For all of our ‘freedom’ within the western world, is it possible that every last one of us are ‘farmed’?
I refer to the way we are raised by our parents and the state and are influenced by our peers, who expect us to comply and behave within a set of acceptable ‘civilised’ guidelines.
The evidence may be assessed by the way we dress, the way we ‘style’ our hair, how we behave and how we choose our ‘partners’
Please be as ‘brutal’ in your response as you feel necessary, then I can prove to myself that we are all ‘educated and intelligent animals’ and that consciousness is a ‘taught’ concept, or is it ‘learned’?
I am not asking for ‘quotes’, so please use your own mind, if you have one!! 
What is your frustration? Freedom has at it’s very essence a contradiction. There’s the freedom “to” which is the kind of freedom you need to go and do things that you want to do for whatever reason, then there’s the freedom “from”, which prevents you from getting squashed by bigger stronger things in the world that might eat you alive. The problem is that the freedom from infringes on the freedom to, and vice versa. It’s a paradox. That’s all there is too it. If you’re going to be thinking philosophically, you’ve gotta get comfortable with paradoxes. It’s not that bad when you realize that they’re at the heart of everything, and that without them we’d hardly be able to think about anything at all.
What’s wrong with being “farmed” in this way. We’re social animals, of course we need to behave in a civilized manner towards one another. And if you’d rather we weren’t raised (you can’t avoid the “problems” you bring up unless you skip parenting altogether), well, where do you think that would get us?
This question implies that there is a power or someone who profits from it, and we don’t realise it. And that our expenses are higher than what we profit from this “farming”. But I guess we i.e. our society made and make this guidelines (and of course some social strata have more influence than others). The aim is that we can live together in a high density with not too much harm, violence and annoyance. And it results in a working social and economic system, e.g. all accept the same type of money, we can communicate, cannot be a complete egoist without punishment.
Of course it works only generally speaking as the economic crisis, crime rate and kleptocracy shows. Anyway at least the basic social rules we live by (e.g. hierarchy, punishment for breaking the rules, existence of private property,…) you find even in primate groups. But compared to other centuries or other systems than the western one, our freedom is really high, no need to believe in one special god, no need to wear always suit, tie and hat, no need to follow special habits and traditions, or whatever. And of course you are free to leave the system and do what you want, join a monastery, live as beggar on the street, or as opt out and live in a hippie community, or as prospector in Australia.
If I ask you to pick up a book and you obey, does that make you unfree? Of course not. It means that you’ve chosen to obey me. I think the same can be said about our tendency adopt the styles and fashions of the day, to believe what we’ve been raised to believe, how we choose our partners, etc. It’s true that this is a tendency, and therefore probably stems from our inner nature, but this hardly makes us unfree. We are still free despite being driven by our nature because being so driven doesn’t entail that we have no capacity to thwart or turn off such a drive.
People manipulate others. When you are young you are easily manipulated. There are plenty of people trying to do the manipulating. From what I can see peer pressure, or family pressure tends to make people conform. Everybody bends under the pressure to some degree. No one is untouched. Some people are more easily farmed than others. Most children accept the beliefs of their parents. Some rebel. The ones who do rebel are looked down upon by most people. They are the outkasts. Most people don’t like being an outkast so they move to a different house, buy some hollister t-shirts, and start over again.
are you looking for a freedom vs determinism (metaphysical or epistemic) discussion, or more so for a discussion on social or biological/psychological conditioning?
if its the former, then the question presupposes a false dichotomy. if its the later, then yes we are all very much socially conditioned and “farmed” as you call it. there is no way for us to completely isolate ourselves from environmental influences on our bodies and minds, even if we were to try, which most people do not.
as for freedom within the limits of conditioning, well, this is of course possible. we may be conditioned, as Gib said, to follow social customs such as clothing ourselves in public, but we may still be “free” to choose for ourselves which types of clothing we actually wear, i.e. free to choose how we conform, even when we are not free to choose NOT to conform. basically, unless conditioning becomes absolute (i.e. it absolutely precludes all possibilities except one) then we are still open to choose from the available choices, even if these choices are predetermined by social mechanisms or cultural conditioning.
of course, we could realise that even if we are conditioned to accept a range of choices, we are still conditioned per se, regardless of how many “choices” are open to us… of course, under this interpretation, its meaningless to speak of any other way of looking at it, unless you are going to live outside of society itself or completely disregard its rules (in which case you will probably end up in jail or dead very quickly)-- however, even if you were living outside of society (i.e. in the wilderness or in a “state of nature”), under this interpretation of conditioning here, you would still be “conditioned” to choose from the predetermined limited range of choices available to you by your environment itself. it seems that we are either conditioned by one thing, or another, because there will always be a range of choices which are open to us, and a range which are not… this is a necessary fact of reality, of being a finite lifeform.
not sure if any of that actually answered your question…
I think human beings have the capacity to be free or to to be subtly or obviously framed.
There are those who have the consciousness to realize that they are fully capable of making determined willed decisions on their own through their ongong awareness - at every and any moment.
I do believe that we are free, to the degree that we realize it. And we must look at this, and practice this awareness at every moment - though we sometimes fail. But a combination of will/determination and awareness lead to freedom of choice which lead to being free.
There are those who would choose to follow the herd, to be farmed out, in a matter of speaking. Conformists who need to follow the crowd, with the herd mentality. Those who would also frame us according to their views of what “should be”, how we should be, how we should dress, how we should live, how we should think.
Some of us want and need to “fit in” to a safe little niche among our peers, but that being the case, it is difficult to be that one little herd animal that eventually tells himself that he doesn’t want this anymore. He wants to go his own way, do his own thing. He wants to be FREE to pick and choose for himself, to make his own mistakes, to use his own will to go up the mountain or down the mountain. At some point, it dawns on him that he does have a brain and he does have the power and the inner strength to be himself, and that the only way in which to be truly free is to know that he IS truly free and to act on that. And thus, he not only steps away from the herd, but he very eagerly runs away from the herd. At this point, he becomes and continues to become who he is always meant to be, and that is seen in every moment that he realizes that HE IS TRULY FREE TO BE HIMSELF and not part of the sad, sad herd.