Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom: An Owner's Manual for Life

by Gerry Spence

Overview

Beloved author of, among many other books, the bestsellers How to Argue and Win Every Time and The Making of a Country Lawyer, Gerry Spence distills a lifetime of wisdom and observation about how we live, and how we ought to live in Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom. Here, in seven chapters, he delivers messages that inspire us first to recognize our servitude-to money, possessions, corporations, the status quo, and our own fears-and then shows us how to begin the self-defining process toward liberation.

Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom is a powerfully affirming, large-hearted, and life-changing book that asks us all to take the greatest risk for the greatest reward-our own freedom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429909006
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/16/2002
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	165 KB

About the Author

Gerry Spence is the author of twelve books. A lawyer by training, he has been involved in many high-profile cases, including the radiation poisoning death of Karen Silkwood, and has appeared on Oprah, 60 Minutes, and Larry King Live, and is currently a regular guest on Rivera Live. He lives with his wife in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Gerry Spence has been a trial attorney for more than five decades and proudly represents "the little people." He has fought and won for the family of Karen Silkwood, defended Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, and represented hundreds of others in some of the most notable trials of our time. He is the founder of Trial Lawyer's College, a nonprofit school where, pro bono, he teaches attorneys for the people how to present their cases and win against powerful corporate and government interests. He is the author more than a dozen books, including The New York Times bestseller How to Argue and Win Every Time, From Freedom to Slavery, Give Me Liberty, and The Making of a Country Lawyer, and is a nationally known television commentator on the famous trials of our time. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

THE FIRST STEP

Recognizing the Slave Within

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.

—Erich Fromm
from Man for Himself, 1947

PERFECT FREEDOM

Perfect freedom does not exist except when we are freed of life. Then the mind is unprisoned, and the soul is free to fly. Death frees life, releasing it like a bird that soars without fear of its enemies, like the sparrow with no fear of the hawk. Absent death, perfect freedom cannot exist. I do not argue for death. What I argue for is freedom without regard to the exterior forces that enslave us. I argue that freedom can exist only if we have first freed the self. And in life the self is ours to free.

THE FIGHT AGAINST FREEDOM

Most of us do not want to be free. Most of our parents were slaves. We have grown up as slaves. The system in which we live and struggle and attempt to fulfill our lives is a system of slavery. In the end all systems enslave, whether they be orders of government, religion, or society, and although our system may offer the best chance for individuals to be free, systems themselves never free us. We must free ourselves.

    Once enslaved, few want to burst out from under the leaking roof of the slave hut to freedom and stumble in the colddark night alone. In the back part of our hearts, we equate freedom with terror. To be free leaves us isolated from the other slaves. Better that we rage until we are palsied, point and squall and wail at fate, shake our fists at God, blame the politicians, blame anybody, everything, because to become free demands that we take responsibility for our bondage. No, we do not want freedom. We were born in slavery. It is too frightening outside the slave hut. We want, instead, a more comfortable slavery gilded with bountiful excuses for our servitude.

    On the underside of freedom lurks the sense that we are as puny as a particle of dust at sea. We stay imprisoned in bad marriages because we are afraid to be alone. We endure every manner of indignity and outrage, every agony and tedium, because we are afraid—afraid to throw off the traces and experience the naked terror that so dominates the idea of freedom. We kiss our shackles. We stay at home with the old folks, or never leave the farm or the neighborhood. We linger on in daddy's business or hang on to the old job until we have worn a track around it like the knee-deep trail of the old gristmill horse, because we are too frightened to march out into the wilderness alone.

    Already we know that no one is ever really free. Not the president, not the chairman of the board, not husband or wife, not the haughty businessman, the playboy, or the idle rich. Freedom is for the birds. And even they are securely bound by their instincts. No. No one is free, and no one wants freedom. We want to talk about it over a beer. To many, freedom is death. If we awakened one day to confront pure freedom, would we not scurry back into our dark little holes as fast as terrorized mice?

    Cages are cages whether constructed of steel and concrete or from the fabric of the mind. Like all experiences, both freedom and slavery are registered in the mind. The mind sets the limits of bondage and provides the gate to liberty. What each of us mistakes for our freedom is really our experience within the cage.

