We Demand Freedoms We Have Never Weighed

The modern citizen asks for freedom about almost everything. To buy, to say, to carry, to consume, to drive, to build, to refuse. Whatever the question, the reflexive position is that people should be free to choose, and the reflexive villain is whoever proposes otherwise.

I want to suggest that most of these demands are not really about the freedoms in question, and that we have never actually asked ourselves whether we want them.

Why We Ask

Two facts about our situation produce the reflex, and both of them are true.

The first is that the government is, in fact, in the business of curtailing our freedoms. Not always maliciously, but structurally: every institution grows by taking on more, and the state is the largest institution. A citizen who has watched this happen for a lifetime learns to resist every encroachment on principle, because the alternative is to be encroached upon indefinitely.

The second is that the wealthy already have the freedoms the rest of us are told we cannot have. The law forbids a thing, and the rich do it anyway, through a company, a jurisdiction, a lawyer, or a fine they can afford. So the restriction is seen for what it is, a restriction on people who cannot buy their way around it, and the demand for freedom becomes a demand for equal treatment dressed as a demand for liberty.

Both of these make the demand for freedom a form of revolt, and it is expressed as one: in popular culture, in the tone of political argument, in the automatic sympathy for whoever is being told no. The revolt is justified. But a revolt is not a considered position, and it prevents us from forming one.

The Question Nobody Asks

Here is what the revolt keeps us from noticing: freedoms have social consequences, and one person's freedom is regularly another person's burden.

The freedom to drive a large car is a burden on everyone who breathes the air and on everyone in a smaller car. The freedom to build anything on your land is a burden on your neighbours' light and their property's value. The freedom to say anything is a burden on the people said about. The freedom to refuse a vaccine is a burden on the people you infect. The freedom to accumulate without limit is a burden on everyone whose options narrow as yours widen.

None of this means the freedoms should be denied. It means they should be weighed, and weighing is exactly what we do not do. We have not begun, as a society, to talk about the balance of freedoms: which ones we want, at what cost to whom, and where one person's latitude should stop because it has become another's constraint. The conversation does not happen because the reflex forecloses it. Propose that a freedom be weighed and you have joined the encroachers.

Why the Conversation Cannot Start

I do not think this is only a failure of public maturity. The structure of decision-making prevents it.

Under representation, a small group decides. That group has an interest in how the debate about freedom is conducted, and its interest is in keeping the debate emotional.

Consider what an emotional debate does for a minority in power. It divides the public into camps that hate each other, and camps deliver votes. It keeps attention on symbols rather than on the actual distribution of costs and benefits, which is where the minority's advantage lies. It produces no resolution, so the same question can be fought over at every election, indefinitely. An emotional argument about freedom is not a failure of the system. It is the system's product, because the people who run it gain from the emotion and lose from the understanding.

So the introspection a society would need, the sober weighing of who bears what for whose latitude, cannot begin while a minority sets the terms. The minority has everything to gain from the fight and nothing to gain from its conclusion.

What Would Have to Change

For the conversation to happen, the people bearing the consequences of a freedom would have to be the people deciding on it, and their decision would have to stick.

That is a description of direct democracy, and I think this is one of its less obvious advantages. When the public decides a question about freedom directly, three things happen that do not happen otherwise. The issue is discussed on its merits, because there is no candidate to attach it to. A decision is reached, rather than deferred to the next election. And the losing side accepts it, because it lost to its fellow citizens rather than to a government it suspects of serving someone else.

Acceptance is the part that matters most. A freedom restricted by a legislature is a grievance; the same freedom restricted by a referendum is a settled question. The difference is not in the restriction. It is in who did the restricting.

The Freedoms We Would Choose

I suspect that a society which actually weighed its freedoms would keep most of them and give up a few, and that the few it gave up would surprise the people who currently fight hardest to keep them. I also suspect it would discover freedoms it does not have and has never demanded, because the current fight has kept its attention elsewhere.

But I do not know, and neither does anyone else, because the weighing has never been done. We are defending a list of freedoms we did not compile, against a government we do not trust, on behalf of a wealthy class that already has them. That is not liberty. It is the noise a society makes when it has not been allowed to decide.