When we look at the universe through the lens of physics and chemistry, no concept such as freedom or liberation exists at all. Atoms and molecules obey the laws of thermodynamics blindly, possessing no will of their own. And yet, a particular species roaming the vast grasslands of Africa eventually succeeded in convincing itself that it possessed a priceless treasure called freedom. How did this become possible? To understand why freedom came to matter so profoundly, and when humankind first began to grasp its true worth, we must step outside today's political debates and look at a vast backdrop of history spanning millions of years. The story of freedom is not merely a political story; it is the biological, intellectual, and deeply tragic story of a species that has struggled ceaselessly to escape a cage of its own making.
But before we discuss freedom, we must understand the story of our origins as described by Charles Darwin and modern genetics. For millions of years, various species of the genus Homo inhabited the earth. From Homo erectus to the sturdy Neanderthals, the lives of these creatures were entirely governed by their biology and ecology. They were, in truth, animals, driven by the fundamental code written into their DNA: survive, and reproduce. In this primal state, "freedom" was an unrecognized and meaningless notion. Just as a lion is not free to choose between eating grass or meat, ancient humans too remained bound by their biological necessities. Their actions were governed by shifts in neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin coursing through their brains. They lived in the present moment, reacting to predators, seeking shelter, and gathering food. They had no conception that life could ever be otherwise, and so no desire to break free from their present condition ever stirred within them.
A great transformation within this entirely biological existence arrived about seventy thousand years ago, an event evolutionary biologists and historians call the Cognitive Revolution. A chance genetic mutation subtly altered the neural wiring of the Homo sapiens brain. This granted our ancestors an almost supernatural power that no other creature possessed. As a result, the Homo sapiens of that time gained the ability to imagine and speak of things that had no physical existence at all. An ordinary monkey could only warn its troop that a lion was near the riverbank, but after the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens could tell a story that a lion-god was protecting their tribe. This capacity to create shared imagination—myths, gods, and fictional realities—was the first step out of the purely biological world. But, ironically, it was also the first step into a new kind of prison, whose walls were built not of brick or stone, but of human belief.
Having gained this new intellectual power, Homo sapiens began spreading across the entire world. For roughly the next fifty to sixty thousand years, they lived as hunters and gatherers. Modern anthropology often marvels at these ancient hunters, wondering whether they were, in fact, the freest humans in history. They had no king, no state, no taxes, and no written law. They likely spent only four to six hours a day hunting and gathering food, and passed the rest of their time mingling with one another, telling stories, and resting. Their diet was varied and nutritious, and they were generally free of the terrible epidemics that would later devastate crowded cities. From a purely physical and temporal standpoint, an ancient hunter probably experienced a level of personal freedom that today's factory worker or office employee can only dream of. And yet, this freedom was harshly bounded by nature. A brutal winter, a prolonged drought, or a chance encounter with a powerful predator or rival band could end their existence in an instant. Beyond this, the very myths that gave them the power to survive together were also what bound them. Tribal customs, taboos, and the fear of vengeful spirits drew invisible boundaries around their every action. Their freedom, then, was not the philosophical liberation we seek today; it was merely the absence of institutional human oppression.
The most devastating blow to human freedom—and perhaps the greatest betrayal in history—occurred around twelve thousand years ago, in what we call the Agricultural Revolution. For whatever reason, certain groups of Homo sapiens in India and the Middle East began settling permanently and taking control of the life cycles of particular plant species. We often take pride in believing that we domesticated these plants. But in truth, viewed through an evolutionary lens, it was these plants that domesticated us. Before agriculture, a person could go wherever they wished. After agriculture began, humans became bound to a fixed patch of land. They had to clear forests, pull weeds under the scorching sun, carry water, and worry constantly about the weather. The Homo sapiens body had evolved for climbing trees and chasing deer, not for the repetitive, punishing labor of farming. This shift brought a rise in spinal ailments, arthritis, and hernias. We traded a varied and adventurous life for a dull and grinding one.
So why did humans accept this vast loss of freedom?
The Agricultural Revolution delivered one specific evolutionary advantage: it dramatically increased the amount of food available in a given region, triggering a population explosion. From the standpoint of evolution, success is not measured by individual happiness or freedom, but by how many copies of one's DNA are passed on to the next generation. Seen this way, agriculture was a triumph for humanity as a whole, but a catastrophe for the average individual. With settled farming came the concept of surplus food, and with surplus food came the concept of private property. For the first time in history, a human being drew an imaginary line on the earth and said, "This is mine." Once property was invented, the need to defend it arose. This required walls, guards, and eventually, armies. And if one could own land and livestock, why not other human beings as well? This agriculture-based logic of property, combined with a shortage of laborers, gave birth to slavery. Most people became farmers, bound to the land, dependent on the mercy of the seasons and the tax collector. A small group, meanwhile, sat atop society as rulers.
