ESSAY SERIES

The Psychology of Freedom

By Kemi C. Amusan

Charminine.com

ESSAY THREE

The Garlic of Egypt: Deconditioning and the Loneliness of the Pioneer

The Price of Refusing the Role

Laws may be changed, institutions remade, and the distribution of resources altered, yet the mind can remain loyal to an order that has long since lost its rightful claim upon it. The signs of authority may be taken down, the gates opened, and those once kept outside admitted within, while something of the old kingdom continues to govern the lives of those who have entered.

Neither laws nor policies can guarantee that we will treat one another as equals. The existence of a right does not determine how freely we can exercise it, how much resistance we will encounter when we do, or what we must surrender to remain accepted. Equality may be established in law long before it becomes an ordinary experience of life.

The struggle therefore changes as societies change. When exclusion is written into law, resistance must confront the law itself. When exclusion becomes less explicit, the struggle moves into the customs, expectations, and relationships through which we negotiate our place in the world. The question becomes whether we can exercise the freedom we have formally acquired without being punished socially for using it. Can a woman disagree with her superior, or even her husband, without being considered difficult? Can a Black professional challenge an established practice without being treated as a threat? Can someone from a working-class background enter an unfamiliar social environment without having to conceal the parts of themselves that reveal where they came from?

These questions concern the lived experience of equality. A society may recognise our rights while continuing to attach conditions to our full participation. We may enter an institution, provided we do not challenge its assumptions. We may speak, provided our words do not unsettle those accustomed to being heard. We may succeed, provided our success does not disturb established ideas about who deserves authority. The door stands open, yet an invisible set of expectations still governs what we may do once inside.

The challenge is to exercise our freedom without allowing the expectations of others to determine the limits of our existence. It is also to confront the assumptions through which another person’s freedom comes to be interpreted as a threat. Equality demands changes in conduct, in the distribution of opportunity, and in the terms on which we are permitted to belong. A society must examine the distance between recognising someone’s right to participate and accepting their participation on equal terms.

When Equality Disrupts the Old Order

Modern institutions present themselves as departures from older systems of domination. They speak of performance, competence, professionalism, and equal opportunity, all of which are valuable principles. Yet supposedly neutral standards can become instruments through which established expectations are protected and unequal freedom preserved.

We may sincerely believe in fairness while remaining attached to the arrangements through which we have experienced ourselves as capable, respected, and secure. When those arrangements change, equality can feel like a personal loss. Another person’s authority may be interpreted as a reduction of our own. A challenge to an established practice may feel like a challenge to our competence. A wider distribution of recognition may seem to diminish the recognition we once enjoyed, including the freedom to speak without being scrutinised, to make mistakes without being defined by them, or to assume that our perspective will naturally carry weight.

For those who have historically enjoyed less freedom, the corresponding struggle is different. We may have to learn to exercise authority without treating every moment of discomfort as evidence that we have done something wrong. Consideration need not make us responsible for everyone’s comfort, and examining our conduct need not mean allowing another person’s unease to become the final judgment on our legitimacy. Someone’s discomfort with our independence does not, by itself, make that independence unreasonable.

Individual confidence cannot resolve a problem that is continually reproduced by institutional arrangements. When the same people must repeatedly demonstrate their competence, explain their legitimacy, or absorb the consequences of challenging unfair treatment, the burden extends beyond their individual capacity to cope. Clear criteria, consistent accountability, transparent decisions, and meaningful avenues for challenge help prevent personal preference from masquerading as objective judgment.

Such measures allow admission to become meaningful participation. They help ensure that those who enter an institution can exercise judgment, influence decisions, and recover from ordinary human mistakes without having their belonging continually placed on trial.

Yet even when the rules change, the old order may continue to speak through the people who once enforced it and those who learned to survive beneath it. Its authority can persist in a hesitation before speaking, an expectation of deference, an apology offered before anyone has taken offence, or a conviction that certain rooms were never meant for us.

The arrangement has begun to change. The mind may not yet have followed.

