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PTThree Freedoms, Their Smaller Games, Bigger Games, and the Many Flaws of Judgment Involved
We are born, in many respects, as slaves to circumstance. Without a single word of consent, the birth lottery assigns us a single patch of land and instantly binds us to a set of non-negotiable rights and lifelong obligations. We often possess no real taste of true freedom until we either tragically lose the little we have, or actively fight for it.
This reality extends to every dimension of our existence, revealing boundaries that are often invisible and fragile: we are free to breathe, right up until the moment we are drowning underwater. We are free to consume and buy, right up until we have no income or are drowning in debt. And we are free to decide our own paths with clear judgment, right up until our minds are completely oppressed by the ego, the dense layers it builds around us, and the many cognitive flaws it brings.
While the most essential liberation is that of the mind (the inner freedom), other outer manifestations of freedom have become vital in our world of borders and socio-economic domination. In this article, we will explore three key freedoms that are particularly timely: 1. The Freedom of Mind; 2. Financial Freedom (or the prosperous path to it); and 3. Freedom from Geo-Political Dominance.
Achieving true completeness requires peeling back the illusions in all three.
Each of these freedoms contains a "smaller game" that traps the masses in mediocrity, and a "bigger game" where true sovereignty lies. The ultimate goal is to move from being a cog in the machine to becoming a steward of the system.
Here is how to spot the lies, avoid the flaws in judgment, and play the bigger game.
1. The Freedom of Mind
The first freedom is the one most touted by yogis, spiritual leaders, and psychologists like C.G. Jung. It is also the hardest to comprehend, because we remain oblivious slaves to our own psychological programming until we actually experience what it means to be free from it.
The Games
- The Smaller Game: Fixing and grooming your ego. This is the realm of endless self-help and superficial therapy, where the goal is simply to massage the ego so it hurts a little less while remaining firmly in control. It keeps you trapped in the outermost layers of your identity.
- The Bigger Game: Transcending the ego entirely through a continuous process of detachment, shedding those layers to find your true self.
The Lies and Flaws of Judgment
Society feeds us comfortable lies to keep us playing the small game. We are told that stress is "good" to keep us motivated and out of trouble, or that the ego is the only reliable engine for ambition.
Furthermore, transcendence is falsely painted as a path to destitution. We are warned that to transcend the ego is to become a beggar, a mendicant monk wandering aimlessly. In reality, a mind free from the frantic demands of the ego is the ultimate strategic advantage. It operates with clarity, untethered from the emotional reactivity that destroys so many lives and fortunes, and provides the foundational inner peace required to pursue the outer freedoms.
2. Financial Freedom
Financial freedom is more widely understood than freedom of the mind because its results are tangible outer manifestations. You do not need to be enlightened to see the difference between a wage slave and a sovereign investor, though true sovereignty ultimately requires both inner detachment and outer capital.
The Games
- The Smaller Game: Trying to lift yourself out of poverty solely by trading time for a salary. While entrepreneurship used to be the classic escape route, it has grown increasingly risky; dominant global conglomerates and digital gatekeepers are increasingly squeezing out the independent entrepreneur.
- The Bigger Game: Be more than an employee. Own part of the system—both the companies that drive the economy and the land that sustains life. By owning the "work-givers" and your own patch of Eden, you earn the time and money to steward the world for the better.
The Lies and Flaws of Judgment
The illusions surrounding money are deeply ingrained. We are taught that a career alone will propel us forward, that currencies hold intrinsic value, and that risk is simply "price volatility" rather than the permanent loss of capital. We are also told you need to be a mathematical genius to succeed in the stock market.
"You do not need to be a genius to invest. High school math will do. What requires genius-level effort is cultivating good judgment, strategic thinking, and emotional control." — Echoing the wisdom of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.
The Time-Value Exchange Lie: The ultimate currency is not the dollar, but the hour. In the smaller game, you are forced to sell your life in eight-hour blocks to someone else. In the bigger game, you use capital to buy those hours back. If you have ten million dollars but zero control over your Tuesday afternoon, you are not free; you are just a well-compensated prisoner. When you possess time, capital, and ownership, your leverage to change the world increases exponentially.
The Earnings Lie: Financial media obsesses over "earnings," but earnings are easily manipulated. A CEO can fire their entire sales staff to artificially boost short-term earnings, secretly sacrificing the company's future. A company exists to sell. Sales are the closest metric to the truth. Those who lie about top-line sales quickly face the wrath of tax authorities. True discernment leads to value investing: finding companies with meaningful margins, healthy cash flow, low debt, and growing sales measured not in fiat currency, but in a global basket of goods and services.
Furthermore, the true power of compounding is unlocked when you realize you are free to reinvest your dividends at your overall portfolio's return rate, rather than blindly back into the specific company that paid them. It is not too hard to calculate how much a company will compound your investment—you simply need to simulate its sales purchasing power growth alongside your dividend reinvestment strategy.
The “All Investing is Good” Lie: Sovereignty without responsibility is a hollow victory. It is vital to invest ethically, focusing on companies that respect human dignity and planetary health. If we do not account for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors, the very freedoms we enjoy today may become ever harder for future generations to attain. True stewardship means using your ownership stake—in both companies and productive land—to steer the system toward health, consciously voting with your wallet and your hand.
