Feel Safe or Be Free
It’s the same story told time and time again, the balance between feeling safe and being free and it seems that the wrong side is winning the battle.
The hard truth is that you really cannot have both, quite frankly ‘safety’ is something you can truly not have at all. The debate between safety versus freedom does not boil down to which you would rather have, it is about what you can have versus what you can feel like you have.
Safety is something we all want, even the loudest and most staunch advocates for freedom want to be safe. No serious individual would suggest that freedom means complete and entire anarchy. Albeit this is suggested by people, just not serious folks.
There are restraints on our freedom. As it is commonly stated, my rights end where yours start and surely we should have no problem with this. It sounds reasonable. I can swing my fist wherever and however I please so long as it does not make contact with your nose, the minute it does, I have violated your right not to be hit.
But we freedom advocates have accounted for the uncomfortable nature of a world fraught with freedom. We suggest that one ought to use his freedom to protect himself — Ensure that the proverbial fist hurling toward your proverbial face be stopped in its tracks so as to ensure that the only damage incurred is by the violator, not the soon to be violated.
Freedom and the ideas behind it have had many years of thought put into them. Any situation which you could concoct in your head can likely be solved with freedom.
People are worried about COVID-19, they have the freedom to remain in their homes, to participate in only those activities which allow for them to feel safe, to take whatever precautions they want over themselves, and in many cases, over their children as well.
Freedom accounts for things like pursuing the ideas, dreams, and ambitions that are deeply held within you. If you have a theory that you want to discuss openly, freedom allows you to do it. It allows you to come up with ideas and pursue passions. People might not agree with them, but as long as your passion is not against the basic rights we all believe each other has, you are free to carry on.
The same cannot be said for the ‘pro-safety’ camp, more aptly titled the ‘anti-freedom’ camp. Creating the feeling of safety is all about limiting your freedom and the freedoms of those around you so that everyone can feel safe.
Key word: FEEL.
You will not be safe, but the hope of these ‘anti-freedom’ people is that you think you are.
The ‘anti-freedom’ movement is rooted in the idea that society can weed out those things which make you feel like you are in danger and in doing so, we can form a more perfect society.
Imagine a society where nobody is ever offended, nobody ever dies from causes other than old age, and nobody is ever made to feel lesser than.
Yes, it is almost inarguably a beautiful thought and surely a perfect basis for a children’s television program, but it lacks foresight. Frankly, it lacks hindsight too.
We needn’t go back very far to discuss the risks posed by even attempting to create such a society.
It was only a few years ago when the activists began echoing sentiments suggesting that there is in fact a difference between ‘free speech’ and ‘hate speech.’ These advocates did not just insist that ‘free speech’ was different from ‘hate speech’ though, but that ‘hate speech’ should be banned altogether.
I cannot argue with the fact that it would be nice if nobody ever told me anything that I hated to hear. Of course, as a person who does not have a taste for hearing those words which express hate toward me, why should I not be in favor of bans against ‘hate speech’?
The answer may not surprise you.
What someone considers ‘hate speech’ is just their opinion. This is the basis of the entire problem. Of course a craftier individual than I could concoct a whole bevy of issues involved with the banning of ‘hate speech’. But the basis of the problem is answering the question as to what is hateful.
Maybe now we can decide on certain phrases that are awful and terrible and a rather large group of us could get together and agree it to be so and so it will be.
However, even in saying that, there are very few statements I could think of which all of us could agree upon.
Consider this statement:
“America is the greatest country in the world.”
You, the reader, may read such a statement and agree wholeheartedly. You may have even said this exact same thing before. But go make this statement on a college campus and you will find yourself surrounded by adolescents ‘triggered’ by such horribly offensive remarks.
“America was never great!”
“America is racist!”
“I have never read a history book!”
Maybe not that last comment — though it would not be far from the truth for many anti-Americans, but I digress.
The point should be glaringly obvious, limiting the freedom of what someone can and cannot say based on what is ‘hateful’ is no basis for limiting speech.