    I remember when one simply bought one's ticket and hopped on the airplane. Today we have constructed new cages in old zoos. Today we are terrorized by terrorists. Yet there are probably no more than a few score people in the entire nation whose madness would cause them to plot the willful destruction of hundreds of innocent passengers. As a consequence, these few, whoever they might be, control 260 million people. Today we take it as an unquestioned part of travel, as the way of things, that we must identify ourselves with an official picture identification—the precursor of tattoos on our wrists. Today we accept as the way of things that our bodies must be searched mechanically, that our luggage must be inspected, that once aboard, we must behave in numerous purposeless ways that have little or nothing to do with our safety but control us perfectly like cattle run through the chutes. We know that if someone wants to manufacture a bomb and blow up the plane and its passengers, all of the endless procedures we have endured will have proven to be only the known landscape over which any terrorist can travel with ease.

    We do not provide ourselves with safety. We have only given up our constitutional rights against unlawful searches and seizures for the illusion of safety. Yet no one complains, or if a complaint is heard, it is in the form of an impotent mumble to which a security guard, who may not be able to read the regulations he has been hired to enforce, responds by warning us to comply at once. Otherwise, we can take the bus to Chicago.

    Today one's every move, every decision, every act, is governed by rules and regulations devised, ostensibly, to permit masses of people to function together in harmony. We dress according to rules, eat according to rules, excrete according to rules, sleep according to rules, and die according to rules. We mate according to rules, and, according to rules, we rear and educate our young. To build the simplest house requires compliance with a mountain of rules that would confound all but modern man who has been born into this bureaucratic cage. The rules that govern our daily lives would fill reams of fine print on tissue-thin paper. Still, the human being, more than any other creature, is perfectly able to adapt to nearly any environment. We can swelter and prosper in the jungles. We can tramp over the ice and multiply in igloos. The rules and laws and the multitude of man's endless impositions on man that consume our freedom have become a part of our daily environment to which we have also adapted with little more than an occasional whimper.

    The difference, of course, between the monkey in the zoo and the man on the street is that the monkey cannot be contained without physical restraint, while the man can be caged and shackled and whipped and exist in captivity from birth until death within a prison without walls and still believe, at his last breath, that he is free.

FREEDOM INSIDE THE ZOO

Yet we cannot be free outside the cage unless we are able to experience freedom within it. Consider the wild monkey who, lately transported to the zoo, hurls itself against the walls until it is battered and exhausted. Consider how it refuses to eat within the cage and may eventually die. On the other hand, his cage brother, born in the cage, sits peacefully by munching on whatever morsel the zookeeper has tossed him and bounces off the concrete walls as if he were swinging from tree limb to tree limb.

    Slavery and captivity are not synonymous for either man or monkey. The wild monkey can be captive in the jungle itself. Relegated to an inferior rung on the monkey-ladder, it is subject to a monkey-imposed hierarchy. In the jungle, it is pinioned to a territory with limits, to the safety of certain trees the leopard cannot climb. In or out of the zoo, the monkey may accept the limits imposed upon him as freedom.

    In his preface to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote of an army of managers who, without coercion, controlled a population of slaves who were perfectly manageable because they loved their servitude. "To make them love it," he wrote, "is the task assigned in present-day totalitarian states."

HISTORY, OUR SLAVE MASTER

In the same way that nations are the product of their history, so, too, each of us owns a personal history. Just as many nations possess a past in slavery, so, too, each of us has experienced to varying degrees an individual slavery. The deeper we have fallen into slavery, the more difficult it is for us to recognize it, especially if we have been ravaged by its power at an early age. The colt broken to the lead before it has run free is the easier to harness.

THE ETERNAL NO

From the moment we are freed from the imprisoning womb and the cord is cut, we not only begin to assert our freedom, to search for it and grasp for it, but at the same moment powerful forces are loosed against us to enslave us. Although we were born to become free, the mother, the community, the law, the system begin to fling the eternal no at the child. As the child reaches for a glass on the table, he hears the eternal no! He hears "No!" as he toddles toward the door. He hears "No!" as he reaches for the nose on his father's face. He hears the eternal no echoing in his ears from cradle to grave. The Ten Commandments, with their "thou shalt nots," ring in his ears. His teachers, more dedicated to their comfort than to the child's free growth and expression, smother the child with the eternal no from the first moment he is entrusted into their hands until the factory we call the educational system has, at last, spit him out.