The Cost of Refusing the Role

Deviation can become socially expensive. After years of accommodating others, we may finally establish a boundary, only to be accused of having changed. A woman who negotiates firmly may be called aggressive, while a Black employee who identifies unequal treatment may be labelled divisive. Even a student who refuses to imitate the mannerisms of a more privileged social group may be considered unrefined.

We can understand the injustice of an arrangement and still have to reckon with the price of resisting it. The pressure is especially powerful when belonging, employment, financial security, or family relationships depend on those applying it. Sometimes it appears in a meeting where a contribution is met with silence, in a friendship that becomes strained after a boundary is established, or in a family that interprets independence as ingratitude. At other times, it is the exhaustion of having to explain an ordinary decision repeatedly because others are accustomed to having a say in it. Formal rights may remain intact even as exercising them changes how we are treated.

The choice is presented plainly enough: return to the accepted role and recover some measure of approval, or continue acting freely and risk rejection.

For this reason, we sometimes return to familiar roles even after recognising their limitations. We may know perfectly well that an arrangement is unjust and still be unable to resist it without risking our livelihood. Someone who depends on a community for safety or material support may have good reason to move cautiously. The capacity to resist is shaped by the resources available, the risks involved, and the alternatives we can realistically access.

A choice carries a different meaning when the alternatives are genuinely available than when one option threatens our livelihood, security, or most important relationships. The freedom to choose therefore depends partly on the conditions within which choices are made. Otherwise, what does equality amount to?

Accommodation, too, exacts a price. Repeatedly suppressing our preferences, judgments, and desires may eventually erode our confidence in our own judgment. Genuine desire becomes buried beneath the habits of appeasement. The exhaustion accumulates quietly, until maintaining an acceptable version of ourselves requires more energy than living honestly would.

Eventually, the cost of remaining acceptable may become heavier than the cost of being misunderstood. What others call courage may begin as weariness: the exhaustion of continually negotiating our right to exist without apology. We may reach a point at which we would rather face disapproval than continue to experience our own lives as performances arranged for other people’s comfort.

There is grief in that decision. Some relationships will not survive a change in the terms on which they were maintained. Some opportunities may disappear. Those who remember us as accommodating may regard every subsequent expression of independence as evidence of arrogance or decline. We, too, may miss the ease of familiar approval, even while understanding what it cost us.

The question is whether the strategies that once protected us still serve the lives we want to live. What offered safety may eventually prevent growth. What made belonging possible may become the condition that keeps us from being fully known. In a reciprocal relationship, both people can change without either being expected to disappear. Equality becomes possible when consideration flows in more than one direction and belonging can accommodate the development of those within it.

But what happens when we recognise the role we have been playing and begin to refuse it? What happens when the rules around us change, yet the old expectations continue to govern our instincts? And what happens when we are no longer willing to organise our lives around them?

The answer begins with the work of deconditioning.

Breaking the Script

If conditioning is built through repetition, freedom cannot come from awareness alone. Awareness is the beginning, not the end. The first real move is learning to separate instinct from truth.

Why did I assume that person was less competent? Why did I feel threatened by their confidence? Why did I hesitate before speaking? Why did I apologise? Why did I read my own silence as personality instead of adaptation?

Such questions interrupt the automatic sequence. They open a small gap between what happens to us and how we respond, and within that gap, choice becomes possible.

For those accustomed to holding the centre, deconditioning may mean learning to share it: listening without reclaiming the conversation, questioning why one person seems more trustworthy than another, and sitting with the fact that equality does not deprive us of something we were entitled to possess alone. It may require surrendering the assumption that our familiarity with a system proves that we deserve to determine how it works.

For those who have spent their lives managing risk, the work may take another form. We must learn to distinguish inherited anticipation from actual danger, to speak before the internal voice finishes explaining why silence would be safer, to refuse the automatic apology, and to take up space without first proving our worthiness. We must also sort out which parts of ourselves were freely chosen and which were built to help us survive.

