THE FACTS ANSWER

FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM–BUT WILL SUCH FREEDOM BRING HAPPINESS?
WE REGARD DEMONSTRATIONS IN AFRICA WITH DISILLUSIONMENT, BECAUSE NOT EVEN DEMOCRACY CAN SATISFY HUMAN DESIRE.

BY JOHN WATERS

It has been strange observing how the recent elections here in Ireland were accompanied almost daily by images of people demonstrating for freedom in different parts of Africa. While we Irish engaged in a democratic process of self-examination following a disastrous period of boom and bust, the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya took to the streets in pursuit of something that we contemplated as having failed to deliver what we expected.
By comparison with the circumstances of those people, our problems are laughably small, but such an observation would do little to placate the current anger and disappointment of Irish people, preoccupied as they are with the failure of democratic politicians to render them happy and satisfied in accordance with their expectations.  
We Irish have not rioted, or even demonstrated with great enthusiasm in the streets, but still our sense of the vast disproportion between our desire for something, and the manner in which our democracy and its economy have been operated by our leaders, finds an unexpected resonance in the emotions we observe in those TV reports from Africa.
To a great degree, those images seem to articulate what we feel about our own rulers, even though, objectively speaking, we are infinitely better off than those people who risk their lives for freedoms they assume we already possess. Deep down, it seems, we are no happier than they are.
One way of comprehending this is to perceive human happiness as a relative state. Sigmund Freud observed that, if you want to understand happiness, you should put your foot outside the bedclothes on a cold night, leave it there for a few minutes, and take it back in again. This is happiness.
But there is a better way of putting it: the human desire for freedom derives from an infinite energy that far exceeds anything any system, economy, or ideology is capable of satisfying. Thus, strangely, man is never grateful just because his political state appears to be significantly better than his neighbor's. If his expectations have been raised and disappointed, he is just as angry, dissatisfied, and frustrated as if he had never been given anything. There is no resting place for man, once he has glimpsed, or sensed, what is possible. Democracy is not enough.
Padraic Pearse, the great poet and revolutionary who led the 1916 Easter Rising that began the liberation of Ireland from its state of slavery to England, wrote that the substance of freedom cannot be changed, any more than can the substance of truth.  Freedom is not something defined by statutes or mutual interests and should never be compromised by material considerations. Freedom, he said, is a spiritual necessity, which "transcends all corporeal necessities."
Freedom is not a matter of the satisfaction of man's material needs, but of the full engagement of his being and reason in accordance with his deeper structure. Short of this, even by a relatively short distance, man, in the midst of wealth and pleasure, remains unfree.