    His life is cut into segments of time. The fence of time captures him. There is a time to sleep, a time to arise, a time to go to school, to eat, to play, and a time once more to go to bed. Never has the child been permitted to revolt against any of the enslaving forces that domesticate the human animal and convert him from the wild aborigine of his genes to the human machine that will eventually perform as predictably as a windup toy.

THE REBEL WITHIN

By puberty the war between the forces of freedom and those of slavery explodes to the surface. The child, now brimming with hormones, begins to assert his individuality. He strikes out in unpredictable ways against all authority—against his parents, the school, the law. He experiments with alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. He tests his sexuality. No matter the love of parent, the supplications of parent, the pleading of parent, the threats of parent—nothing will divert the child from his rush toward individuality. One cannot experience individuality in the womb, attached to the placenta, suckling at the breast, held by the maternal hand, or contained within the parental folds. Like the slave who breaks his chains, one can achieve individuality only through the rebellious forces of freedom.

    But no sooner does the child begin to assert his independence during puberty—although usually with the wisdom and aplomb of a wild hare—than the forces of the eternal no are reapplied with even greater vigor. In high school he is no longer coddled. School has become a higher-stakes penitentiary. The rules are impersonal and rigid. The juvenile's own social system, too, has rules. He can belong only if he complies with the gang and accepts its rules. His genetic longing for the tribe shouts in his ear. His need to become a functional, recognized member of the tribe dominates his decisions. To belong is the paramount goal. Parental approval and acceptance in the larger social order bear little weight for the adolescent. His is not the adult world, nor does he wish to enter it. He does not respect it. The adult power structure is the enemy. Yet it is from that power structure that the eternal no pounds perpetually in his ears—threatening, punishing, and finally enslaving.

ENCOUNTERING THE EVIL BITCH

By the time children blunder into adulthood, other forces have come to assert their power against them. Mother Nature has stricken them with the ultimate disease—falling in love. Her weapon, the evil bitch, is chemical warfare. The hormone, a magic potion still not fully understood by science, strikes at the human brain, causing its victims to fall prey to the disease, to mate, and to thereby plunge into a new slavery from which they will likely never recover. The forces of the malady cause them to woo, to fight, to copulate, and to produce children. Now they must provide their offspring a nest and nourishment, and, in an utterly predictable progression, they must make certain bargains, which usually require them to sell themselves as a commodity at the slave market. Thereafter they make their bargains from year to year, from job to job, and the bargains ensnare them until they are rolled into their graves.

    We are creatures enslaved by our genes. We are, indeed, like salmon predictably fulfilling our genetic course. Mindlessly we swim with the school into the great seas and back up the river of our birth to spawn, to die, and to be eaten by the waiting grizzly on the bank. Such freedom as we experience is only that which we encounter within the genetic cage of our birth, within the confines of the mammalian creature that we are—confines from which we can never escape nor, ultimately, wish to escape. We were not born to become free. We were born to fall in love with Mary Jane or Billy Joe, to marry her or him, to parent those three little drippy-nosed rascals who will bedevil us until the day we gasp our last exhausted breath, and then, as true to the equation as dandelions going to seed and withering in the first frost, we, too, will complete this seemingly purposeless cycle established by the ultimate force, which some call God.

THE PESTIFEROUS LONGING

Still we long for freedom. And in the end, we must have it. When the infant's cord is severed, the infant experiences the first power of freedom. It can cry at will. And it does cry, exercising its freedom to protest the external forces already laid against it. The babe can be heard. And it is heard. It can respond to its bodily demands. Already it is an entity to be reckoned with. It has a will of its own. It can exercise its will, and although its dependence is clear to see, its dependence, as in all dependent relationships, enslaves the caretaker as well. Yet freedom is the biological goal of every creature, whether babe or brute. Within the confines of its genes the hawk is free. The squirrel. The worm in the wood. Man is born to struggle for freedom. Yet only man devours the soul of his brother. And only man enslaves others of his kind and himself.