Both processes require us to examine the relationship between our internal responses and the conditions that produced them. The discomfort of being challenged may have become evidence that someone else has overstepped. The discomfort of asserting ourselves may have become evidence that we have done something wrong. Neither reaction necessarily reveals the truth of the situation. Sometimes discomfort signals genuine danger; sometimes it signals the disturbance of a familiar arrangement. Learning to distinguish between the two is part of becoming free.

Neither process is simple, and neither should be romanticised. There are still environments where self-protection is necessary, and there are real consequences for challenging power. Telling someone to stop being conditioned can become its own cruelty when it ignores the conditions that built the conditioning in the first place. We cannot command ourselves to feel safe in circumstances that remain dangerous, nor can we pretend that insight alone will remove the material consequences of resistance.

Unlearning also requires us to examine the stories we tell about ourselves.

Who might I have become under different conditions? What do I want when I am no longer organising my desires around anticipated disapproval? What capacities have I mistaken for impossibilities because I have rarely been given the conditions in which to exercise them? What advantages have I mistaken for proof of superiority because I have never had to examine the environment that supported them?

The answers may expose two very different consequences of conditioning. Repeated discouragement can lead us to experience an imposed limitation as a natural boundary of our abilities. Consistent encouragement and reward can lead others to regard the advantages they have acquired as evidence of inherent superiority. In both cases, the influence of the environment disappears from view. We mistake what we have learned to expect for what we are, and what circumstances have made possible for proof of what we deserve.

The purpose of examining these stories is not to replace one fixed identity with another. It is to make room for a more honest understanding of how identity develops, what has been inherited, what has been imposed, and what remains possible. We may discover capacities that have gone unused, desires that have been suppressed, and assumptions that have never been tested. We may also discover privileges that have appeared so ordinary that their influence has remained invisible.

Recognition, however, does not bring instant transformation. A pattern reinforced for years by family, institutions, material circumstances, and the responses of others may persist long after we have begun to question it. We may understand intellectually that we are entitled to speak and still feel our bodies tighten when the opportunity arrives. We may know that another person’s independence does not diminish our own and still experience an involuntary sense of displacement. The old response can remain long after its authority has been called into question.

Deconditioning must therefore be a practice, not merely a revelation.

It involves noticing the old response, examining what it assumes, and choosing deliberately whether to follow it. We must learn to tolerate the unfamiliar experience of acting without the usual permission, just as we must learn to remain present when someone else does the same. Repetition matters here, too. Habits that once reproduced inequality through automatic behaviour can gradually be challenged through repeated acts of awareness and choice.

Those who learnt to keep silent must discover their voices, while those accustomed to being obeyed must learn to listen. Both must learn to encounter disagreement without automatically interpreting it as a threat to their place in the world. Freedom begins to acquire substance when neither silence nor submission is required to preserve the relationship, and when another’s independence no longer has to be experienced as our diminishment.

Yet the work extends beyond our private habits. The mind does not develop in isolation, and what we have internalised is often reinforced by the very institutions that claim to have changed. The final frontier of liberation lies in the relationship between the world we are building and the world we have learned to carry within us.

The Mind as the Final Frontier

Laws can change behaviour. Institutions can change opportunity. Policies can redistribute resources. Representation can change what we imagine is possible for ourselves. All of it matters. None of it, by itself, finishes the psychological work of liberation, because the deepest layer of hierarchy was never only the rule that told us where to stand. It was the voice that told us where we belonged.

Freedom requires more than emancipation from external authority. We must learn which parts of ourselves were formed in response to a world that no longer has the right to define us. Those who have spent a lifetime shrinking must discover that taking up space is not automatically dangerous. Those accustomed to being centred must discover that sharing space does not automatically mean loss.

These are not merely private adjustments. They affect the relationships through which equality is either practised or undermined. Someone who has internalised their own inferiority may continue to defer even after the formal restrictions have disappeared. Someone who has internalised entitlement may continue to expect deference even when the rules no longer support that expectation. In both cases, the old arrangement survives through conduct that no longer needs to be explicitly demanded.

