Living Free with Bikes
Why would people buy expensive products when any number of mass-produced bicycles are often of good quality and cheaper than custom builders like myself could build a bike for? It’s a question many or most potential bicycle buyers would normally ask. And it reveals our “hierarchy of values.” Everyone has a hierarchy of values. We choose to value this over that. If our income decreased, we’d figure out what we could cut out most easily. But this hierarchy isn’t mostly the result of personal choice.
Most of us are “fallen” as the German philosopher Heidegger describes it. We fall into life, into a place in life. Not a lot of choice or intention has gone into it. We’ve inherited values, we’re influenced by marketing, we’re shaped by a world that’s shaped by money. None of us were given some neutral choice to make the world this way. We’ve fallen into most of our values and accept them unconsciously.
But that doesn’t mean choices cannot be made. People often talk about “free will vs. determinism” as though there were such thing as either. We are neither free, nor determined in a total sense of the word. Life is a complex mixture and we have to choose where we will allow ourselves to be determined and where we will reject what seems normal or necessary, and do something different. The French thinker, Jacques Ellul, contrasts this idea of necessity with a concept of freedom. This is a freedom-for-responsibility, not the freedom from responsibility that we usually mean by that word. The “problem” with this kind of freedom is that it cannot be exercised individually. Freedom for responsibility has to create relationships that focus on liberation from necessity.
Bicycles are often touted as routes to freedom, but this is an escapist freedom, the feeling of adventure, of leaving everything behind, going solo. All that’s fine and I love doing that as well. But how can we use bicycles as tools of liberation from necessity? How can we use them as tools for freedom-for-responsibility?
We can choose to adjust our hierarchy of values and create relationships of liberation. We liberate by taking back responsibility for the choices that have already been made for us. Bikes can be a wonderful tool for creating relationships. Purchasing from a craftsperson is but one way to give freedom for responsibility to people you can get to know. But the options are limitless.