The Rat Race Tragedy: It is easy to pity the rat-racer. Driven by an egotistical mind that has not yet peeled back the layer of materialism, they compete unethically with colleagues for extra breadcrumbs from their boss, celebrating a promotion to manager that simply means working twelve hours a day instead of eight. They do not realize they are victims of a system that has been bleeding human labor for centuries. The salary (or labor) share of GDP has been on a steady, documented decline since the Industrial Revolution. I argue this shift began even earlier, during the agricultural revolution, when we stopped sharing the hunter-gatherer resources and began dominating nature—and each other—through contracts and hierarchical organizational structures.
Today we have various trends that only aggravate this situation of dominance and being dominated: the ever-growing population diluting the value of labor while the owners of capital consolidate the wealth, inflation eroding fiat salaries, globalization outsourcing labor, and AI threatening the very necessity of the worker. In such a scenario, a sensible goal is not the freedom to work a "better" job. It is the freedom of using the proceeds of your job to reduce your own reliance on having a job—perhaps just tending your own fruit trees or going fishing, like the hunters and gatherers of the past. All this while your capital is employed to drive the world in a better direction.
3. Freedom from Geo-Political Dominance
The third freedom is the realization that borders are constructs, and your birthright is the planet, not the specific patch of dirt where you happened to be born. This outer freedom allows you to physically detach from the expectations of the collective.
The Games
- The Smaller Game: Holding a single passport, never leaving your village, or mistaking the right to move with the ability to move.
- The Bigger Game: Going to where you are treated best and where you can best steward your “chunk of Eden.”
The Lies and Flaws of Judgment
The grand illusion of the state is blind nationalism—the belief that you owe eternal allegiance to "Fakelandia" simply because you were born there.
In reality, many governments farm their citizens like dairy cows. They feed you just enough (a monthly salary) to keep you producing, while aggressively milking you through early taxes and inflation. Citizens often do not wake up to this prison until it is too late: until a world war breaks out, a pandemic locks them down with no island to escape to, or their government accrues a debt-to-GDP ratio so massive that generations yet unborn are already sentenced to financial slavery.
This is the boiling frog syndrome. The temperature of taxation, restriction, and debt rises so slowly across generations that the collective memory of true freedom is erased. It is never "too hot" to jump out until the day you physically cannot.
To play the bigger game, you must secure options. Marry across borders, secure work visas, establish foreign residencies, buy property in other countries, or acquire a second passport. Refuse to be the frog that stays in the pot. Prepare yourself to vote with your feet.
The Final Freedom: Completeness
Ultimately, true freedom is not a singular finish line but a delicate balance of two inseparable forces: the inner freedom of the mind and the outer manifestations of freedom, such as financial sovereignty and geo-political mobility.
Focusing on one at the expense of the other leaves the human experience fractured. Those who achieve profound external freedom—amassing vast wealth or multiple passports—without freeing their minds remain profoundly poor inside, trapped in a gilded cage of their own making. Conversely, those who cultivate immense inner peace but lack the material means to escape undesirable, oppressive situations will eventually feel as though their lives are missing something fundamental. We were built to experience and enjoy the "Garden of Eden" we came from—a land of plenty and physical vitality. Completeness requires both the sovereign mind and the sovereign environment.
To achieve this completeness, we must understand that inner freedom is not granted overnight; it is uncovered by peeling back the layers of the ego, much like the layers of an onion.
The Three Layers of Inner Freedom:
- Layer One: Detachment from Materialism. This is not about taking a vow of poverty; it is entirely about attitude. You can own a nice car, wear fine clothes, and hold substantial capital, but your identity is not tied to them. This layer bridges the gap between inner and outer freedom. It is the defining difference between a wealthy, penny-counting Scrooge and a wealthy, open-hearted steward of capital like Warren Buffett. Unfortunately, most people remain stuck in this superficial layer of accumulation and fear of loss, preventing them from conquering the deeper, more difficult realms of the mind.
- Layer Two: Detachment from the Perceptions of Others. Even if you conquer material greed, you can still be held captive by emotional mediocrity. This second layer requires letting go of what other people think of you, how they view the world, and how you believe things "should" be. This internal detachment is deeply intertwined with your external freedom from geo-political dominance. Often, the world tries to box you in as a mere inhabitant of "Fakelandia," projecting all its societal expectations and nationalistic limitations onto you. Breaking free from these external labels means releasing the need for external validation, suspending judgment, and overcoming jealousy or resentment. When you stop reacting to the ignorance of others (and your own), you free yourself from useless emotional turbulence that does nothing to improve the world around you.
- Layer Three: Detachment from Your Own Self-Concept. Once you conquer the first two layers, you stand at the threshold of ultimate liberation. The final layer is peeling away what you think of yourself. This is the ultimate transcendence of the ego—the cessation of identifying with your own passing thoughts. It is the realization of true mindfulness and presence. When you break the grip of your own self-narrative, the result is a radically open, fully present, and truly free individual. This liberated mind is then fully empowered to ethically navigate the freedoms of the external world, achieving a clean victory that seamlessly balances inner peace with outward stewardship.
Freedom is a continuous process of peeling back these layers. When you are truly free internally and externally, you can vote on countries, employers, and people with your feet, and your hand and wallet too—and that is often the most effective way to improve your life and steward the world.
Voting with your feet is a choice to move out of a situation, while voting with your hand, wallet, or a hug is a choice to move into one—to join in. Which one is best? Both can and should be done, provided they are executed from a perspective of detachment. When we act with detachment, we shed our remaining layers and uncover our true selves. Through this process of shedding, we realize that we are often more defined by what we leave behind than what we constantly seek, because a state of endless seeking is the opposite of freedom.
You are complete when you are free, and you are free when you realize you are complete. Transcend your ego and steward the globe as your home—from your family and your land to the furthest reach of the companies you own.