Do we really want freedom or is freedom the name we give to what we really want? What has taken place in American society during the early decades of the twenty-first century suggests we are moving from freedom properly understood toward decreasing freedom. Because a flourishing society requires genuine freedom, this trend threatens much that we mean by flourishing. When the meaning of words become confused, it is unavoidable that thinking also becomes confused. This has happened with freedom. Therefore, I will often use liberty in place of freedom to encourage careful thought about what is meant.
I begin by defining power and liberty because without proper definitions, we cannot competently analyze what is taking place. We will then look at the requirements for liberty followed by reasons why—willingly or unintentionally—we are yielding our liberty. Finally, we will consider what is required of citizen-rulers if we want to reverse this trend and restore liberty for future generations.
Power
It is easier to define power than liberty. Power structures develop naturally. Every society throughout history, from the primitive to the civilized, depended on a power structure. The formation of hierarchy stems from human nature and the social benefits derived from organized activity. In any society some people are more suited for leading and organizing than others. Furthermore, most people are willing to accept leadership from those they judge as qualified and legitimately chosen.
Power drives history. Much of history arose from circumstances in which an individual was willing to do whatever it took to gain power and pursue their agenda. Under such conditions, most people may have preferred a different power structure but chose to accept the one imposed upon them because the cost of resistance was too high. Through much of history, the bargain was often simple: submit or die.
Liberty
Power is a universal value, liberty is not. Today, when we think of liberty (freedom), we are dealing with a category of thought, a set of characteristics, which have rarely existed in history. The worldview of a people must include elements that are necessary to imagine, let alone build, a free society. Prior to about 1600, few if any societies in history possessed such a worldview. On the contrary, many older worldviews understood rulership and power in ways that prevented liberty as we understand it.
Around 1500 in Europe, this began changing. Ideas and circumstances worked together to slowly alter the prevailing worldviews. By the end of the seventeenth century, radically new ideas were presented concerning the rights of individuals and the limits of rulership. For the next several hundred years, these ideas were extended and developed. Countries experimented within this developing new worldview by creating new structures of power. Pertaining to freedom, the most important development was the founding of the United States at the close of the eighteenth century. For this article, we must skip the details of that development process. What we require is an understanding of how the meaning of freedom has changed.
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, liberty (freedom) was understood as responsibility. To win and maintain liberty requires that individuals assume the responsibility of self-government. Liberty was understood as the absence of coercion. Liberty meant that everyone lived under the same rules. A free society required a balance of individual rights and social responsibility. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1831, Americans lived with a “self-interest properly understood.” This meaning was intact as the 1800s closed. However, by 1950, new things were continually added to the meaning of freedom.
Events of the first half of the twentieth century reordered the world. The reality in 1950 was radically different than in 1900. Not just the United States, but for most of the world, the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the threat of atomic weapons resulted in a restructuring of government, the economy, and society. Every society experienced huge changes in the prevailing worldview. For some societies, particularly Europe, some elements of the worldview of the late nineteenth century had been shattered. This reordering set the stage for many changes over the following seventy plus years up to the present. Some of the most significant changes were related to the understanding of power and freedom.
We often think of democracy and freedom as old and proven concepts; after all, the United States declared independence 250 years ago. However, democracy as we understand it today is quite recent. The United States has only had full suffrage for about 60 years. Some countries in Europe did not become democracies until the middle of last century. From the time of our founding, what the United States was attempting was often referred to as an experiment. Never had freedom been tried to such an extent and on such a scale. The performance of the United States in the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century vindicated the experiment. I suggest, however, that the reordered world following 1950 presents another test, another experiment, for keeping liberty. It is therefore essential that we understand liberty and its relation to power.
Democracy is not easy to define. It is not simply holding honest elections for government officials; this has been confirmed by multiple attempts in countries around the world in the past 50 years. For most of those countries, democracy meant a set of benefits that citizens saw or assumed when they looked at countries which were richer and freer. The common pattern is that the country made initial changes toward effective elections and a freer market, only to discover a few years later that the expected benefits did not materialize. The next step in the pattern is when that country decides that “democracy” does not work and replaces it with a power structure that removes the possibility of obtaining the very benefits they look for.
Democracy, of course, requires free elections by citizens with proper understanding. Democracy must also include individual freedom and responsibility, again properly understood. Democracy is better understood as a way to order society. It requires the preparation and development of citizens. It requires a commitment to shared principles and values. It requires social institutions to support the working of society. The assessment of many countries that “democracy doesn’t work” is not a useful statement because they never attempted an ordering of society that could produce the benefits they wanted and to which they assigned the name democracy.
