Choice, Then Agency, Finally Liberation — Paulo Freire on the Fear of Freedom, Autonomy, and the Quest for Human Completion by Eric Hepburn
Updated: Aug 31
The illusion of powerlessness stems from our belief that we can't choose. Owning our choices and the real situations and circumstances that boundary those choices is an act of agency. Well practiced, this agency deepens into a lived experience of liberation - sowing the seeds for our collective liberation.
"We are not free from triggers, but we can develop the skills to recognize those triggers when they happen." - Eric Hepburn
Full Podcast Transcript
Eric Hepburn: Welcome to the sixth episode of the third season of The Pulpiteer. I'm your host, Eric Hepburn, and I'm glad to have you join us for today's episode.
Today's episode is called "Choice, Then Agency, Finally Liberation." It is an exploration of the path from reacting to life to expressing agency — from conditioned constraint to liberation. It centers the work of Paulo Freire.
There are references in the episode to news shared by our congregant Billy Adams. Those references are to the killing of Timothy Visa Xayyaraj in the Georgetown Square on Saturday, August 29.
We'll begin with our Great World House segment, and then our Voice of Wisdom, read by Judy Mayo.
Great World House
We now pause to honor the Great World House of which we are a part, lifting up the needs, the hopes, and the voices beyond these doors.
This month in 1921, 105 years ago, Paulo Freire was born in Recife, in the impoverished northeast of Brazil.
The Depression arrived when he was a boy. His father died when he was thirteen. He knew hunger directly — he later wrote that as a child he stole food for his family, and he dropped out of school for a time so he would have more time to work. He learned to read in the yard of the house where he was born, taught by his mother, using the ground for a blackboard and twigs for chalk.
He took a law degree, and then didn't practice it. He spent his life teaching adults to read.
His method was simple and dangerous. Rather than depositing lessons into people, he sat with peasants and farm workers and started from the words that already mattered in their lives — and found that people could become literate in a matter of weeks. In 1963 he was appointed to run Brazil's national literacy program. The next year a military coup put him in jail for about seventy days, and then in exile for sixteen years.
He wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed in exile. He was a Catholic and a Christian socialist, and for most of the 1970s he worked for the World Council of Churches in Geneva. His thinking and the liberation theology rising in Latin America in those same years grew alongside each other, feeding each other — the shared conviction being that God is found among the poor, and that faith which does not change their conditions is not yet faith.
He returned to Brazil in 1980 and taught until his death in 1997.
He believed that no one is educated by another, and no one educates themselves alone — that we come to know the world together, and that that is what freedom is made of.
Voice of Wisdom
Judy Mayo: After these words are spoken, we will breathe together in silence until the ringing of the bell calls us onward, into the space where the word unfolds among us.
I ask you to listen carefully to this passage, as Eric will explain it carefully after I say it.
We welcome this Voice of Wisdom, carried through Paulo Freire.
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.
Unfolding in Word: Choice, Then Agency, Finally Liberation
Eric Hepburn: I'm going to keep Judy's promise and unpack what you just listened to. Our friend Mr. Freire is not known for easy legibility. That wasn't one of his gifts.
But before we get into his abstract land, I want to try to ground us in everyday experience with a little story.
Two dogs on a trail
Some of you may know this already — usually my routine on Sunday mornings is that I get up and go for a run. Running is a spiritual practice for me. It helps me be in my body. It helps me center my energy. Sometimes I don't know exactly what the heart of the sermon is, even after I've written it, until I'm running that morning. And sometimes I don't know until I'm sitting up here, and when the Song of Yearning happens, tears run down my face like they did this morning.
So I was on my run this morning. It was a very simple, almost trivial situation.
There was a man standing off to the side of the trail with his dog — medium-sized dog, shepherd-ish, clearly in training. Okay. Stay. And coming up the path the other way from me was a woman walking one of those little dogs.
And the little dog — as you can imagine, when it got within about fifteen feet of the other dog — was bouncing and barking and carrying on.
