Entirely possible. I haven't read much Pratchett, and haven't encountered that line from him, but we do seem to think along the same lines.
Do we have freedom? Perhaps. Sometimes the weight of obligation is as heavy as a mountain and freedom seems almost tangible in its distance as it waits, tantalizing, at the end of some tribulation. We will always find new things to seek freedom from. The Ascetics seek freedom from the self--I think that's about as far as you can go. Freedom often is just interpreted as freedom from oppression. We have that to some extent in the United States, though it is slowly being eroded.
The question is never "Do we have freedom?" It is "How much freedom do we have, and are there freedoms we do not have that we should?"
The question is often "Are we a free people?" politically or "Do we have free will?" philosophically.
You miss my point. Freedom is not a binary state, that you have it or you don't. It is a continuum, so the question must truly be "To what degree..."
i guess that makes me an 'ascetic' then, though not as a member of any group of same, since i divested myself of 'self' a dozen years ago and have been living a 'self'-less life ever since... i don't believe in any god or follow any religion or cult's regime, merely decided it was the best way to justify my existence in this life... it's a stress-free way to live and simplifies everything, since you don't have to make any decisions more taxing than what to eat for dinner... having no goals or ambitions, not needing to be successful, or happy, or even alive, is the ultimate personal freedom... but that still does not allow one the right to infringe upon another's... so freedom--even the ultimate total kind--for us as a sentient species, still carries with it the responsibility to respect and protect others' rights... were we not 'thinking' animals, it wouldn't be 'freedom' but only the nature-instilled instinctive behavior of our kind, which is a total lack of freedom... the lion is not 'free to kill'... it's forced to... just as the praying mantis must eat her mate after copulating... a human is the only animal that can have any kind of 'freedom'... and that's due to our unique ability to think up such a concept... ;-)