What is a free person? Freedom is in the ability to recognize all options in a choice and the qualities of each option. It does not fundamentally change the nature of these things.

Because of his freedom, Mahatma Gandhi was not much troubled in his heart by his imprisonment. He saw that an option still existed for meaningful action and used it.

But the option of conscious starvation existed because conventional options had been barred to him by isolation. The use of that option further alienated him in conventional minds. His advance was in demonstrating the serene security of free will. Isolation of the physical and the spiritual was his retreat.
Freedom requires training of the will. It requires experience; few of us are free at birth. (The heroes of our great stories included. They are troubled by questions or sorrow and discover their freedom along the Hero’s Journey.) Because of this, in the innocent blindness of childhood (at any age, from babies to elders) it is possible for the doors of conventional success to be forever closed to us without intention or fault. Sometimes, this does not even require a choice. Our essential nature can shut us out from convention!

Those who are so barred from convention are then marginalized by the influential. The realm outside conventional appearances is handled as a prison to contain what conventional minds believe is dangerous, destabilizing Otherness.
Being thoroughly of that realm myself, I enjoy its unique rewards. I’m losing the fear that comes from being closed out of the usual paths to security and I’m sustained by gladness that I resisted convention in my foolish youth. I believe it must be made clear that it is illusionary and divisive to believe that conventional success is the right and credible result of free will!

Truth is found in the ordinary yet rarely in the choices we make in order to be accepted.

The title article can be read at: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/thinking-about-choice-diminishes-concern-for-wealth-inequality.html