The Progressive Degradation of Freedom

AmericanThinker.com ^ | 11/10/2013 | Daren Jonescu

[RoosterRedux]

If self-preservation is our natural inclination, and mind and body our natural tools, then having control of the use of those tools is the minimum requirement of living fully in accordance with our nature. The desire to have such control is therefore coextensive with the innate desire for self-preservation. And, therefore, the feeling of having such control is the proper object of what I am calling the freedom sense. This conscious awareness of practical self-determination is thus our most direct experience of ourselves as rational animals. While other experiences fulfill our nature in other ways, this is the one that tells us that we are human. In a very strict, non-poetic sense, "I am human" means "I am free."

In addition to being the feeling that accompanies a social existence suitable to our nature, the freedom sense is also a natural means of self-protection. Just as our sight is naturally repulsed by the ugly, and our hearing by the cacophonous, so our freedom sense, when functioning properly, recoils from the feeling of forced dependence or violated will. This explains, at the everyday level, why some of us feel excessively annoyed at having our sentences completed for us by loved ones who know us too well, or at being "rushed" into doing chores we had every intention of doing anyway.

At a deeper level, it explains why children, whose freedom sense is developing along with their rational agency, bridle at even the most reasonable limitations placed on their behavior by responsible guardians...

From Socrates' ironic demolition of the Athenian elite to Locke's analysis of natural rights, and from Exodus to the Resurrection, escaping or being liberated from restraints of one form or another has been the theme of all the great teachings of Western civilization.

[Travis McGee]

[Servant of the Cross]

Yet tyranny is always capricious, and the willingness of police and compliant doctors and nurses to go along with it ought to disturb a supposedly free people, no matter how comparatively rare it may seem ... But there is a despotic trend in American government. Too many of our rulers and their enforcers reflexively see the citizenry primarily as a threat.