There’s a video circulating on X this morning. Someone walking through Tel Aviv, pointing at sex shops as though they were proof — proof that Israel is a fundamentally free country. A Western liberal democracy. And the contrast being drawn, of course, is with Iran, Gaza, and the broader Islamic world. *Look at us. Look at them. See the difference?*

And here’s the thing — I’m not going to pretend that’s entirely wrong. When it comes to individual freedom, to doing what you want without government interference, Israel almost certainly offers more of that than Iran does. I support individual freedom. Completely. Unconditionally. I have no desire to live under an autocratic government where bureaucrats dictate my choices.

But.

There is a fundamental problem buried inside that video, and inside the entire Western framing it represents. The West has defined freedom in terms of what you are *allowed* to do. And that is not freedom. That is, at best, a *symptom* of freedom.

Real freedom is an internal state. It is freedom *from* — from obsession, from compulsion, from the anxieties and fears that the mind generates on a daily basis. And by that measure, the West is not free. Not even close. We live in a near-constant state of anxiety. Are we good enough? Do we have enough? Do we look right, think right, believe the right things? The very culture that celebrates individual freedom has produced a population that is, in many ways, profoundly enslaved — to consumption, to status, to ideological conformity.

This is the paradox the Western mind refuses to examine: freedom defined in purely material terms eventually becomes its own form of tyranny. What is the point of the freedom to do whatever you want, if that same freedom produces a society where people are expected to hold certain views — and face serious social or professional consequences if they don’t?

And here’s where it gets more uncomfortable. It is *precisely* because the West has adopted this materialistic conception of freedom — this obsession with individual freedom as the highest good — that it has largely lost touch with what it actually means to be free. The deeper meaning. The older meaning.

When the West looks at countries like Iran, Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia, it points and says: *they are not free, and we are.* And from that judgment flows justification — for sanctions, for military action, for interference, for whatever needs to be done. Because *we* are free and *they* are not. But this act of pointing outward, of projecting our definition of freedom onto the rest of the world and measuring everyone against it, is itself making the West less free. It is creating the very conditions — the groupthink, the moral certainty, the intolerance of dissent — that freedom is supposed to protect us from.

Neither the West nor the East, in their current forms, is truly free. When it comes down to it — when the rubber really meets the road — both are operating from a place of inner unfreedom. And if we’re being honest, one could argue that Eastern philosophical traditions — not Western ones — have historically offered a more direct path to the kind of freedom that actually matters: a free mind, a quiet mind, a mind no longer at war with itself.

Real freedom begins within. It is not a document. It is not a proclamation. It is not a constitutional right or a flag or a walk down a street full of whatever shops you choose. It is an existence rooted in something deeper — something spiritual, for lack of a better word. And until the West understands that, all its pointing at autocratic countries, all its projecting its own inner lack onto the rest of the world, is going to produce exactly the opposite of what it claims to want.

It will not make us more free.

It will make us less.