The Wilderness of Freedom and the Comfort of Our Chains

At the end of the film The Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman’s character Red is released after spending most of his adult life in prison. He is now an old man.

As part of his parole, Red works as a bagger in a grocery store, and he lives by himself in a small apartment. He can function, but he is miserable in his newfound freedom. He doesn't make friends and is bored with his job. He had learned to thrive in the “dog-eat-dog” prison culture, but out in the real world, he is restless and unfulfilled.

In one scene, Red finds himself looking at a revolver in a store window, contemplating a crime that will return him to the world he knows. He almost abdicates his freedom, until the opportunity arises to flee to Mexico and join one of his former fellow inmates.

In The Matrix (another popular film from the 90’s), a character named Cipher faces a similar choice. He has been freed from a virtual prison, where all of humanity has been enslaved in a computer-generated false reality.

At first, Cipher embraces his freedom. He works with a team that seeks to free people from their enslavemnet. Eventually, however, he grows restless and cynical. The real world is barren and harsh, lacking the luxuries and pleasures of the virtual prison.

In his final scene, Cipher sits with an agent, eating a delicious meal. He understands that his steak is not real, but he also understands that he no longer cares for freedom. He proclaims, “Ignorance is bliss,” before selling out his leader on the promise that he will be plugged back into the Matrix and will remember nothing about his time of freedom.

Red and Cipher show opposite responses to the same problem. Freedom isn’t always what we dream it will be, and often we find ourselves preferring our chains. It’s a phenomenon as old as the Exodus story.

When God released the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt, they soon discovered that freedom was a very difficult proposition. They wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. They battled thirst and hunger, and faced dangers they never faced while under Pharaoh’s thumb. More than once, the people complained to Moses and wished to go back to the familiarity and relative security of their slavery.

In our quest for freedom, we face the same problem. Whatever it is that binds us, it is also what we know. It is the world that we understand and know how to negotiate. Even as we long to be released from our chains, another part of us is afraid of what lies out in the wilderness of freedom.

More often than not, we choose our chains.