The Problem with Liberty

Many in America would say that we have more liberty granted us than any other nation in the world. Many would counter that we have in fact no meaningful liberty and never have. This is not the problem with liberty. This is the problem with rationalizing prejudice. The problem with liberty is more simple.

Liberty runs directly contrary to control. More liberty means less control, more control means less liberty. Control brings with it security, liberty offers peace. Peace doesn't come with security, and security doesn't come with peace. One who was an advocate of peace might conclude that the problem with liberty is thus fear.

That is not my conclusion. Fear is a natural side-effect of self-reliance, which itself is essential to liberty. The human race is messy business, and to believe differently is unrealistic and perhaps foolish.

Americans have, with eyes wide open, suspended liberty when a percieved threat to personal safety loomed. We interned Germans in WWI and Japanese in WWII, we allowed McCarthyism because of our communist scare, and the CIA gained an invasive power that never would have been allowed without the threat of total (nuclear) annihilation. These were conscious, deliberate suspensions. In hindsight, we can decry the short-sighted aspects of these decisions, and note the infamous character of the politicians involved. But we cannot say we would not do it again if we felt a threat to our collective survival.

Again, examples such as these are not the problem with liberty. They are the problem with demagogues, with the nature of political power and its correlation to propaganda. The problem with liberty is more simple.

The problem with liberty is that it requires tolerance. I've been to the four corners of America, and I've met very few who were self-reliant and possessed tolerance. Tolerance is dangerous here. To say nothing more than that one is tolererant of those interested in Communism would have had serious consequences in the '50s; it would have made one a sympathizer. Tolerance, for those of you who know our dominant religion, is the 'lukewarm' position which God spews from his mouth. Even my generation, by all accounts a liberal generation with extensive claims to tolerance, have no tolerance for those who are themselves intolerant. In America, this means just about everybody.

At the very least, tolerance will never win a debate.

But liberty without tolerance is an odd kind of liberty. It is the liberty of the powerful, who have always, in every political system - including despotism and theocracy - possessed it anyway. It is the fascade of liberty; liberty today is found in public relations campaigns, not in the homes of American citizens. A citizen may believe he has liberty, until his neighbors turn against him. Then he will find that he should have done better with his PR.

Today, intolerance is the most striking feature of our culture. In every city, township and commune there is religious intolerance, sexual intolerance, ideological intolerance, racial intolerance, lifestyle intolerance, and/or economic intolerance.

You want to speak of liberty? More power to you. But fair warning: if you ever run afoul of any of the possible forms of intolerance in this country, you will not be spared by our laws, our courts, our judges, our jurors, our businesses, our media, our homeowners associations, the Federal government or anyone else you think should protect you. That is the status of liberty.

For my part, I'll be talking much more about tolerance in the coming tripe...

April 7, 1999