Vodou Culture 101: Freedom
In US majority culture, the word freedom means “has a US flag and an eagle on it, might be a gun.” It is a word used by our advertising to remind people that the US is the best place to live in the world, and to prompt us to buy more stuff if we like living here. The word evokes fireworks, hot weather, people yelling about patriotism, and drinking.
Throughout this vodou culture series, the word freedom has been used a lot without definition. This was on purpose, because many people reading this blog are from the US or have been exposed to our relentless advertising. To discuss freedom in vodou cultures, you have to know something about elevation, because you need to know the goal of vodou. You have to know something about maturity, because you need to know what having freedom looks like. You need to know that we are not interested in good and evil, we’re interested in consequences.
Freedom is the capacity to choose with free will, understanding the consequences and ramifications.
In the US majority culture, the majority of the rules and laws are moral, by the standards of the Abrahamic religions. The rules and laws represent moral judgements about behavior, from who you’re allowed to fuck and how, to what allows you to have a car. This is not to say some of the rules and laws aren’t more practical than others, but they are all built around the idea that the rules and laws represent how to be a good person in that society. You comply with the rules and laws to be a good person, and more importantly to be treated like a good person (you hope.)
Because vodouizans do not believe that good and evil are meaningful distinctions, we do not view the rules and laws with the reverence, compliance, and satisfaction that US majority culture members do. We have our own laws, of course, and our own rules. But where vodouizans interact with the majority culture, it becomes quickly apparent that we are just not that excited by rules, laws, and moral judgements about people: we move different, treating rules and laws like things to move around, not as things that must be obeyed to fulfill a moral duty.
This does not mean we’re out committing crime all day long. We do embrace understanding consequences and the impact of decisions. It merely means where we are expected to feel moral about compliance, we don’t. It’s just not that motivating to us.
As far as the US majority culture (and for that matter, cultures in which Abrahamic religions are influential) is concerned, vodouizans are lawless. We’re not getting excited or emotional about the right things. For the US majority culture, freedom is a thing you feel, a moral satisfaction.
For vodouizans, freedom is in the ability to do things you do.