THE FIRST STEP TO FREEDOM:

RECOGNIZING THE SLAVE WITHIN

The first halting step toward freedom of the self is the acknowledgment of one's enslavement. If we do not recognize that we are slaves, we can never break free.

    We are told that in this American system our destiny rests solely in our hands. But when we slam against the chains of our slavery, we conclude that there must be something inherently wrong with us. Since the rest of the nation is said to be free and enjoy freedom's rich rewards, it must be that we who suffer this powerful sense of insignificance, of aloneness and enslavement, are somehow defective. We must be weak. We must be at fault. We must be worthless.

    On the other hand, for those who have been lulled into the sweet security of bondage, and exist contentedly within the walls of the zoo, for those who embrace myth and splash like happy babies in the bath of blissful conformity, the question naturally arises: Why should they who are content in their servitude be disturbed? Why make happy slaves miserable freemen?

    But the destiny of the human race can never be fulfilled under the yoke. The potted plant in the window can never produce its most prodigious blooms. I say God performed the ultimate act of love for Adam and Eve by ejecting them from the Garden, for, confined within the Garden, they existed without the knowledge of freedom, and without suffering its pain the slave can never seek the splendor of the self. The first step to freedom, therefore, is discovering and freely acknowledging that we are slaves.

Chapter Two

THE SECOND STEP

Recapturing the Perfect Self

We are slaves to ourselves. Preserve a closed mind and what we behold is the ambulatory dead. All slaves are a form of the ambulatory dead.
    Is it not time to arise from the grave? Is it not time to speak out, to cry out, to fly, to test wings, to fall, and to laugh with joy over the divine bruises?

—Gerry Spence
from Give Me Liberty, 1998

POWERLESSNESS, THE CONTAGIOUS DISEASE

One night when I was a boy, I was working under the kiln in a cement plant, that hot hellhole where I was shoveling the spill with a guy we called Old Bill. We were talking. I said I was going to become the greatest lawyer in the history of the world. It was just noise, just the sound of my voice against the deafening roar of the kiln, but there was some small entity playing in me—the precocious, naive little fellow called Hope.

    "Well, now, that there sounds like a lota bullshit ta me," Old Bill said. "I will tell ya one thing, boy. You be lucky to keep this job, and we'll both get our asses canned if we don't quit fuckin' the dog." He started shoveling harder and faster, and I joined him. "Better get this somebitch cleaned up afore the boss comes by."

    We kept on shoveling and sweating. When the wheelbarrow was full, he got between the handles, lifted them up with the hoist of his old legs, and toted the load up over a two-by-twelve plank into the plant proper. After pushing it outside the kiln shed a distance that amounted to a couple of city blocks, he dumped the load where one day a backhoe would lift it into a dump truck to be hauled off. Next load was mine.

    When Old Bill got back with the empty wheelbarrow, he jumped right in with his thoughts. "Boy, you best pin yer ass to the grass. You best not go bullshittin' yerself about bein' some big-time lawyer. Them big-time lawyers go to them big schools and wear clean underwear ever day." He laughed. "They ain't our kind. I'll tell ya that much."

    I didn't say anything.

    "Nothin' wrong with bein' poor. Don't ya ferget that."

    Never did. Never have.

    "But there is somethin' wrong with bullshittin' yerse'f," he said. "Ya know what the eleventh command is, boy?"

    "No," I said.

    The eleventh commandant is "Thou shalt not bullshit thyself." Then it was my turn to lug out the load.

    Something there is about feeling powerless that makes us wish the world around us were as powerless as we—something about feeling weak and worthless that causes the human animal to inflict weakness and worthlessness on his fellows. Old Bill, working with a boy under the kiln, saw life as cruel and brutal, and people as worthless and weak. Most often the way folks see others is how they see themselves.

THE PERFECT POWER OF THE SELF

We were born with all the power we require to live free, and all the power we require to free ourselves of life by dying. We need not seek power from others, for others cannot give us power. We need not marry a powerful person, join a political party or club, or wildly climb the corporate ladder to obtain power. To obtain power we do not need to join a church, embrace a religion, adopt its enslaving myths, or mumble its dogma. Each of us has been endowed at birth with the perfect power to be free. No God with whom I would care to carry on an interchange would demand that we submit to him. No loving God would demand our servitude; instead, like any loving father, he would take great joy in our having evolved to a state of independence and would rejoice in our liberation.

