industry? Self-help books are all the rage and romance novels are the top selling books at most bookstores. It seems like we’re outsourcing our self-esteem to drugs, hacks and fantasy. Yes, we’re rich and beautiful (Botox started in San Francisco) but are we really free?

Since Locke: not Kant: influenced our founding fathers the most, we’ve inherited a particular conception of freedom. Freedom is freedom from. It’s “get the government off my back.” It’s “I do what I want.” Well, what do we want? HBO and pay-per-view UFC?

Ultimately, this negative conception of freedom, as an absence of limitation from our parents, government and even our friends, leaves a really impoverished self. Look, there are a lot of things we all want but how do we know if we really want them? I mean, sure the Internet has a great menu of all-you-can-buy, but are you picking the selections on the menu?

No. Some marketer with an MBA is picking the menu for your life. At Whitman, we think we’re really independent (insert dig at the greek system) but defining plaid instead of polos as stylish is still defining. We’re just exchanging one myth for another and calling it free. After all, it’s easy to do the same thing weekend after weekend and day after day. The media’s given us a guide already.

My point is that we don’t know what we’re missing precisely because we think we’ve got life figured out. It’s hard to know the unknowns. And so it’s easy to replace self-knowledge with self-help. Hence, a freedom from interference leads to a perpetuation of the status quo in our lives because our ability to choose what we want is outsourced to marketing departments.

What does a positive conception of freedom look like? Not freedom from but freedom to. Do what though? I don’t know. Freedom to climb buildings. Freedom to travel the world. Freedom to be what you want. Emphasis on the you and not the from.

Sure this sounds like a great cliché. People have been telling us forever to be free, to do whatever: but have we? In order to be free, to be ourselves, we have to know ourselves. Well, what do we know about ourselves? Just a set of facts. Our height, race, academic transcript and whatever our Facebook profile says.

Don’t most Facebook profiles contain a collection of musicians, movies and books? It tells us what we want other people to think of us. Some likes are fit for publishing and some aren’t. Some part of us is open for consumption and some part is hidden.

If we can never recover that hidden part, can we be free? Only in one sense, the sense of us open to categorization. Statistics say Whitman’s getting more and more diverse. More international students, first generation college students, students not from just Seattle and Portland, right?

But statistics only capture facts that can be measured and compared. Statistics scratch the surface, and isn’t that the essence of marketing? Pattern recognition of what people click online, or whatever we put in our Facebook profiles. So, if it’s cool to be different, be different in a way that can’t be measured.

And to not be measured we have to transition from living by a negative freedom to a positive freedom. Yes, we are free from totalitarian government but we aren’t free from being pigeonholed into marketing data.   Yet.