Are We Wrong About Freedom?

Freedom is a cancer plaguing the modern man. Just like an addiction, it is a disease you don’t realise is negative for you until it corrupts your entire existence.

At the bedrock of all societies, the fundamental balance is between order and freedom. Order, being conceptualised as that which restricts. And freedom, as that which is unrestrictive.

Here lies the fundamental choice. Place freedom as the heart of society by tilting the scales in its direction, or doing the opposite to place order as the heart.

What we’re doing when making this choice is laying down which of the two ideas are going to grip society at its very core. This in itself would be fine if ideas were static in nature, as they would only pursue the specific outcome of what they were designed for. However, I would argue that ideas instead exist outside of the body, outside of the intention they were created for, and instead have eternal lives of their own.

Just as a child grows and changes, so do ideas until they reach their natural conclusion.

At the foundation of Liberalism, the philosophy of modern day Western nations, freedom lies at the heart. The expression that one should be able to do as one chooses, as long as those choices don’t infringe on the rights of other people remains constantly in the air.

However, there becomes an intrinsic issue here. When the boundaries of all actions are only limited by rights, which creates an exceptionally wide space, the only thing regulating action is the current culture.

This is a dangerous place to put your faith, in the wishful hope that the culture will continue to protect all that you hold dear. What if it doesn’t?

There was once a time children in the womb were cherished, because the culture made it so. Now through new abortion laws, they’re nothing more than a ‘ cluster of cells’. Even if they’re 9 months into the pregnancy.

There was once a time where we would protect the sanctity of sexual interaction between man and woman, because the culture made it so. Now one tenth of 12 – 13 year olds fear they’re addicted to pornography.

Culture shifts under our feet. This is not an inherently bad thing, some things do need to change. However, the fundamental values, traditions and way of life the West holds dear are being destroyed through our cultural crisis. Maybe we should not solely rely on culture to defend against the waves of progressivism.

Coming back to the concept that ideas have natural conclusions, it can be said that the situation we’re in is not by accident. But instead is a reality pushed along toward the natural conclusion of freedom.

Freedom, being defined as that which is unrestricted, continuously molds itself into a new form in order to further remove the shackles it finds itself in, creating a wider gap where action can take place. At first, it was the removal of physical shackles of slavery. Then it progressed to equality under the law. 

After achieving this level of freedom, where men and women of all creeds became equally treated under the law, the largest restriction of the individual suddenly became the culture and categorisations/ideas the culture possesses which ‘oppress’ people. 

The very things which confine and restrict us in the modern world are culture and forced identity. Conceptualised by liberal thinkers as gender, class, race, religion, borders, identity from birth, and a large list of others. Freedom desires to be unrestricted, and these are the new shackles which freedom desires to overcome.

It is not a mistake that those who believe in liberalism left or right are attempting to remove the shackles of culture and forced identity. It is embedded into the very nature of the idea of freedom, and this idea is now reaching its natural conclusion. The conclusion of a world where no external forces, legal, biological or cultural can define an individual. But only that the individual can define themselves.

This conclusion however, does not exist in nature. And the pursuit of such things is leaving behind a mess of unimaginable scale. The scale of each individual having to act as atomised individuals with no collective past or future. They are part of no story, and no story is part of them. The modern person knows not who they are, where they come from, and has no structure to guide them on the complicated path of life. 

Instead of freeing the individual, our liberal system has instead opened a gaping hole underneath the feet of all who live in the modern West.

Order must be the bedrock of society, with freedom as the next level up.