We are not free, far from it. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:
Everything you do on this front makes a difference, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
One point I keep trying to drive home here in as many ways as I can is that this is the dystopia we were warned about. The main difference between this mind-controlled dystopia and the fictional dystopias in novels like 1984 is that in 1984 people knew they weren’t living in a free society, whereas in this dystopia the people believe they are free.
In Orwell’s dystopia people knew they weren’t free and had to use doublethink to stay out of trouble with their rulers. In this dystopia people have no idea how pervasively they’re being dominated by their rulers; they think they came up with their ideas, worldview and political positions on their own, when in reality those belief systems were constructed inside their skulls by a profoundly sophisticated propaganda machine without their even knowing it.
All mainstream and semi-mainstream political factions are owned and operated by the powerful, and propaganda is used to get the public subscribing to them to advance the interests of the powerful. Because the overwhelming majority of us have been manipulated into espousing one of these power-serving belief systems (they give you multiple choices depending on your ideological disposition), the more overtly totalitarian measures described by dystopian novelists are unnecessary. You only need to cage a bird if it knows that it can fly.
But make no mistake: our society is no more free than those in the dark futures imagined by storytellers. If our minds are not free, then we are not free. If we’re being successfully manipulated into thinking, speaking, acting, voting, working and consuming in accordance with the wishes of the powerful, then we’re just as locked down as we would be if we had chains around our necks. Collectively we could not be any more aligned with the will of the powerful than we already are, even if our brains were replaced with computer chips.
So many fighting between the choices they are given believing that they are free because they can choose one of the options (both are offered by the overlords and either leads to the same destruction) and that if they make the correct choice they are restoring the freedoms they recognize that they lost. In fact those who think they are fighting for freedom and simply selecting a different route to Hell believing that because they entered through a different door they averted disaster. There aren’t enough birds of freedom to win. The only possibility is to find a way to live unobserved, therefore not drawing the ire of the dragon.