Who can argue with freedom? It is the touchstone of modern life. Yet a comment from the East African writer, Okot p’Bitek, shows that not everyone thinks it is necessarily a good thing. “[A person] cannot, and must not be free,” p’Bitek writes. “Son, mother, daughter, father, uncle, husband, grandmother, wife, medicine-man, and many other such terms, are the stamps of [a person’s] unfreedom. It is by such complex terms that a person is defined and identified.”
p’Bitek raises a profound question about what we think the point of life is. His view is that we are all born into an already existing set of relationships and it is these relationships that define us. We take our first breath as someone’s child and go through life moving into connections and congeries of relationships.
p’Bitek would strongly disagree with the sentiment of the psychiatrist Thom Szaz, who wrote, "Some people say they haven't yet found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates."
Szaz was the modern doctor of the mind and p’Bitek memorialized traditional life, but it is p’Bitek, the writer, who is closer to the truth. Much of modern psychology is built upon a false premise. We aren’t self-made but largely other-made.
p’Bitek isn’t completely right either. The self isn’t wholly other-made but arises from the interaction between ourselves and the social environment.
Aristotle and Confucius, to take two ancient thinkers, shared a similar view. And I think their psychological understanding is more accurate than the one widely held today.
We can make ourselves only with the tools that are ready for our using, tools fashioned by others before us. Our culture shapes what we see, gives us a set of values and largely determines what we believe reality to be. Our selves are filtered through the eyes of others. George Herbert Mead (1863–1931)—philosopher, psychologist and sociologist—said, I am what I think others think I am.
Where p’Bitek had it wrong is thinking that our selves are reducible to sum of our connections. We are partly the makers of ourselves because we also make choices about which parts of our culture we accept and through which people’s eyes we measure who we are.
The self isn’t just what others have made of us but neither is it possible to be that we have made ourselves by ourselves. We need p’Bitek’s sense of connectedness. We also need to honor the uniqueness that is also ourselves. We are never completely free from relationships nor should we want to be. The most precious part of ourselves is to be found in relationships that are founded on mutual respect and support—on the right to be different.