Romeo & Juliet was a much better play than I’d remembered. So often when I saw it as a child, or when we watched it in high school, it seemed terribly cliché, though it must be acknowledged that the reason it may have seemed cliché to me was because the play was so impactful in the first place. At any rate, I think the reason I enjoyed this viewing so much was because I was much older, and therefore could parse some of the play’s deeper points. Amidst the flurry of Shakespearean language, it’s easy to let these lines pass you by as you frantically try to follow the plot. Nevertheless, there was one that stood out to me, as it was something that I’d been long thinking about and, in Bard-ly fashion, it was said so eloquently:

APOTHECARY: My poverty, but not my will, consents. (—Act 5, scene 1, line 79.)

What is it to be free? To be honest, I’m not sure there’s much point in considering this question. I’ve never really found the arguments for free will very convincing in the face of those for determinism; and beyond that, the very idea of freedom raises some interesting questions. For instance, how does freedom differ from randomness? As such, I would say I’ve arrived at a neither-nor view, as rationality would seem to dismiss the idea of freedom while experience seems to negate its absence. You might call this a “compatibilist” position, but frankly I could care less what one labels it.

Having said that, there is a sort of conditioning that seems to run in opposition to our idea of freedom. If ever there was a sense in which one could not feel free, it is surely when they felt coerced—either by force or threat, be it tangible or intangible, explicit or implicit—to act or refrain from acting in accordance with their conscience and good judgement. I’m, of course, not simply talking about trifling pleasures or things like that. What really eats away at someone’s “soul”, as anyone who vaguely knows the story of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment could tell you, is the moral alienation one can feel sometimes. One recent read of mine, Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, touched on this theme, as did another, Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

Both were excellent reads, but tackle the concept of alienation in different ways. Dazai is much more existential: the alienation his narrator feels is from his very humanity and all of the games the people play. Graeber’s work, however, is likely to hit far closer to home for many more people: it is precisely because his subjects are human that they feel alienated through, as you may have guessed, their bullshit jobs. Graeber has a very specific idea of bullshit jobs (distinguishing them from jobs that are simply “shit”) as employment that effectively makes no difference in and perhaps even worsens the world. Consequently, through interviews with a variety of people with bullshit jobs, he does an excellent job of exploring how agency is a crucial source of meaning for many (i.e., being able to act upon one’s environment) as well as the “spiritual violence” that working a bullshit job can do.

The fact is, having read Graeber’s book, that there are a great many people in society (he estimates roughly 40%) working jobs that they consider pointless but which they must do in order to make ends meet. They might think or know of solutions that would render them irrelevant, but, in order to make ends meet, they must keep up the pretence, and this is profoundly alienating. That this is seen necessary by society—whether to maintain long-held and perverse beliefs about the meaning of work or the politics of resentment that define the class structure of our societies—is rightly described as “absurd”. And while, of course, there are many other facets of our current economic system that I would consider cruel, in this case there is not even sense in the cruelty.

I think what makes alienation a particularly pernicious cruelty of our economic is that it often pits one’s own well-being against that of others, or of society. Hell, we are even disincentivised from acts of care, as they are often unpaid or underpaid, as Graeber points out. It pays much better to do something that’s essentially bullshit and possibly soul-sucking which pays okay, or something that’s flat-out immoral which pays very well. For as much as right-wing laissez-faire advocates talk about incentives as the missing facet of left-wing economics, it is as deplorable that one should advocate a system in which greed is incentivised as it is to expect social good to come from that greed. It won’t. Yet, this is precisely what many feel they must do just to afford a decent life. While capitalists tout individualism, nevertheless the under-classes are corralled into workplaces where they are taken away from themselves. It is an individualism for the few who can afford it.

So, I return to the Apothecary’s statement, and I consider that true liberation of the human person must be political, economic, and spiritual, for these are the domains in which one relates to themselves, others, and the larger world. And the more I think about what is so evident from Graeber’s work, the more I begin to realise what makes Dazai’s novel so touching, too. After all, I am perplexed at these games of make-believe that people play, everyone pretending to enjoy a moral system that, for most people, takes more than it gives. We disqualify ourselves from our humanity (i.e., the literal translated title of Dazai’s No Longer Human) as we willingly embrace that which is simply inhuman. Nevertheless, to end on a happy note, we should take comfort in the knowledge that we happen to be in a cell that is locked from the inside.