Institutions must learn the same lesson at scale. A society can remove the old signs and still carry the old instincts. It can change its laws and keep its reflexes, celebrate diversity while quietly rewarding conformity, and speak the language of equality while reproducing the conditions of hierarchy beneath it.

Representation alone cannot complete the work of liberation. The presence of previously excluded people in positions of authority is significant, but the deeper question concerns the terms on which they are permitted to exercise that authority. If acceptance depends on reproducing the same exclusions, silencing the same challenges, or conforming to the same narrow expectations, the composition of an institution may change while its underlying relationships remain intact.

Nor does access to a new environment immediately resolve an internal expectation of exclusion. We may continue to anticipate rejection, minimise our contributions, or interpret ordinary disagreement as confirmation that we do not belong. The environment has changed, yet the learned response persists. Genuine freedom requires attention to both.

The final frontier was never only the law. It is the learned mind.

Conditioning is what happens when the world is repeated inside us until the world begins speaking through us. Liberation begins when we can hear that voice clearly enough to ask: Is this actually me, or is this something I learned?

That question opens a space where there was once only reflex.

And inside that space, choice becomes possible.

The Garlic of Egypt: The Loneliness of the Pioneer

Pushing a boundary can provoke resistance even among those who stand to benefit from its removal. We might expect those who suffer under a system to welcome efforts to change it, particularly when the proposed change promises greater freedom, dignity, or opportunity. Yet we do not experience the world solely through an assessment of what is fair or what might improve our lives. We also depend on familiarity, predictability, and the practical knowledge we have accumulated about surviving within existing conditions. We can be deeply dissatisfied with an arrangement and still feel threatened by the prospect of its disappearance.

The biblical account of the Israelites in the wilderness gives this tension a memorable form. Having lived under Egyptian bondage, the Israelites were led out of Egypt towards an unfamiliar future. Yet the journey brought uncertainty, hunger, exhaustion, and fear. The promised destination lay ahead, while the hardships of the journey were immediate. Under pressure, some began to long for Egypt, recalling the fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic they had eaten there. The memory of food became part of a wider longing for the life they had left behind.

The irony is striking. Those who had cried out under oppression could come to remember aspects of that same environment with longing when liberation demanded that they endure the uncertainty of transition. Egypt had held them in bondage, yet it had also become the place whose rhythms they knew. They understood its hardships, its limits, and the means by which they might get through another day. The wilderness offered the possibility of a different life, but it could not immediately offer the reassurance of the familiar.

The garlic is worth pausing over. It represents the small, tangible comforts that can acquire extraordinary significance when everything else feels uncertain. Egypt was not made free by the availability of garlic, and familiar food did not erase the conditions of bondage. Yet in the wilderness, where the next meal and the next stage of the journey seemed uncertain, the remembered garlic could become a symbol of what had been lost. The familiar hardship offered something the unfamiliar freedom could not immediately provide: the reassurance of knowing what tomorrow might look like.

We can see the same pattern in our own lives. We may remain in an arrangement that diminishes us because we know how to survive within it. We know which compromises will keep the peace, which ambitions must be concealed, which truths are safer left unspoken, and which version of ourselves will be accepted. Even suffering can acquire a kind of predictability. We learn its boundaries and develop strategies for living within them. The possibility of leaving may therefore bring fear alongside relief, because freedom asks us to relinquish not only the conditions that hurt us but also the habits and expectations that helped us endure them.

This is part of what makes boundary-pushing so uncomfortable, both for those initiating change and for those around them. The pioneer asks others to consider a possibility for which they may have no established frame of reference. The proposed future might offer greater freedom, but it may also require the surrender of familiar roles, habits, relationships, and ways of making sense of life. Even when the existing order has disadvantaged us, we may have learned how to navigate it. We know where we stand, what is expected of us, which compromises are necessary, and how to secure whatever limited advantages remain available. A new arrangement threatens to make that knowledge less useful before it provides anything equally dependable in return.