As villages grew into towns and towns into vast cities, the shared myths born during the Cognitive Revolution had to be made ever more elaborate in order to bind together large numbers of people. Humans invented new concepts like "nation," "kingdom," and "empire." These had no physical reality—one cannot view a nation under a microscope. They were, therefore, inter-subjective realities, powerful fictions that everyone believed in together. To manage the vast quantities of data—granaries, tax records, census figures—needed to run these enormous empires, a new tool was invented: writing. With the invention of writing, humans ceased to be merely living creatures. They were reduced to data points inscribed on clay or wooden tablets, or on papyrus and palm leaves. This marked another profound erosion of personal freedom.
The administration of vast empires—Akkadian, Roman, or Mauryan—required a rigid hierarchy. Society was divided into strict classes: kings, priests, warriors, merchants, and slaves. The notion of human rights did not exist at all. If you were born a slave, that was accepted as your fate, a fate that religious or cultural narratives of the time were often crafted to justify. The freedom of the elite ruling class to build pyramids, construct palaces, and conquer new territories depended entirely on the complete seizure of freedom from the common people.
Throughout this long, dark age of agrarian empires, did humanity truly come to understand the value of freedom?
For the most part, people accepted their subjugation as a natural law of the universe. The myths and religions of that era placed tremendous emphasis on duty, obedience, and fatalism. If you suffered as a farmer, it was said to be the will of God, or the fruit of karma from a past life. The individual was regarded as a tiny cog in a vast cosmic machine. And yet, the sheer cruelty of human suffering eventually sparked a philosophical awakening.
In India, this philosophical tradition took root as sages, seers, and ascetics emerged, teaching society that peace of mind could be found even by renouncing the transient material world. Long after this philosophical awakening in India, the Axial Age dawned across the world about twenty-five hundred years ago, and thinkers in various corners of the globe began questioning the suffering found within worldly subjugation. Though they did not immediately demand political freedom in the modern democratic sense, they sought spiritual and mental liberation. Humans across the world began to sense that the material world was full of bondage. This was, perhaps, the first faint glimmer of recognition of the profound absence of freedom in human life. They began to understand that although they could not control the empires that ruled over them, they could control their own minds and thereby seek a form of liberation for themselves. And yet, for the vast majority of Homo sapiens, life remained a brutal struggle for survival within a harsh and merciless hierarchy.
For thousands of years following the Agricultural Revolution, the basic structure of human society remained remarkably static. Empires rose and fell, old kings were replaced by new ones on their thrones, but the fundamental reality of the ordinary farmer or slave underwent no visible change. During this time, one of the greatest lies filled human society—that hierarchy is a natural and unchangeable order. The idea that every individual has an equal right to determine their own destiny would have sounded like sheer madness to an Egyptian pharaoh or a medieval feudal lord. The human mind remained bound by the limits of its own biological nature, the harsh realities of agrarian economics, and the indomitable power of social narratives. But beneath this calm outer surface, the intellectual machinery of Homo sapiens never stopped working. The very capacity to imagine alternate realities that had first trapped them within agriculture and imperial systems was still alive. It was only a matter of time before humanity began imagining a new reality in which they were no longer anyone's subject or slave, but the masters of their own destiny. For centuries, the pressure of subjugation kept building, awaiting only the right intellectual and material spark to ignite a wholly new kind of revolution—one that would ultimately place the idea of individual freedom at the very center of human history.
Alongside the rise of Humanism, Homo sapiens arrived at the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment. During this period, philosophers like John Locke, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that every human being is born with certain natural rights. The primary purpose of the state or government, they contended, is to protect this freedom and these rights of the individual. If a government fails to do so, the people possess the full right to overthrow it. This was an era of tremendous transformation in history. For thousands of years, people had been taught that the duty of the individual was to serve the state or the king. Now, it was declared that the duty of the state was to serve the individual. This philosophical debate quickly took the form of bloody revolution. The American War of Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 were not mere changes of power; they were the first attempts to bring the idea of freedom off the page and enshrine it in law and constitution. It was declared that "all men are created equal." Of course, this freedom was, in its initial stages, deeply biased. Many of those who wrote the declarations of independence kept African slaves chained in their own homes, and never even dreamed of granting women the right to vote. Nevertheless, these revolutions planted a seed of freedom in the human mind that could never again be uprooted. The subsequent two hundred years of history represent a continuous struggle to expand the scope of this freedom to reach slaves, women, and minority communities.
Alongside political freedom, a tremendous transformation occurred in the economic sphere as well. The Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism destroyed the feudal economic order. Economists like Adam Smith gave rise to the idea of the free market. For the first time, people were not forced to accept their ancestral occupation. A farmer's son, if he wished, could go to the city and start a business, choose his own life partner, and live wherever he pleased. Individualism became a new religion. But like every revolution, this one too had a dark side. Though old chains were broken, industrialization reduced humans to small cogs in a machine. The lives of workers in coal mines and textile mills were, in no way, better than those of ancient slaves. Philosophers like Karl Marx argued that the freedom promised by capitalism was an illusion. If a worker must labor fourteen hours a day in inhuman conditions merely to survive, what freedom does he truly possess? From this debate arose communism and the various labor movements of the twentieth century. The twentieth century was, in truth, a terrifying laboratory for defining human freedom. Fascists despised individual freedom and glorified the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the nation or race. Communists placed greater emphasis on social equality than on individual freedom. But in the end, it was liberalism that emerged victorious. Liberalism believes that the will of the individual is the highest authority; the customer is always right, and the voter is the ultimate decision-maker. This ideology gained worldwide acceptance because the countries that granted individual freedom saw the fastest pace of scientific innovation and economic growth.
