Free to be Free

 

            When you're looking at the Freedom balance sheet afforded you by virtue of being in a Democratic society, you really should be looking at both sides of the ledger. In your list of freedoms and liberties, how many are "Freedom froms" and how many are "Freedom tos"?

            The difference? Putting your community and country before yourself by demonstrating your civic duty to preserve and protect your family, community, and country is an example of your freedom to be a moral citizen. If you decide to emphasize your individuality in order to resist any efforts to urge you towards being that moral citizen because you insist you should have the freedom from government control, you've contaminated the concept of freedom.

            The founders of Democratic Constitutions were men of thought. They realized the gravity of setting out guidelines for societies so that individuals would have inalienable rights all the while preserving the integrity of the collective and preservation of the greater good. They also knew that humans are fallible and there had to be recourse when the greater good was in peril due to the acts of individuals. There also had to be recourse when houses of Government exhibited those same human characteristics. There had to be a process whereby the masses could hold Government to account when it overstepped its authority.

            So, the citizenry have been gifted with tools to ensure that accountability: Freedom of speech, assembly, and peaceful protest. They're every bit as much civic duties as the privilege of casting a ballot or running for public office. There are also many responsibilities attached to those gifts. While all of those tools are methods of civic engagement, it is incumbent to remember that some civil disobedience stems from individualistic motivation wrapped in pseudo-patriotic zeal. Nothing is more destructive to democracy than a misguided mob demonstrating the elevation of individual selfishness at the expense of the greater good. Similarly, Governments arbitrarily suppressing that civic engagement to facilitate a totalitarian ideology is a demonstration of authoritarian individualism - also at the expense of the greater good.

            When these two tendencies collide, democracies crumble. When an unruly citizenry flexes its individuality and is met with authoritarian intolerance, all bets are off. Governments seeking to maintain some sort of control are then forced to abandon the quest for the good of the collective and must capitulate to the needs of individuals. Little by little government assumes the burden of choice from the individual. Likewise they assume the burden of property, wealth, responsibility, and then of freedom itself. What began as a movement to protest the freedom from government control results in ultimate government control. This is how fascism is born.

            The end result of that unruly citizenry actually overthrowing and replacing a government will likely be the same. Wholesale revolution seldom results in a return to the place where the greater good will prevail over individualism.

            We're seeing many disturbing things that have all the earmarks of a fall into that individualistic whirlpool. The rule of the mob seems to be subverting the rule of law. Political policy makers are tilting to individualistic breezes in order to subdue discordant opinions. Tribal divisions are being forged along social, political, medical, environmental, and other ideological lines that push people farther apart when civic responsibility and cooperation is needed the most.

            We're disrespecting those men of thought who poured their souls into documents that ensured safety, respect, compassion, and liberty for their countrymen. We're disrespecting the people who served in armed conflict to defend those tenets by insisting that we should be free from the burden of our civic responsibilities. They died on battlefields so that we are free to challenge the very ideologies that they went to war to defeat, not to propagate them. They sacrificed knowing that it is a civic duty to sacrifice. They bled so that we have privileges. They would cry if they saw how we abused those privileges by shirking our responsibility to care for our societies. They might also weep for how our Governments have slowly but surely put the needs of individuals and powerful business entities before the needs of the citizenry. But I'm being presumptive.

            Have a look at your balance sheet again. Is what you're thinking is freedom still valid? Is what you imagine as oppression merely an inconvenience that reminds you of the burden of your civic responsibility? Is what you've built your ideology upon merely a belief based on a paranoid imagining of totalitarianism control? Do you recognize that those men of thought knew that placing restrictions on a population or requiring social sacrifice would result in push back?

            They did not place those emergency mechanisms in Constitutions as mere trifling items. They knew that people weren't in large part capable of recognizing threats to the greater good and would default to individualism under pressure. I can't imagine that they wouldn't be alarmed at how vigorously individualism has seized so many. It's basically revealing the stark fact that there is wholesale civic illiteracy. Mostly because we're a generation or two removed from the kind of conflict that shone a light on what happens when tyrants really seize control. If you want to revel in being free from something, be glad you're free from having had to make the sacrifices of those previous generations.

            I am privileged to have the freedom to put these words to page and share them without fear of persecution. Those who read them have the freedom to disagree, the freedom to engage me in debate, and the freedom to ignore what I've written.