I watched the man with the larger dog. As the yapping dog got closer, the man's body started to tense up. The man started to tense up, afraid that the training wasn't going to hold. And then it didn't. Then the big dog started barking at the little dog. And while they were within six feet of each other, that continued. Once the little dog was dragged off and got outside the radius, the big dog stopped barking and sat back down. And the man was like, good.
You've all seen this scene, right? It's not a shock or a surprise. But there's nuance to it that we can learn from, and it deeply relates to our sermon topic today.
Stimulus-jerked puppet
The little dog is one hundred percent stimulus-jerked puppet.
Have you ever heard that phrase before? Or is that a weird thing? Did y'all have catch phrases with your friends in high school and college that nobody else knew about or cared about, but it was so huge in your group you figured everybody knew it? "Stimulus-jerked puppet" was one in my college group that we used a lot.
What it means is this idea that the stimulus happens and you don't have a choice about it — you're just going to react. It plays into the debate about whether there's really free will, or whether we're just meat machines that respond to stimuli the way we've been trained to. The phrase played into the idea that, oh, don't worry about it. You're just a meat puppet. You're going to do whatever your biology and your family of origin and whatever your stuff is tells you to do. You're going to play out that script for the rest of your life. So you might as well relax and enjoy it.
I think there's a gradient.
Have any of you ever overreacted to a friend — not because they did something that hurt you, but because they did something that reminded you of a time when someone else hurt you in a similar way? A friend, a family member?
I'm seeing lots of looks like you don't know what I'm talking about. That was sarcasm. Sorry, I shouldn't use sarcasm from the pulpit. They tell you not to in child-rearing books — don't use sarcasm with young children.
This is a common experience. In five seconds or five minutes or five days or five weeks, you look back and you realize: oh, my reaction wasn't about what was happening right there. It was some stuff I was carrying from before that brought me into a triggered place. And in that space, you are a stimulus-jerked puppet. You are going to play out whatever unhealed trauma is still residing in your body.
So the sermon today is really about a three-step process. The first step: developing spiritual practices and a sense of embodiment and self-awareness allows you to decrease the time it takes between when you get triggered by something and when you notice, as awareness, that that has happened to you — and are able to interrupt it.
I will tell you, friends — and Billy's story reminded me of this this morning. That man who was killed was in a triggered space he couldn't get out of. That's not magic. That's not rocket science. Never met the man. Didn't hear his story till this morning. My doubt about this is less than one billionth of one percent. He was absolutely in a triggered place about something that probably had nothing to do with what was going on that day, and that he couldn't get out of.
This is not to diminish mental illness. It's to understand that mental illness itself plays out through some of these same mechanisms that we're talking about.
What the big dog knew
So the little dog in the story is one hundred percent stimulus-jerked puppet. You get me close enough to another dog and I just lose it.
The other dog was starting to develop some self-awareness. He's like, okay, I'm standing here calmly. This other dog is barking at me. It's a signal that could mean danger, but I am not in danger right now.
Why does the dog not know that it's not in danger? Anybody? Any attachment theory folks?
The big dog is standing right next to him. In dog training, the whole premise is that you are the alpha of the pack. That dog that's in training is taking its cues from you.
When did this dog lose it? When did he become triggered? When the guy got anxious.
It's infectious. And it means something about leadership. It means something about how you're able to show up in a room and how much self-awareness you have. Can you notice you get triggered before you even react on it?
What a different standard for leadership that would be. Why don't we have debate questions for our political leaders that ask them what their mean time to return to being able to think is? What do we expect of our leaders, if we expect wisdom of them? This should be one of the questions we ask, or one of the things we try to figure out.
None of us are free of triggers. Paulo talks a lot about freedom. We're going to talk a lot about freedom. We're not free from triggers, but we can develop the skills to recognize those triggers when they happen.
Some of them can be healed. What a blessing that is. Some of them we learn how to tolerate. You know, I did some healing on that bad thing that happened to me when I was six, and now when I am in a similar situation I still get triggered, but I don't take it out on anybody. I just feel a deep sadness. And I don't think that scar tissue is ever going to go away — and maybe it will and maybe it won't. That's a very unique and particular thing to one person's life. It's not an answerable question in general. It's a particular question about a real person, and how that scar tissue is doing, and how the rest of everything is going.
