The Labyrinth of Freedom

 It is said that in the early 5th century, a minor theologian of Alexandria composed a treatise, now lost, titled On the Freedom of the Deceived. In it, he proposed a troubling paradox: that a man who freely chooses an illusion is no less imprisoned than a man who is forced to accept a truth. The heresy of this idea was not its logic but its implication—that beneath the mirror of human choice lies an abyss of manipulation, so subtle and intricate it may be indistinguishable from volition.

I think often of this Alexandrian and his forgotten scroll when considering the apparent conflict between "free will" and what moderns call "propaganda." The notion that a man chooses freely presumes that his desires, values, and perceptions are his own. Yet what if the very structure of his desires has been fashioned by another—by a con man, a cult leader, or a state with vast machinery of persuasion? Does the hand that turns the key know it forged the lock?

Let us consider the democratic election, that most sacred rite of the modern era. Here we see the image of freedom: citizens, diverse and autonomous, selecting their leaders through informed choice. But what if the information they receive has been filtered, sculpted, and adorned like the lures of the anglerfish? If a foreign power, let us say a nameless one for the sake of allegory, invests in subtle advertisements and masked narratives, bending sentiment with quiet algorithms, is the will of the people still their own? The ballot, under such conditions, becomes less an expression of liberty and more a ventriloquism of unseen forces.

The classical answer to this problem has always been education—that through it, the citizen may become impervious to deception. But the propagandist’s genius lies in his ability to weaponize truth itself. Facts are selected, sequenced, and dramatized not to inform but to suggest. Reason becomes the servant of feeling. In such a world, to feel free is perhaps the final trap.

There exists, then, a shadowy lineage: the con man, the cult leader, the propagandist. Each one offers a gift, and in accepting it, the victim—who believes himself a sovereign subject—enters a labyrinth from which exit may be impossible. The cult leader offers revelation, the con man offers wealth, the propagandist offers belonging or fear. Each offer is tailored not to the objective good, but to the secret architecture of the target’s longing.

To prohibit such figures may seem a solution, but here arises the tyrant’s paradox: can one suppress coercion without becoming a coercer oneself? If the state prohibits manipulation, who then defines what counts as manipulation? The snake devours its tail. To prevent the people from being misled, must we first presume they are incapable of leading themselves?

There is, I suspect, no resolution—only a deepening of the puzzle. One might argue that all influence is a form of coercion, that to exist in a society is to swim in a sea of borrowed language, values, and mythologies. If this is true, then freedom is not a condition but a gradient, a ghost we chase through mirrors.

In one of the apocryphal gospels, Christ is said to have whispered to Judas, “You are free to betray me, and so you must.” I do not know if this saying is true or fabricated, but I feel it contains the essence of our dilemma: that the act of choosing, in the presence of manipulation, is neither fully free nor entirely coerced. It is a riddle passed from generation to generation—an inheritance not of answers, but of doubt.

And perhaps that, too, is a kind of freedom.