Author Jeet Thayil was interviewed recently on NPR about his new book Narcopolis. NPR included some of the highlights on their website. Their highlights are the exact portions of the interview that irked me the most.
On the twin-ship of freedom and slavery
"Every character in this book is an addict of some sort — addicted to drugs or to violence or to religion or to sex. And as the Dimple character says later, after her transformation, she says, it's possible the addict is actually the freest of men because everybody knows what addiction does, how it can destroy your life. And to know those things and to continue to do it is actually an example of free will at its strongest."
On the perceptions of addiction in society
"With opiates, when you're addicted, your day is pretty much taken care of. There's no question of boredom. There's no question of existential anxiety. You know exactly what you're there for, what you have to do. It's a question of getting money and then buying what you need to buy and then doing it. It's a full-time job and, yes, you are a slave to that substance and you need it every day. Within that, I can only call it freedom because under that umbrella you are absolutely free to do whatever you may want to or to think whatever you may want to. I don't mean to be an apologist for heroin addicts, and I'm not trying to glamorize it in any way, but I would just like to offer this as kind of a counterpoint to the prevailing idea of addiction."
While I have not suffered from a drug addiction and cannot speak with firsthand knowledge to what it feels like, the idea that addiction=freedom was very upsetting to me. Granted, Thayil may have been saying this to stir up controversy and sell a few more books, but regardless of his intention, the idea that someone so enslaved to something could be freeing is ludicrous.
It makes as much sense as the character Truman (played by Jim Carrey in the movie "The Truman Show") thinking his life was his own and that he orchestrated it, while we in the audience watch his every day being programmed by producers and watched by millions of viewers on television. Did he have a perception of free will? Of course. But this perception paled in comparison to a truly autonomous life.
In the same way, I take great issue with the use of the word freedom in association with addiction of any kind. You are in no way free; you are ruled over by your desires.
What really made this interview stick with me was the fact that I heard it during Easter week, when, as a Christian, I was celebrating the ultimate freedom found in Christ.
I'm leading a book club right now on C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, and I love what he has to say about free will:
"Some people think they can imagine a creature who was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is was has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them (us) free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata--of creatures that worked like machines--would hardly be worth creating."
