Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Freedom means very different things to different people. Some people think of freedom as being able to exercise maximum control over their own lives and make their own life decisions. Others consider freedom to be the degree they are free from want and fear. These different definitions are so contradictory that they become mutually exclusive. Freedom from want and fear inevitably requires some sort of authority structure that can take responsibility for dealing with those aspects of life. Personal freedom requires an absence of controlling authority.

Much of the history of our current century has been the often violent conflict between social structures based on these incompatible philosophies attempting to forcibly share their version of freedom with their unwilling neighbors. In spite of efforts to distract the public's attention with sex scandals and other titillations, the core of our current political debate continues to revolve around this issue that has bedeviled humanity for as long as we've existed.

Perhaps the reason this issue so dominates our modern political life is because we are all marked by a variation of this same conflict in our formative years. Early childhood is the very definition of seeking freedom from want and fear. Unable to care for ourselves, as newborns we have no option but to surrender all personal freedom and responsibility to our parents. We depend on our parents as the primary authority structure in our lives to provide us with the basic necessities of life and protect us from harm.

As we mature, most of us seek to diminish the absolute authority and control of our parents and exercise ever greater influence over our own lives. This culminates in the often acrimonious hormone driven temporary insanity of the teenage years, when the trauma and confusion of the natural need to separate from the safety of our parent's nurture and protection further complicates the issue.

Most important in our early education is learning that taking responsibility for our actions is as critically important in a free society as the concept of personal freedom itself. Children whose parents fail to teach this very important lesson through neglect, abuse or misguided permissiveness, either learn the hard way on their own, find a way to abandon their personal freedom, or become the sociopathic monsters of the future. A free society simply can't function without a strong connection between the freedom enjoyed by its citizens and their willingness to accept responsibility and accountability for their exercise of that freedom.

How well they deal with their childhood trauma of separation, and the resulting shifts in responsibility and control in their personal lives, defines the perspectives on freedom of many individuals for the rest of their lives. Those who have difficulty handling personal freedom and taking responsibility for their own actions in their personal lives, almost inevitably have difficulty accepting the principle of personal freedom in society at large.

Just as the transition from seeking freedom from want and fear to seeking personal freedom is a sign of maturity in the individual, the same can be said of societies. Until a society has matured sufficiently to embrace an enlightened understanding of human nature, the greater real value of personal freedom will always seem less robust and reliable than the simplistic direct intervention approach of authority based freedom from want and fear.

Just as with most profound truths, appreciating the true value of personal freedom requires the ability to understand a larger perspective. From a superficial perspective it's far too easy to point out the many downsides to personal freedom. At its most basic level the freedom to succeed must also allow the freedom to fail. Even the most successful have experienced some measure of failures and disappointments while finding and correcting the flaws in their world views. The average successful businessman failed in several previous business ventures before finding the right combination. Those who are unwilling or unable to learn from their past failures will always provide as many emotionally useful examples of how hard life can be in a free society as personal freedom's critics could ever desire.

The benefits of personal freedom, on the other hand, are so pervasive that we take them for granted. With our schools failing to provide any kind of meaningful historical perspective, most of us have no alternative but to accept the world around us as a given with no idea of what went into creating it. The ever shortening public attention span lacks the depth to grasp the process of success, and attempts to judge the value of personal freedom on the basis of momentary snapshots in which the disparity between success and failure can be made to appear grossly unfair. Only those able to grasp the larger perspective, able to see the world as the result of a complex process that has been going on for thousands of years, can truly appreciate the tremendous power of personal freedom, and how critical it has been to the creation of our modern world.

The life of the original humans was perhaps the point in the evolution of human civilization where the balance between personal freedom and freedom from want and fear most favored personal freedom. Just stepping outside of the limited area controlled by his small extended family or tribe brought an individual all the personal freedom he could want - along with all of the potential dangers and hardships of facing the primitive world alone. Within the group, the pressures of survival dictated that all members of the group shared roughly the same objectives, and so imposed only very limited constraints on the personal freedoms of the participating individuals.

From the perspective of the original humans, freedom from hunger and danger could hardly fail to become a natural focus. Within the context of the primitive world, those adaptations that promised freedom from want and fear became a favored alternative to the more profound freedom and personal responsibility of the truly free individual in a world full of sharp toothed predators and fleet footed prey. With the basics needed to sustain life very much in question, freedom from want and fear offered powerful attractions. Not surprisingly this became the overwhelming focus of primitive life and mankind's evolving social structures.

The ascendancy of the individual that was empowered by the dawning of the industrial revolution did more than just provide the means of increasing the productivity of society - it also provided both reasons and perhaps more importantly the means by which individuals could question the historical dominance of authority based social structures. While the first smoldering embers of the industrial revolution may have been sparked into existence within the partly free upper classes of England, they only flared into full brilliance when fanned by the enlightened self-interest of those who had embraced the principle of personal freedom.

The upper classes in preindustrial revolution England may have considered themselves free, but their concept of freedom fell far short of true freedom, and their society was still largely a rigid authority based structure. The limited impacts of the industrial revolution on England enriched a small percentage of the population while deepening the class divisions and further decreasing the personal freedom of most of those trapped in the exploited lower classes. Distorted within the artificial restrictions of authority based English society, the industrial revolution was more of a curse than blessing for most of the population.

