A Dance for Balance Between Freedom and Discipline

The obsession to attain the balance between freedom and discipline leads a person to possess practical maturity. A person with freedom but without discipline wanders aimlessly and fails to tap into his or her infinite potential, ends up not amounting to anything of significance. A person with discipline but when fails to acknowledge freedom of self, will not only fail to enrich their lives but also stands in the way of the evolution of his or her species.

Without attaining the balance between freedom and discipline one cannot play a constructive part in a society's politics. Like every individual has their own personality, every society has its own. Quite often the concept of freedom and discipline are polarized by two divisions of people who recognize themselves as left (freedom) and right (discipline).

From childhood, we are fed stories after stories about what is good and bad, what is just and unjust, so on and so forth. This basically lays the foundation for solid world views and beliefs. When you are an adult, these ideologies priming has already ingrained in you so deep that it becomes hard to look otherwise. You didn't have control to stop what you were being fed as a kid. When you are an adult, you are strong enough to stop people from feeding you thoughts and ideas but the domestication is already done in most cases! Your conditioning continues to back your deep-rooted beliefs whether it is constructive or otherwise.

In all these stories that are circulated, semantics plays a huge role in conditioning this world in a particular way. Most often phrases are quoted from great personalities like Socrates, Epictetus, and many more. Those phrases are mostly interpreted based on one's ideologies and agendas, which might not even be the philosopher's context or intent. Quite often you fall for whichever story is more convincing or whichever sits comfortably on your ideological foundation. Your trajectory is pretty much set by people around you who said compelling stories and you learned to look at your reality with those shades. The sense of belonging gravitates you to people who collectively affirm and validate your beliefs. When you are continuously looking for stories and subjective facts that empower a narrow worldview without any balance, it is easy to get lost in the abyss of extremism.

Very few rebels and challenges deep-rooted beliefs that were installed into them, and those are the ones ready to have an objective view of this world for what it really is and those are the same ones that attain the balance between freedom and discipline for self and their society's self. Hence it is very important to evaluate and re-evaluate one's beliefs and ideologies from time to time that set you on a path to self-awareness which hands you the key to a meaningful life.