Liberty and democracy are not synonymous. While democracy can provide the widest range and fullness of freedoms, it can become as tyrannical as any other form of government. On the other hand, it is possible to enjoy several freedoms under a benevolent monarchy. The founders of the United States understood this danger inherent in democracy and did a brilliant job implementing safeguards. Nonetheless, they acknowledged that a society in which citizens had unprecedented freedoms and responsibilities could not be held together only by the founding documents. Such a society needs citizens that are virtuous, informed, share a core set of beliefs and values, and are qualified and willing to assume self-government.
As the second half of the twentieth century opened, the meaning of freedom began changing and continues to the present. The meaning of liberty as freedom from coercion and as life in a society in which everyone lives by the same rules gradually acquired an added meaning: that citizens should be free of necessity. To this was added freedom from caprice, from the risks and chances of life. To this was added freedom to ignore traditional moral and social beliefs and standards, and to behave accordingly. As these additional concepts were added to the meaning of freedom, natural consequences occurred, consequences that were personal, economic, and social. Thus, the meaning of freedom was amended again to include freedom from the consequences of the new freedoms. More recently, for some, freedom means not having to hear anything they disagree with. Today, some citizens want freedom to mean release from the confines of nature, to change their gender and physiological and psychological characteristics at will.
Here is where we find ourselves in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Some citizens hold to the traditional meaning of liberty while others hold a meaning that includes all the additions just listed. The rest of the citizens fall somewhere on the spectrum between the two ends. If the consequences of living according to any definition of freedom just given were born solely and completely by the individual, the definition would soon adjust. However, that is not the case. Some of the behaviors unavoidably affect all of society. Some of the behaviors impose significant costs which are not borne by the individual but are socialized, that is, they are paid by society.
Misunderstanding the meaning of liberty is a large part of the social crisis of our time.
What Is Required for Liberty?
The most important requirement for liberty comes directly from the definitions of power and liberty. Liberty requires that citizens willingly accept personal responsibility for self-governance. It is a high responsibility requiring ongoing effort and vigilance. For some, personal responsibility may be a price they are willing to pay for the flourishing that only liberty can bring. For others, responsibility may be the reward of liberty. Far more people are in the former group. A healthy society contains both groups.
Personal responsibility is a prerequisite for liberty but is not sufficient. A functioning and sustainable society under liberty must provide opportunities for all citizens to flourish. This requires ongoing balancing of self-interest and the obligations of each citizen to support what is good for society. Human nature tends to focus on our personal interests at the expense of society.
As noted above, our founders understood that the scope of liberty they inaugurated requires a citizenry of virtue, shared values, and knowledge proper to the role of a citizen-ruler. This requirement can be easily overlooked, something that has happened in the United States over the past sixty years during which the worldviews of groups of citizens have been diverging. This divergence begins a process that ends with an understanding of majority-rule that believes the majority decides what is right and wrong. This is antithetical to liberty, a point we will discuss later.
We commonly speak of “the government” as if it were an independent entity out of the control of citizens. As a figure of speech, the term might be convenient, but as a concept of rulership power, it is inconsistent with American society and is dangerous. Anything that might be included in “the government” exists because we citizens allowed it to be created and maintained because of our political, social, and economic votes—and we can change it by our votes. This understanding is a fundamental element of liberty.
Related to the point above and to the unfortunately expanded meaning of freedom presented previously, “the government” has steadily become a paternalistic state. That is, too many citizens look to “the government” to make them comfortable, compensate for their mistakes, and protect them from all risks. This perspective works against liberty. This very mindset is contrary to what is required for a citizen in a free society. Furthermore, all actions of government require resources. Therefore, of necessity, paternalistic actions require resources (taxes) from citizens. This harms both the citizens receiving paternalistic care as well as those who are paying for it. This will eventually lead to a breakdown in the cohesiveness of society.
Liberty requires a proper understanding of equal. For the United States—as originally intended—equal means that everyone must follow the same rules and that everyone has equal standing under the law. That is the ideal, although everyone understands that human nature will always prevent a society from perfectly attaining that ideal. Today, it is more instructive to look at what equal does not mean. It does not mean that the differences among people no longer matter. For every role and function in society, some people will by nature and development be more qualified than others to assume those roles and perform those functions. As a corollary, hierarchies will always exist—and they benefit society. This applies to rulership. We are not all equally qualified. Our role as citizen-rulers is to become skillful at identifying and selecting those who are qualified to be in leadership positions.
Furthermore, equal does not mean that everyone will have the same circumstances. On the contrary, attempts to ensure equality of circumstances, sometimes called equality of outcomes, are antithetical to liberty. Some who recognize this fact speak of equality of opportunity, but that phrase can also be misunderstood unless we have a proper meaning of opportunity. As simple examples, it is harmful to tell the proverbial one-hundred-pound weakling that he has the opportunity to be a professional football player or that someone who is challenged by basic mathematics has the opportunity to be a theoretical physicist. It is a fact of nature that some people are more or less qualified for any opportunity. It is a fact of society that some people are raised in environments that prepare them better or worse for any opportunity.