So we've got this simple story that happened on my run this morning, but it tells us so much. Because I believe that dog was ready to sit there and ignore that fake threat all the way through the zone.
So why did the dog owner get anxious? He thought he was going to fail. Maybe I haven't trained him enough. I hope he sits still. I hope, I hope, I hope. He couldn't get out of his own head. All he had to do was stop worrying about it and just breathe with the dog. We're here and there is no threat. There is no threat in this situation. We're cool.
Because you've all seen the dogs that do it right. That little dog is yapping, and if it got off the leash it'd come tearing, and the big dog's like, yeah, don't worry, if you get off the leash I can handle it. Just looking around like, yeah, there are more interesting things than you in this room.
Something else interesting about being triggered: when you're triggered, you want to be the center of attention. We want to act that trigger out with all eyes on us. Look at me, look at me. The little me who's afraid and anxious. Stare at me. Give me your attention. Let me feed on it.
Thirty-six seconds
When we learn to get some space in our own being — through what I call spiritual practices.
I don't care what you call them. I don't care if you think about going to work out at the gym as a spiritual practice, as long as it works as one for you. I don't care if you think of sitting quietly, or napping, or meditation, or dog walking. I don't care what you do and I don't care whether you call it spiritual. What I care is that you find practices in your life that help you develop that space within yourself, so that you can see when you get triggered — because the very first step is to stop taking it out on other people when you get triggered.
Happened to me just this week. My joy — I forgot to put a rock down about it.
My wife is currently in Sweden with her mom and sister on a vacation trip, and I'm very happy for her that they get to do that together. But she got on a plane on Friday, and on Thursday I got a call from USAA saying, hey, we think there's been some weird activity on your card. And I'm like, okay, well, that's not my card number. I have to hang up and call my wife. I'll call you back. Hang up. Is this a real thing? No, it's not a real thing. Call back. Oh — guess what. Oh yeah, we have to cancel the card.
And I'm like, cool. It's our primary credit card that we use for everything. My wife is getting on a plane in twenty-six hours. I have to leave for the airport in twenty-six hours. Can you overnight us a new one?
Yeah. No, we can't do that.
Triggered. Right here.
Now, here's an interesting thing. Many of my remaining triggers are about other people who I think are going to get triggered. And then I get anxious because I know that they're about to get anxious.
And so for me — I was, for at least thirty-six seconds on the phone, unkind to this woman whose fault this was not. She didn't write the policy. She's not the head of the bank. She's got a script in front of her that says what she's allowed to do. Not her fault. But I was unkind to her for almost a minute before I was like, oh — I'm sorry for speaking to you unkindly. I know that this isn't your fault. You're just the one who has to bear the bad news.
She said, thank you, it's all right, I do this every day. I imagine some people go for longer than thirty-six seconds.
I say that as a way of saying that I know this work because I'm still in it. I don't want you to hear me and think, oh, it must be nice to be free of triggers like the minister. That would be disingenuous and untrue, and it would be unkind to you to make you think that I was up here living in some other reality than the one you get to inhabit every day.
A lot of times I'll recognize when I get triggered fast enough to not be mean or unkind or rude to anyone. And sometimes not.
But there's a parallelism for me. The guy on the trail was worried about the dog, and that's what got him anxious. Is the dog's training going to stick? Is it me? I'm on the phone with the USAA rep and I'm worried about my wife panicking — because I'm going to tell you the secret. You know why she's in Sweden? Because this is the second or third time she and her family have tried to go to Cuba and it got canceled because of mostly political shenanigans. So something always goes wrong before trips. And I'm like, no, don't cancel the credit card, just get on a plane tomorrow. Don't do that to her.
She loves her mom and sister, but she's about to go spend ten days with them, and that is not easy. Ram Dass famously said that if you want to figure out how enlightened you really are, go spend a weekend with your parents. The source and perpetuation of a great many triggers in our lives.
