Other people open or close the future that my freedom requires

Evidence

It is this interdependence which explains why oppression is possible and why it is hateful. As we have seen, my freedom, in order to fulfill itself, requires that it emerge into an open future: it is other men who open the future to me, it is they who, setting up the world of tomorrow, define my future; but if, instead of allowing me to participate in this constructive movement, they oblige me to consume my transcendence in vain, if they keep me below the level which they have conquered and on the basis of which new conquests will be achieved, then they are cutting me off from the future, they are changing me into a thing. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 86

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out what oppression concretely is: being cut off from the future and changed into a thing, the mechanism behind Beauvoir’s central claim.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the actual derivation the reader asked about — whether willing my freedom requires willing yours. Here the mechanism is explicit: others define my future, so my freedom structurally depends on theirs.
• XREF: connects to: The Other’s freedom is the sole separation between my self and the Other — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 749; Ordinary people must proclaim their right to the future — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 176