Live free and die

Farewell then, Flaco. In his short 14 years on Earth he captured the hearts of a whole city. Now, in death, he is making them reflect on their own lives.

Flaco was once an exhibit in New York's Central ParkAn iconic large park in the heart of New York City. Zoo. But last year a vandal slashed open the mesh on his enclosure, letting the owl free into the night.

Immediately, there began a frenzied hunt to bring him home. The Wall Street Journal demanded that he be recaptured.¹

But Flaco had other ideas. He never returned to the zoo and he thwarted every effort to bring him home.²

For many who feel their own lives have been a little too comfortable, a little without risk, perhaps a little unfree, Flaco offers a lesson in how to live.

Many philosophers have tried to teach us the same lesson. Friedrich NietzscheIn 1869, the German philosopher became the youngest person ever to hold the University of Basel's Chair of Classical Philology. He was 24.   asked his readers to imagine how they would respond if they were condemned to repeat the life they had already lived for all eternity.³

He bet that almost everyone would be horrified, and castigated themselves for disdaining the greatest gift of all, a human life.

But others are not so convinced. They point to the example of Homer's AchillesThe Greeks' greatest hero. The only vulnerable part of his body was his heel - hence the expression "an Achilles heel", meaning a weak spot., whose ghost told OdysseusThe most cunning of the Greek leaders. The Odyssey, an epic poem about the 10 years he spent trying to return home after the Trojan War, is also attributed to Homer. that glory is no consolation to the dead.⁴

Still others say Flaco did not have to choose between his freedom and his life. It was human choices that cut his life short. He died after flying into a building.

Up to 250,000 birds die in New York CityA city in the US. It is the biggest city in New York state. every year from collisions with buildings.⁵ This is because artificial lights in urban areas disrupt their navigation. They are drawn like moths towards the light sources, which are often behind hard glass surfaces.

This is exacerbatedMade worse. by other human interference. Owls can end up absorbing rat poison and lead from the animals they eat.⁶

In this, we are not a million miles from the owls ourselves. The environment we have created is what makes freedom a deadly prospect.

We no longer have the skills to fend for ourselves outside the comfortable world that we know. And the environment is so polluted that if we tried to live off it we would just fall sick at once. Civilisation is what Max WeberA German thinker of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries who is regarded as one of the founders of sociology. His ideas about the development of modern western society remain highly influential. called an iron cage: it keeps us safe and keeps us in.

Freedom is a fine thing, they say. But it has to mean freedom to live, and not just freedom to die.

Is freedom worth any price?

Yes: If life means anything, it is the ability to make our own way. A life without freedom is not really lived at all. Most of us have no idea what it means to live.

No: The thought that you died free is little consolation when you are dead. For as long as you are alive you can hope for better things. To die is always to die for nothing.

Or... We are free as individuals only insofar as we are free as a society. If you want freedom, do not dream of giving up your cage and returning to the wild. Think of how to free the people around you.