Freedom quest and the liberty of knowledge in a torrid society

emy chaoschildren

By

Ogunniyi Abayomi

British novelist and poet, Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) described war as peace, ignorance as strength and freedom as slavery, a paradoxical slogan of the Oceania big brother political party in his dystopian novel 1984.

A novel published in 1949 depicts an era, age, and period the proletarian feed on the information acquired from stables of the bourgeoisies and political cabal to ensure their survival is guaranteed across their territory by the act of monitoring each event that concerned these individuals.

The vision built a platform for society to express its thoughts, feelings, and actions across the political, social and economic atmosphere of the territory without external interference. This sovereign act was blighted by the carnal and destabilizing measures of the totalitarian state.

A quest that berates the attention of the followers by its leaders, who tremble and triumph on his fortunes of lazy effort rather than observe the derelict state of abrupt rejection, agony and maltreatment endured over time as long as we breathe.

Freedom is the riddle of unanswered malignant, relegated, restricted and bewildered acts that can not be cast from our minds and souls because we feed on the ignorance our enemies place on our table for myopic survival.

Knowledge is alienated from our minds, the awareness is no longer valuable to our demeanour when our identities are lost to the wild and erratic noises of illusionary acts and decree enforced leaders who blindfold the visionary movement and plan for the blessing of their pockets.

Author James Baldwin at a writer’s congress, 1962 – photo Marc Riboud

A common deception among Africans and the black continent who are neither emphatic about the grief of its masses either dying or ragging in the controversial absence of their position and responsibility the leaders sworn their allegiance to, more so the masses are neglected for their selfish desire.

Genocide, religious extremism and chaotic rampages that evolve across our society each day and seconds address the stance of freedom in a society where public institutions are restricted from transpiring the principle of fairness in their duties which do not eradicate the poverty of ignorance.

Then the swindling and siphoning of funds among public officials without basic questions over their credibility and integrity prove the declining knowledge of accountability across our world.

I ask again, is war the advocate of peace, ignorance building our strength to endure the things we never knew crippling our identity, or are we enslaved from the benefit of knowing the true worth of a beauty we lack?

Do we long for ourselves to rule in the realm of its identity, as opposed to beneath the identity of the supreme law of another man of blood and water?

To ponder more on the term ‘freedom and liberty of knowledge’, James Arthur Baldwin in his essay ‘Nobody Knows My Name‘ wrote thus;

“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. One hasn’t got to have an enormous military machine in order to be un-free when it’s simpler to be asleep, when it’s simpler to be apathetic, when it’s simpler, in fact, not to want to be free, to think that something else is more important.”

As individuals do we see the truth or continue to yield swamps of ignorance that drown your identity away?

Ogunniyi Abayomi

Ogunniyi Abayomi was born July 11, 1991 in the city of Lagos, where he resides. A poet and essayist whose works have been published in various journals.