All right. I'm going to actually share with you the sermon that I wrote now. But I wanted it to have a human face, and I wanted it to have some stories that you could relate to that make you interested enough to struggle with the complexity of the way that Freire talks about this.
Because this progression is: freedom from triggers opens up space for really choosing — for not being a stimulus-jerked puppet. And when we can choose, and when we can find a calm center, and that becomes contagious, the next step is liberation. The next step is that we are free to choose and be with each other. And that is what Freire is driving toward.
The first line
The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom.
Paulo Freire wrote to the materially oppressed and for the materially oppressed. But through his work, and those that have followed his investigations into liberation, even deeper truths have come into focus.
Oppression dehumanizes all parties. Oppression dehumanizes all parties.
The lie of superiority infects all those who believe it. This is not a false equivocation, nor is it a claim that the kinds of suffering oppression produces are the same kind or the same magnitude for those who oppress and for those who are oppressed. It is, however, an acknowledgment that the lie of superiority, and the oppression that it creates, is toxic to all who internalize it.
The lie of superiority. I know I'm saying this in a context where the rise of white Christian nationalism is in the news and on our hearts and minds. But the lie of superiority is toxic to all who internalize it.
In the film adaptation of his life, Gandhi says: we must remove untouchability from our hearts and from our lives.
He saw that the caste system in India did not only dehumanize and oppress the untouchables, but that it dehumanized all who practiced it. This is not to minimize the realities of oppression — we will hold those truths close to our heart. It was to recognize that the lie is that this oppression was wholly beneficial for the oppressors. It may have been, in terms of material wealth. But the cost was their own humanity, their own souls.
The cost to the oligarchs today — yes, they may eat things that we will never get to taste, and move around on yachts that we will never set foot on or couldn't imagine. They might do all this stuff that is material opulence.
Would you give up your humanity for it? Because they have. They have, through becoming perpetuators of oppression, lost their souls.
I don't mean a permanent loss. I don't mean they're irredeemable. I'm not demonizing them. I'm saying that they would have to stop what they're doing to get back in touch with this stuff I'm talking about. Because right now they're stimulus-jerked puppets trying to shove wealth into a God-sized hole. They're stimulus-jerked puppets trying to shove wealth into a God-sized hole.
A rip in the fabric
I had an image come to me one day when I was thinking on this topic, and I'll share it with you quickly.
When I say shoving stuff into a God-sized hole, most of us picture a hole in the ground, and it's hard for us to imagine bottomless. It's not that kind of hole.
The hole that they are pouring their wealth into — the God-sized hole — is a rip in a piece of fabric. It's a rip in the fabric of love and relationship.
How much do you have to pour through torn cloth to fix it? A hole in cloth cannot be fixed by pouring anything, any amount, through it. Only by rebuilding the strands of loving relationship of the fabric itself can it be made whole.
Does that make sense as an analogy to y'all?
Autonomy and responsibility
Freire continues: Freedom would require them to eject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility.
When we reject this lie of superiority and the dehumanization it fosters, we are left with autonomy and responsibility. What does that mean?
Autonomy: the recognition that you are a being, a human being, who has choice, has agency. And no matter the environment, the obstacles, the unfairnesses, the injustices — your choices and your actions are yours.
I've had deep debates about this with friends of mine at the seminary. They want to say that if you're coerced, it's not a free choice. It isn't a free choice. But it's still a choice. And you still have to own it. And you're still going to be the one who lives in the consequences of it.
Worst-case scenario: someone holds a gun to your head, puts a gun in your hand, and says, kill that other person. We can't imagine a more severe scenario of coercion. The choice is still yours. Die, or live a murderer.
And until you accept that you own every choice in your life — how you spend your time, all of it — until you own that you make those choices freely, while seeing the world as it is and living in your own consequence, then you are responding to the stimulus-jerked-puppet-ness of the environment and not owning your ability to choose.
It's not fair. And as we know, the world today is not filled with justice. It is filled with people who will do and say unjust things, and some of those people have significant power over the operating conditions of your life. I can't make you free of coercion. But I can help you, I hope, generate a sense of agency in your own life.