The resistance that follows can be confusing because it does not always come from those who benefit most from the existing order. It may come from people who have been harmed by it, including those who might enjoy greater freedom if the proposed change succeeds. They may question the pioneer’s judgment, emphasise the risks, recall the comforts of the past, or insist that the attempt to change things is unnecessary. Some fear that the transition will expose them to losses they cannot afford. Others struggle to imagine themselves living differently because the existing order has shaped not only their circumstances but also their expectations of what is possible. The boundary has become part of the world as they understand it, and its removal threatens the predictability of that world.

Those who resist change are not necessarily foolish or ungrateful. The pioneer may underestimate the genuine costs of transition, while those being asked to follow may have good reasons to fear what lies ahead. But the discomfort of change can also lead us to defend conditions we would not freely choose if a viable alternative were already available. The known can feel safer than the unknown even when the known is painful. The person attempting to create a better possibility may therefore find themselves having to defend it against the very people whose lives it is intended to improve.

History offers many examples of those who challenged an established order and found themselves opposed by the world they sought to change. Frederick Douglass challenged the legitimacy of slavery and became a powerful advocate for abolition in a society that denied Black people their humanity and freedom. Early feminists confronted a social order that treated women’s dependence as natural, while some women shaped by that order also viewed challenges to established gender roles with apprehension. Rosa Parks’s refusal to surrender her seat on a segregated bus became an enduring symbol of the civil rights movement, within a broader struggle that required sustained organisation and collective action. James Baldwin challenged the racial narratives through which American society attempted to define Black life, while suffragettes contested the assumption that political authority naturally belonged to men. These struggles unfolded under different historical conditions, but each confronted expectations that had acquired the force of normality.

The pioneer therefore bears a double burden. They must contend with those who have an interest in preserving the existing arrangement, as well as those who have learned to organise their lives around it. The first may resist because change threatens their advantages. The second may resist because change threatens their sense of security. Similar opposition can arise from very different positions within the same order. The injustice of a situation does not guarantee that those living within it will be ready to escape.

The pioneer may recognise that a familiar arrangement is restrictive while those around them continue to weigh the risks of leaving it against the immediate discomfort of their present circumstances. They may be accused of disloyalty for questioning inherited expectations, arrogance for imagining that life could be organised differently, or recklessness for pursuing a future whose benefits cannot yet be demonstrated. They may even find themselves resented by those who could eventually benefit from the change, simply because the pioneer has disturbed the fragile equilibrium through which they have learned to live.

Pushing a boundary is therefore more than an intellectual act of recognising that something could be different. It is an emotionally demanding encounter with the fear, grief, and uncertainty that accompany the loss of familiarity. Those who initiate change must often tolerate disapproval without the reassurance that others will eventually agree. Those being asked to move beyond the familiar must confront the possibility that the life they know, however limited, may no longer be available to them. Neither side can see the entire future clearly. Yet while the pioneer attempts to make a new future possible, others may cling to the remembered comforts of the old one.

There is loneliness in being early. We may see the cost of an arrangement before those around us are ready to name it. We may recognise a possibility before the language, resources, or collective confidence needed to pursue it have taken shape. The people closest to us may understand our suffering and still fail to understand why we can no longer endure what once seemed manageable. They may hear our refusal as rejection, our independence as disloyalty, or our hope as an accusation against those who have chosen to remain.

The loneliness does not necessarily mean the pioneer is right about everything. Conviction is not proof, and the willingness to endure opposition does not make every cause just. A proposed change must still be examined for its consequences, its assumptions, and the lives it may place at risk. But neither should resistance be mistaken for evidence that the old arrangement deserves to survive. Sometimes the first sign that a boundary is being challenged is the discomfort of those who have built their lives around it.

The psychological battle for equality is fought in the space between what we have learned to accept and what we might yet become. It requires changing the conditions that distribute freedom unequally, challenging the expectations that preserve those conditions, and confronting the habits through which the old order continues to live inside us long after its authority has been questioned.

The work is not finished when a door opens. It continues in the struggle to enter without abandoning ourselves, to make room without surrendering another’s humanity, and to build relationships and institutions in which freedom does not depend on the continued submission of someone else.

Sometimes the first person to become free of an arrangement must also become the first to discover what lies beyond it.