By the dawn of the twenty-first century, it seemed as though humanity had reached the very peak of its freedom. We could read whatever we wished, travel wherever we wished, and freely express our own opinions. But at precisely this moment, the very science humanity had created began constructing yet another new and invisible cage. The development of modern neuroscience, genetics, and computer science has dealt a devastating blow to our cherished belief that something called "free will" exists within us. Scientists have proven that our desires do not arise from some immaterial soul or independent consciousness. Rather, every decision we make—whom we will love, what food we will eat, or whom we will vote for—is merely the result of electrical and chemical reactions among the millions of neurons in our brain. These biological processes are determined by our DNA, our past experiences, and our environment. In other words, our emotions and desires are, in truth, nothing more than complex biological algorithms. As long as these algorithms remained a mystery, we believed ourselves to be free. But now, a terrifying convergence of biotech and infotech is underway.
In today's world, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence have already gained the ability to hack into the biological processes of our brains. Whenever you search for something on the internet, watch a video, or like a post, algorithms belonging to various companies and governments are collecting vast amounts of data about you. AI already knows far more about you than you know about yourself. It knows your weaknesses, what angers you, and what triggers pleasurable chemicals in your brain. When an external system can understand your desires better than you can, and control them without your knowledge, what meaning does "freedom" retain? In the future, there may be no need to rule at gunpoint under a totalitarian regime. Instead, algorithms will reshape our desires so skillfully that we will willingly hand over our own freedom into the hands of technology. Some thinkers have termed this "Dataism," a worldview in which humans become mere instruments for processing data, while machines make the actual decisions. We became slaves to the land during the Agricultural Revolution, slaves to machines during the Industrial Revolution, and now, in this age of the data revolution, we are on the verge of becoming slaves to the very artificial intelligence we ourselves have created—a voluntary servitude in which we take false comfort in believing ourselves to be free.
After all this scientific evidence and historical analysis, one question comes to mind: why does freedom matter at all? If freedom has no true existence in the universe, if "free will" is merely a biological illusion, and if our decisions are governed by algorithms, then why has humanity shed so much blood and fought so many struggles for this idea?
The answer is this: human society cannot survive without fictions and shared stories. Money, business, law, the state—all of these are products of human imagination alone. Freedom is the greatest and most useful story ever invented by Homo sapiens. Though it is not a law of physics, this single story has reduced human suffering and anguish to an unimaginable degree.
When humanity came to believe itself free, it abolished slavery, resisted tyranny, and built societies in which even the weakest individual holds some worth. Our biological desires may not be free, but the suffering and pain we experience are entirely real. When a person is bound in chains, or stripped of the right to express their opinion, the anguish they feel is no illusion. The only way to escape this anguish is through a steadfast belief in the idea of "freedom."
In the twenty-first century, humanity's true freedom is no longer confined to struggling against some foreign empire or local ruler.
Today's greatest struggle is to protect ourselves from the technology that hacks into our own psychology. If we truly wish to be free, we must come to recognize our own weaknesses, our fears, and our desires more deeply than any artificial intelligence ever could.
Long ago, the human wandering the grasslands was first a slave to nature, then became a slave to the empire he himself built, and today he is on the verge of becoming a slave to his own technical knowledge. And so, the journey of freedom never truly ends. It is a ceaseless struggle of consciousness. Freedom is not some fixed possession that, once attained, remains forever; it is a philosophical and practical process that every generation must rediscover and defend in its own way. Humanity truly understood the value of freedom only when it realized that the pen writing its own story rests in its own hand—and humanity's freedom will survive in the future only if it ensures that this pen never passes into anyone else's hand, nor into the hands of any machine.
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This essay draws inspiration from the ideas on human evolution and the future presented across various books by the distinguished historian and thinker Yuval Noah Harari, and has been rendered in an entirely independent and original Odia style. However, the essay's style has indeed been written in the manner of Yuval Noah Harari's own writing style. Readers wishing to explore this subject further may read Harari's four principal books:
(1.) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011).
Information regarding the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, and the evolution of human society has been drawn from this work.
(2.) Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016).
The complete philosophical analysis of humanity's biological algorithms and the illusion of free will, along with the concept of Dataism, has been drawn from this work.
(3.) 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018).
The discussion of modern technology, artificial intelligence, and the hacking of human psychology, along with its essence, has been drawn from and incorporated into this essay.
(4.) Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024).
The history of information networks from the Stone Age to artificial intelligence is described in this work, and the essence of its ideas concerning the invention of writing and the impact of information technology has been incorporated into this essay.
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