Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
—Abraham Lincoln
Only a few — the pure, the apt and the true — never deny freedom to anyone. All others, while they may hope for freedom for themselves, deny this blessing to others in countless ways, sometimes knowingly but often in ignorance. Whoever diminishes your freedom deserves it not for himself! Thanks, Honest Abe!
We can also thank William Harvard for his counsel: “The greatest glory of a free-born people is to transmit that freedom to their children.” Never in all history were a people more blest in being freeborn than Americans. And for at least twelve decades they transmitted this blessing to their children. Then came the slump and for many reasons, ranging from prosperity going to their heads — thinking gone dormant — to government “education.”
Lincoln’s thought reversed would read: When enough of us grant freedom to others we shall have it for ourselves! For, as Edmund Burke wrote: “Depend on it, the lovers of freedom will be free.”
Who amongst us have the capability or the potentiality of advancing an understanding of freedom? Only those individuals who find the freedom cause a happy pursuit. Wrote Saint Augustine about sixteen centuries ago: “Happiness consists in the attainment of our desires and in our having only right desires.” Among the right desires is freedom!
If we are to enjoy the blessings of freedom, there are ever so many ideas and ideals that must grace our understanding and exposition. Among these are (1) the proper role of government and (2) the rights of citizens. According to the late Robert H. Jackson, Justice of the Supreme Court from 1941 to 1945: “It is not the function of government to keep the citizens from error; it is the function of citizens to keep the government from falling into error.”
Wrote the Roman Emperor and philosopher, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121–180), “Our understandings are always liable to error. Nature and certainty are very hard to come at, and infallibility is mere vanity and pretense.” A very large percentage of elected and appointed officials assume they are infallible and, as a consequence, attempt to protect us from our countless errors. The costs of this assumed infallibility? Almost without limit. For one, inflation on the rampage! As the Bard of Avon wrote, “You take my life when you take the means by which I live.”
Now to the important side of this problem. Justice Robert H. Jackson pronounced a great truth: “It is the function of citizens to keep the government from falling into error.” How are we to cope with and overcome the vanity and pretense of nearly 16,000,000 political office holders? They presume powers bordering on magic, in the sense of “producing extraordinary results.”
To repeat what I have written numerous times before: (1) ours is not a numbers problem; (2) it is not a selling but a learning problem.
Every good movement in all history has been in response to an infinitesimal minority. One of many examples: The very few who did the thinking which resulted in The Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Ideas cannot be “sold”; neither can they be thrust into the minds of others. The correct formula? Become so excellent in explaining the freedom way of life that others will seek your tutorship. Become mentors! Excellence begets excellence whatever the endeavor — be it cooking, science, golf, music or whatever. All experience attests to this fact.
The achievement of these aspirations requires extraordinary effort, of a kind and quality which only those who love freedom are happy to expend. This is testimony to the fact that freedom is far from free….
Such old-time phrasings as “the home of the brave and the land of the free” or “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable” have long since been meaningless — mere empty sounds. So, in our time, we search for new ways to explain freedom, even though no one will ever be able to explain it fully. Try to explain Creation! It is impossible. Creative action at the human level borders on this difficulty. One way of phrasing will be apprehended by a few, another phrasing by a few others. Explaining liberty is, indeed, a task now and forever….
Finally, two wise thoughts, the first by Felix Morley: “If people do not possess the capacity to govern themselves, they are inevitably governed by others.” This is an excellent and improved phrasing to describe our present politico-economic holocaust: “great or widespread destruction.”
The second is by Edmund Burke who expressed the same idea two centuries earlier: “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Those of intemperate minds — going to socialistic extremes — lack the capacity to govern themselves. The result? An unholy and tyrannical extreme: governed by governments!
The alternative? Self-government, self-reliance, self-responsibility, self-consciousness. Easy? No! But only those who move in the direction of these intellectual, moral, and spiritual goals — while happy in their pursuit — gain a profound awareness: Freedom is far from free!
This article was published in the December 2021 edition of Future of Freedom.
