The question of freedom

This is something I will return to when I'm not slacking off at work, I'm sure. But it interests me greatly... The New York Times, for the past two days, has been running a series on Love in Saudi Arabia. As I was reading today's piece, about women and what love means for them, I found myself struck by the lack of rebellion to the situation as it stands, and further struck that it's the same shape as the lack of rebellion described in Marxist writings (and later feminist writings) commonly referred to as "false consciousness" -- the fairly straightforward notion that the dominant paradigm convinces the oppressed that they in fact have all of their needs met, and don't want for what the opponents of the paradigm term liberation.
But False Consciousness is a damn slippery slope. In the sense that it supposes that a revolutionary knows what you want and what you need, and you don't. False Consciousness reasoning has "justified" terrible massacres across the globe, is one of the theoretical foundations of maoism (of which I am not a fan), and has been a big part of second-wave feminism. It implies a universal truth about freedom that the oppressed cannot be expected to "get". And, in my not so humble opinion, that's a huge problem.
Yet clearly there's an extent to which that kind of mechanism does exist... we live in advanced capitalism. Everywhere we look we are being told what are needs *really* are (a 28 inch waist, chemically maintained happiness and a luxury sedan). In a point of fact overlooked by most of the commentators on the Times site, religious fundamentalism is the same as economic fundamentalism is the same as philosophical fundamentalism, and its a fact of daily life, everywhere, that an external source with a stake in some sort of power game is informing us of our needs. And because it's easier to live within a power structure that is not trying to get you to be different, a fair number of people take that informing as gospel, no pun intended. To say that there is no such thing as "false consciousness" is to allow a whole slew of people, both down your block and around your planet, to get pushed around in the name of structures of power and/or knowledge. (god, have I really become that Foucaultian?)

So what we get down to is what it means to be a person acting freely in the world. So given that to be free is to be an unfettered agent, and given that agency is acting as one intends, and given that intention comes in part from information at hand, and given that information at hand is necessarily a facet of the social (by which i simply mean "beyond the level of the individual") world around us,

How do we even begin to think about freedom in society?