Responsibility. Accountability. These are the opposite of entitlement. Entitlement is the handmaiden of superiority and the catalyst of oppression. Entitlement is the delusion that you can have rights without responsibilities. The misapprehension that life is not a gift worthy of gratitude, but a privilege for the elect.
Conquista
Freire's next line: Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift.
Now, I will admit I was troubled by this line when I first read it. I almost threw out the whole passage and looked for something else.
But I remembered something, and I got curious — because he didn't write the original in English. It was written in Portuguese. And in Portuguese he used the word conquista.
Conquista's meaning is much broader than the English "conquest." It routinely means an achievement won through effort. You conquistar a place at university, a right, a goal. It's closer to "won," or "attained through struggle."
And this reading of the word is affirmed by his next line: It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. By "it," he's referring back to freedom.
This echoes, to me, the line in our own chalice lighting — when we make a commitment to growth and maturing. This is the same struggle. We're talking about this struggle, and those words cover the same space. When we're promising to grow and mature, this is what we're promising. We're promising to pursue our own freedom and agency so that we can bring about liberation for all of us.
This is Freire's invitation to us, all of us: the invitation to struggle. To struggle against the easy and comforting lies of superiority — of race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, political party, religion, ideology.
The struggle is to see the humanity in each and every one of us. And through that seeing, to find what has been lost: our own deepest humanity.
Freedom is not the absence of obligation
His next line: Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth.
You've heard me preach many times that the internal is a reflection of the external, and vice versa — that the micro of the self and the family are reflections of the macro of the society and the nation.
Freedom is not an ideology. It's not a rallying cry, and it's not a justification for violence. Freedom is a state of mature human being. Freedom is a state of matured human being — individually and collectively.
Freedom is not the absence of obligation. It is the ability to choose the relationships that bind you in obligation.
Let me say that again. We did Simone Weil back in Women's History Month; we talked about her rights and obligations work. Freedom is not freedom from obligation.
But if you read the posters in this country, in this culture, that's what you would think. If I was free, I wouldn't — oh, nobody, nothing. Is that not what we teach? I would be an island unto myself. Unfettered. Unconstrained.
You know what I hear when I hear that? I would be out of relationship with anyone I care about, or who might care about me. That's what I hear when I hear that corrupted version of freedom being talked about.
Free to die alone. Hallelujah. What? That's your dream?
I want to die surrounded by a village of people I love and people who love me. I don't want a fake celebration of life where everybody comes and pretends to be happy. I want people to be torn up when I leave — like I'm torn up when people I love are gone.
We owe that honesty to each other. Stop pretending everything's okay when it's not. If you get upset or you get sad, just own it. Be in it. Stop running from it. It's inviting you into your own life.
Human completion
Freire finishes: It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.
What? The quest for human completion. Come on, man. Really?
No, he means it. I mean it. The quest for human completion.
At that moment when you're between sleep and waking, and you're thinking about your niece or your nephew or your own child — this happened a lot for me when that one who's very big now was very tiny — and you have this weird, sweet daydream of the life you hope for them. The stability, the safety, the security, the love, the community. That no one will hurt them for reasons that are just them acting out their own stuff.
You want to take the struggle out of life. Life is going to be a struggle.
This version of utopia isn't the illusion that there will be no more struggle. It's just a world where our own damage and traumas don't force us to play out those traumas on each other over and over again.
We've had these teachings on this wall for thousands of years. The wisdom hasn't changed. All we lack is the political will to make it so.
If we can find and honor our own agency, then we can experience freedom for ourselves. We can live it, and model it, and teach it to others. And when that infectious kind of freedom spreads far enough, we can experience the version of it that encompasses the whole human world.
And that is what we call liberation.
Amen.
Eric Hepburn: Until next time. Thank you for joining us on The Pulpiteer.
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The Pulpiteer podcast is a production of the San Gabriel Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Georgetown, Texas. The podcast is hosted by Spotify, and theme music is by John Faber. Our live recording tech crew is Frank Sanders, Rob Berthold, Keith Hutchinson, and Lance McCullum. The podcast is produced and performed by Eric Hepburn.
See you next time.
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