Things were different on the frontier far removed from the stifling authority structure of the mother country. Empowered by the development of the flintlock rifle with which he could provide his own freedom from fear, and by the untapped natural wealth of the frontier where his own productive efforts could satisfy his wants, it was a natural step for the frontiersman to question the real value of exploitive authority structures.

Only those willing to free themselves from constraining higher authority possessed the flexibility in their social structures to easily accommodate the rapid and profound changes brought about by the machine age. As such the industrial revolution found its most fertile ground within the enlightened self-interest of those Americans who had most completely embraced the principles of our revolution. Small wonder that an America based on personal freedom rapidly displaced an authority bound England as the driving engine of the industrial revolution.

Those enlightened individuals capable of appreciating the value of personal freedom have never been a majority. Even during the American Revolution it has been estimated that only a third of the colonists possessed sufficient confidence in themselves and their own abilities to willingly risk taking full responsibility for their own well-being. Of the remaining 2/3rds of the population, a third of the colonists were ambivalent and willing accept whatever future was thrust upon them. The final third were unwilling to give up the illusion of freedom from want and fear represented by the authority of the British Crown.

The American Revolution is unique in the history of man in that it remains the only time believers in personal freedom both triumphed over the fearful and apathetic, and managed to preserve their principles through their rebellion to form the foundation of their new nation. Many other rebellions have started with as high minded of intentions, but no others have yet managed to avoid turning on themselves and compromising their original promise in their moment of triumph.

The empty promises of freedom from want and fear have always been very powerful. While popular literature focuses entirely on the brutality and inhumanity of slavery, for many of us some form of the freedom of the slave is our preferred environment. We willingly relinquish our personal freedom to anyone willing to accept responsibility for providing us with the basic necessities and some purpose for our lives. We all love to complain about domineering bosses and intrusive government, but underneath most of us remain willing to allow our life choices to be made for us.

An often overlooked aspect of the post Civil War years is that a large number of former slaves remained on the plantations even after their emancipation. In spite of the hardships they had suffered, many who had spent their whole lives as slaves found it impossible to give up the freedom of the slave for the uncertainties and very real dangers of assuming personal responsibility for their own lives. Personal freedom can be more terrifying than the most oppressive slave master to those lacking confidence in themselves.

Even in our modern nominally free world few of us truly exercise our personal freedom. While we pay lip service to entrepreneurship, the overwhelming majority of us prefer being an employee to the far greater potential risks and rewards of being an employer. There has always been substantial demand for ways by which those who are afraid of freedom can imprison themselves in dungeons constructed out of the bars of their own fears.

Never a majority, the believers in personal freedom attempted to protect their hard won principles from the fear driven majority by embedding them in the founding documents of our nation. These expressions of wisdom, gained over thousands of years of hard lessons, are now increasingly under attack by those who no longer understand their purpose. Lacking any historical perspective on the long dominance and consistent pattern of failure by authority based systems, it has become popular to point to the principles of personal freedom, that actually only finally emerged a few centuries ago, as now being quaint and outdated.

Unwilling or unable to comprehend the depth of importance of all aspects of personal freedom, self-proclaimed experts on the problems of society claim that we now live in different times that require different solutions. All too willing to abandon the freedom they don't understand, they demand simplistic authoritarian solutions for imagined crises. Too often these poorly thought out solutions directly compromise the fundamental principle of personal freedom that is still the primary engine of our civilization.

Having grown up in a world where access to the basics of survival is taken so much for granted that it has been declared an entitlement, the spoiled products of two centuries of personal freedom have steadily expanded the list of responsibilities they've abdicated. And as the hard won wisdom of the previous centuries fades from the public consciousness, we become ever more willing to turn away from personal freedom and succumb to the superficial attractions of simplistic authority based solutions.

During the last 50 years we've exhibited an increasing acceptance of authority based responses to ever more trivial concerns, seemingly unaware that each new expansion of authority further constricts our remaining personal freedoms. Our cultural acceptance of authority has grown so perverse and pervasive that we've changed from a nation of dynamic inventors and entrepreneur intent on profiting from our own productivity, into a nation of victims seeking to leverage imagined grievances into claims against the wealth of the productive few who foolishly attempt to provide us with goods or services.

History indicates that any real measure of personal freedom is extremely rare. The personal freedom we take so much for granted today was the product of a unique confluence of enlightened thinking, limitations in the communications and enforcement technology of the day, and access to the unspoiled natural wealth of the frontier. It is extremely unlikely that these conditions will ever converge again on an overpopulated earth where humans have spread to every corner, and technology provides us with instantaneous communications and rapid delivery of sufficient military force to suppress any attempts to overturn authority based systems and restore personal freedom.

Once we've squandered the priceless inheritance of personal freedom that so many of our ancestors gave their last full measure of devotion to preserve, we'll have nothing but a return to the freedom of the slave to leave for those unlucky enough to come after us.