In a free society, citizens influence each other by persuasion, information, social behavior, economic behavior, and so on—that is, by social and economic votes. These are the foundations of a self-governing, free society. While citizens also influence each other through political votes, liberty is damaged if this avenue is used to pressure or coerce other citizens.
Why Are We Yielding Freedom?
We are yielding true freedom even if it appears that we have never been freer. Changing the definition of freedom, as presented above, does not increase freedom. It merely confuses our understanding of what freedom really is. Our capacity for a free society is also declining. One measure of that decline is the growing number of Americans who, for assorted reasons, are not prepared to assume the role of a citizen in a society that requires self-governance. Our capacity for liberty must be assessed by looking at all citizens, not a fortunate few.
Many social problems we are worried about today are partly caused by our yielding of liberty. Stated differently, as false freedoms increased and true liberty declined, we unintentionally created many troubles. As a prerequisite for solving our problems, we must reverse the trajectory and increase liberty while reducing false freedoms.
While many reasons are given for our declining liberty, I group most of them into two categories. The first category is our worldview, specifically the changes that took place following World War II. Within the worldview category, I chose three elements. First, an implicit bargain developed between ordinary citizens and the top leadership of our power structures. This bargain involved an explicit yielding of responsibility because the bargain was based on the idea that citizens could go about their “regular” life while those in leadership positions, especially those in government, would manage society for peace and prosperity.
The second worldview element is the changing meaning of freedom, and the most important aspect is the growing paternalistic nature of government. Stated differently, the aspect is declining personal responsibility. Imagine that John understands freedom to mean that he should be free of stress, risk, necessity, and the consequences of his behavior. He will turn to “the government” to meet his desires. In practical terms, this means that John is willing to turn control of part of his life over to another citizen employed by the government. The government employee “takes care of” John by using money obtained by taxing other citizens. This cycle harms liberty and the capacity for liberty for everyone involved. This was a simple example of the “welfare” type. It would be a mistake to think this is the only type of example. Any person or entity that uses government power to their advantage at the expense of other citizens can be of this same type.
The most challenging issue is the third element: the divergence of worldviews among large groups of citizens. While our worldview encompasses all that we understand about the world, how it works, and how it should work, two domains are especially important for society: economics and belief systems. Societies, indeed civilizations, rise and fall on these two domains, a discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article. Here, it is sufficient to note that fundamental beliefs about production, consumption, distribution of resources, the nature of humanity, what is right and wrong, what is fair and not fair, and what is true and not true are sharply diverging. In some cases, one group holds views that are antithetical to those of another.
When groups hold strongly opposing beliefs and values, the use of persuasion, information, and compromise becomes extremely difficult. This is one reason many citizens have for several decades believed that our society is stuck at a stalemate. In response, some groups have worked to gain political, economic, and social power for the purpose of coercing those who disagree with them into conformance. This move is poison to liberty. If it persists, social conflict will escalate. If escalation continues, we will cease to have a functioning free society. We have hardly begun the task of learning how to deal with contradictory worldviews.
Why did we not recognize our social problems earlier? Why did we not understand that the “new” freedoms were going to create trouble? These questions belong to the second main category of why we yielded liberty: feedback from reality was distorted. This subject is explored in detail in other articles. Here, we only need statements of the main causes. The new world order of the second half of the twentieth century was caused by changes in existing worldviews and it in turn brought about even more changes. The pace of change of everything increased dramatically. Working together, those two facts presented genuine difficulty in interpreting feedback from reality. However, the more significant cause was that the feedback itself was distorted.
To be clear, the feedback from reality was present. Some observers recognized reality and tried to draw attention to what was happening. They were ignored because they appeared at the time to be wrong. What was going on? Following World War II, the United States was in an exceptional position militarily and economically; that much is widely recognized. The United States also controlled the world’s monetary system, which put us in a unique position to spend more than we took in. The result of increasing prosperity and monetary policy allowed “the government” to dampen the feedback from reality and postpone real consequences for decades. (See Monetary Structure for a full discussion.)
Power occurs and grows naturally; liberty must be won and sustained.
What To Do
A central theme of my work is the critical importance of citizen-rulers. What our society looks like now is the result of the earlier political, economic, and social votes of citizens. What our society will look like depends upon our votes. Because our votes are powerful, we must cast them with proper understanding. Therefore, a central purpose of my work is to contribute to the development of citizen-rulers who possess proper understanding.
Please see these articles for more details.
Role of a Citizen-Ruler
Principles for Citizen-Rulers
The Foundations and Effects of Our Monetary System