    The slave master always enlists the power of the slave ghoul. The ghoul knocks at the door of every one of us imploring us to relinquish our power in favor of a state, a religion, an economic philosophy, an employer, a parent, a spouse. The ghoul demands that we give up our power and see ourselves as lowly, powerless and worthless, for without the relinquishment of our power, the slave master is powerless.

THE INCOMPARABLE SELF

I will tell you a laughably simple truth. It is nothing new. It is a truth that has not been invented by any man, or taught by any guru. It is a truth born in the genes of every person. It is as much a part of the person at birth as is his first cry of life. It is as much a part of human history as the thumb is part of a functioning hand. The simple truth is that each of us is unique in him- or herself. And because each of us is unique, we cannot be compared to others. Because none of us can be compared to others, we are perfect in ourselves. And because we are perfect in ourselves, we are not required to surrender to any power that is not our own in order to realize our power, our fulfillment, our destiny, our lives.

    Think of it this way: Do you see your fingers? Each finger has a print that is different from the print of any other finger. Every person has ten different fingerprints, each of them unique. Every person who has ever occupied space on this earth or who will ever be born until the end of time has ten prints that are each different from those of all others in the history of the world, and in the world to come.

    So it is with the imprint of the person. Each of us is different from all other persons living or dead and from any other person who will ever again grace the face of this earth. Such uniqueness renders us incomparable, elevates us as the standard, not for anyone else, but for ourselves—our only standard. But it is when the perfect self is relentlessly attacked by the forces of slavery that we become wounded, that we begin to reject ourselves like a malady of the body that turns the immune system against itself. The scars on the soul begin to build and choke until at last we become enslaved to the slave master within.

ATTACKING THE INNOCENT CHILD

I see the perfect child attacked by the evil of the prejudice of those around him. He is black or Hispanic, or poor or small. She is shy, or her body does not fit the anorexic paradigm of the New York City cover girl. And the child takes the judgment of others into him- or herself.

    I see the perfect children of the world injured by racism, by poverty, and by the stultifying forces of ignorance. I see children stuck in the ugly mire of communities where crime is the norm and poverty the standard. And the child with no vision other than lawlessness and destitution accepts the judgment of the system as a valid judgment of himself. The system has abandoned the child's community. In the child's innocent mind, those within the community must therefore be worthless. Human life must be worthless, including his own, so that injuring and killing at last become meaningless acts in an empty world.

    I see the creative genius in our children—that budding flower that stands for the incomparable power of the human species—being debased and corrupted by fathers who feel worthless and powerless themselves and who, in turn, visit their dreadful disease of dysfunction and slavery upon their children. I see parents telling their children that they are bad, that they are ignorant and stupid, and the judgment of the parents is taken as the truth by the child. I see parents who prove the worthlessness of the child to the child by ignoring his or her uniqueness, by disregarding the child's beauty, and by abdicating the care of the child to those who have no investment in the child—the corporate nanny, the day-care center, the impersonal overseer. I see parents abusing children, both with words and with physical force that communicate the irrevocable message to the child that he or she has no value, for otherwise the child would be treated with endearing respect.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from SEVEN SIMPLE STEPS TO PERSONAL FREEDOM by Gerry Spence. Copyright © 2001 by Gerry Spence. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Note to the Reader	ix
My Own Many Encounters with Slavery	1
PART 1: BREAKING FREE
The First Step: Recognizing the Slave Within	17
The Second Step: Recapturing the Perfect Self	27
The Third Step: Inquisitor of the Self	35
The Fourth Step: Becoming Religiously Irreligious	43
The Fifth Step: The Magical Power of Aloneness	69
The Sixth Step: Withholding Permission to Lose	78
The Seventh Step: Rejecting the Slavery of Security	95
PART II: FREE AT LAST
Redefining Success	111
Free at Last	135
Notes	139
Acknowledgments	143
About the Author	145

Editorial Reviews

Gerry Spence has become the Socrates of Jackson Hole.” —Larry McMurtry

“Gerry Spence is one of America's last true originals-a man who thinks as brilliantly as he lives, who writes as compellingly as he talks, and who practices law as faithfully as most people practice religion.” —Dan Rather

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