A free man (a word I BMcC[18-11-46-503] deploy in a non-genderist way, to include: women, children past the age of reason, The Abrahamic Deity, extraterrestrials, any other beings willing and able to enter into rational discourse, self-excluding all else...) → A free man awakens each new day to the Open and asks himself:

"What do I want to do with this new day which has been given to me to live?"

There is nothing he is obligated to do to shackle his spirit. He chooses freely from a smörgåsbord of the sedimented history of all humankind's doings and not doings, so far as lies within his abilities and means of furthering them. Nor need these be merely "selfish", as mean-spirited persons like to jump up and down like chimpanzees for a banana ignorantly diss "communism", sex except for pregnancy in wed-lock to produce more of their ilk, and everything else except passuming everybody sub their iugums. [fill in the blank]

The medium is almost invariably the message: Anyone who competes, win, lose or draw, is not free. He is shackled to the competition and the pregiven rules of the competitive event. He must sub-mit to the extrenally fiated rules Or else!. He must pass under the yoke (passum sub iugm) of the fixed competition social structure, even if he comes up out the other side with a gold medal like a trained seal gets a fish for performing his trick for the tourists at a zoo. Of course no one wants to be loser because thet results in punishment. But being winner just means you were less worse than all the other people who showed up to be 2-legged sheep that morning and that the persons running the show appprove of how you conformed to further their socio-poliical agenda of competitive athletic events. You are the designated "winner", but their regime of competitive sporting events is what really wins, like the casino always wins if you gamble there.

Options are not necessarily freedom. As a young person I had options to get (a) a crew cut or (b) a flat top or (c) a side cut. I was not free to just not get a haircut and not passum sub iugum the Barber Shop's doorframe.

Some coercions are from nature: If Fortuna gives you stage-4 pancreatic cancer you can't say no to it; you have no choice other than to submit (you can kill yourself on the spot instead). But nature does not coerce haircuts: people do that, and in such cases, for no exigent prupose such as if I didn't get a haircut that would have caused the 14th Street Bridge in our nation's Capital to collapse, upending tens of thousands of government employees' commutes.

Or in school: I coulldn't spend my time learning because I had to prepare to regurgitate informaton for questions on the exam because if I got less than an 93 I would have to spend my "free" periods sitting on a hard wood chair in a stifling, crowded "study hall" instead of in the school's almost unused (they used the lacrosse field) quiet library. Who exactly was that Pharoah of Egypt who invented the monotheistic deity and what was the name of the new capital city he built in the desert which, of sourse, i could look up in Encyclopedia Britannica if I really needed the information and if I spell it wrong I get 5 points off and who were the 8 Kings of the Sargonid dynasty of Assyria (722-609 BC) arranged in chronological order and no, I do not get points for informing the teach about the sex orgy that took place in the school's administratiion building in the mid 19th century when the son of the man who owned the property the school now occupies, at the time married a putative procuress. To borrow a phrase, I can't breathe!

*      *      *      *      *      *      *

Recently I read Abraham Lincoln thought the main difference between slavery and wage labor was that the former was a permanent not a temporary condition. Now I hear a new way for young persons to finance their college education instead of being yoked like oxen under the burden of huge student debt loans at interest: by pledging a percentage of everything they earn after graduation to the school. They can beome time-shared neo-serfs.

Contrast exiting the school grounds upon graduation with no student debt: a free person. As for tuition, the kid (or his parents) may pay ony $35,000 per year. But instead of the school just sending out an invoice, maybe even "2 10 net 30" like in the business world, they charge $70,000 and if the parents grovel to expose their family finances [A new Marcel Duchamp large glass: "The student's family stripped bare by the kid's school even] to prove they are deserving of welfare from the almighty school, they get a $35,000 scholarship. Everything is geared to making people sub-mit to things. Making everybody keep going under yokes: Breaking their spirit: passa sub iugos.

What do I propse instead? Example: Instead of the teach ass-igning the student to write a paper on [whatever] to be sub-mitted by the student for the teach to grade and return the graded paper back to said student.... Instead of that, the teacher respectfully suggests to the student that the student might find value in writing an essay on [whatever], take it or leave it and the teacher will read the paper and discuss it with the student should the student decide to write it and, then, further decide to share it with him. In other words, neither teacher nor student but two peers in civil discourse freely constructing together their shared social world. No yoke to pass under or even not. The Open.

"We are a conversation" (John Wild an others)

Invenit et fecit