Exterior freedom is largely unavailable. The structures of the age constrain movement, speech, association, and even the forms of thought that are socially permitted. The differentiated individual does not waste his force in the attempt to recover a vanished exterior liberty. He concentrates on the freedom that remains possible: the freedom of the center to determine its own orientation and its own measure of participation.
This interior freedom is tested precisely by the strength of the current. When the surrounding forces are weak the distinction between the free and the absorbed is less visible. When the current accelerates and presses from every side the distinction becomes absolute. The man either maintains the capacity to say yes or no from the center or he becomes a function of the forces that surround him.
The practice of this freedom appears in small decisions as much as in large ones. The refusal of certain stimuli, the deliberate choice of certain silences, the maintenance of a rhythm of life that is not dictated by the latest acceleration of the age. These acts accumulate. They form a concrete liberty that no external power can grant or withdraw.
The age offers many substitutes for this freedom: the freedom of consumption, of opinion within permitted bounds, of mobility without direction. The differentiated type recognizes the substitutes and declines them. He holds to the only freedom that preserves the higher type: the freedom to remain the measure of his own movement inside a world that has lost every higher measure.