To speak is to think and to think is one of the most important things that a population should be encouraged to do. In a 2018 interview with Journalist Cathy Newman, Jordan Peterson is famously quoted telling the British reporter “[b]ecause in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.” in response to her question about why he believes a trans person does not maintain a special right not to be offended.
Discussion and debate in themselves are offensive. It’s uncomfortable, but it is the basis of discovering what is true, something that our society has largely distanced ourselves from valuing.
Safety does not only present itself in terms of conversations about speech — the entire pandemic has been an embodiment of the feeling safe versus being free battle.
In many states citizens lost their freedom to operate their businesses how they wanted, that is if they could even keep their business open, citizens lost their right to leave their homes past certain hours, to wear what they wanted (masks), and the restrictions have continued up until this very moment, despite many of them being ineffective or admittedly arbitrary, or both. A vaccine exists, we know the risks, and the government has not receded at all back to the dark and dirty swamp from which it came. Many Americans are even calling for more government involvement.
But as we have enacted all of these ‘safety’ measures, expanded the governments role to unprecedented levels, the ‘pro-freedom’ camp is less free and the ‘anti-freedom’ camp still feels unsafe. We have successfully appeased nobody though we have obviously erred on the side of less freedom and more ‘safety’ measures.
It does not work. And it will not work.
The government ruins whatever it touches. Absolutely no situation has been improved by the government telling people what to do or how to live their lives.
COVID was a disaster, a complete failure to keep people safe and keep people free. At least people could have been free during this whole ordeal, but us commoners were not even afforded such an opportunity.
It was not as though Nancy Pelosi stopped getting her hair done or Gavin Newsome stopped going to the French Laundry, it was just that all the everyday Americans were limited in what they could do.
Even the people imposing the restrictions on our freedoms did not impose such harsh restrictions on themselves. How telling.
There is no balance between safety and freedom. We either have one or we have none, but it cannot be both.
Whatever you did during the pandemic, what of that could not have been done without the government forcing you to do it?
Whatever speech you do not like to hear, travel in circles where you do not hear it. I am sure most of us already do, though we certainly should not.
There is no way to be truly safe. Risk is just a part of living. At least grant us the privilege to live how we want, that is all we are asking for.
What we need to practice and what we need to display is a bit of empathy for one another. There are things I would rather do without, but my distaste for certain things need not impede your ability to participate in or do those things, grant me a reciprocal understanding and courtesy.
Unfortunately, this plea is just that. Seemingly, the taste for freedom is becoming increasingly more uncommon and the desire to feel safe is more aligned with what people want.
The problem with freedom is that just as you are free to succeed you are free to fail. You are free to suffer from your own poor choices and you are to blame for all that goes wrong.
That does not sit well with people. Knowing that there is nobody to turn to and no finger to be pointed when a plan does not result in the intended or desired outcome. Many feel as though it is far easier to limit your upside if you can also limit your downside.
The American dream encapsulates unlimited possibility, both good and bad.
For an individual who claims responsibility for themselves and recognizes that achieving their desired outcome might come along a route riddled with failures, such a society is appealing and desirable.
But for the individual who dreads the responsibility associated with accountability, the American Dream is a nightmare.
The American Dream embodies individualism. You and you alone can create your own success or your own failure. It should not come as a surprise that people are becoming more and more distanced from such an idea in an era where we blame everything on the amorphous antagonist called ‘society.’
‘Systemic this’ and ‘systemic that’ are the reason that Person A is here and Person B is there. It has nothing to do with their individual decisions, suggesting something so preposterous could get you cancelled!
As our conversations start to blame society, a system, as being the cause of all our individual woes, we have not coincidentally drifted away from our desire for control over our own lives. People are erroneously being led to believe that the society does not work and thus the invocation of overbearing safety measures are requisite for the society to be fixed.
If the narrative was directed toward the self, fixing the self, and bettering the self, the conversation would be about the self. Allocating blame to the self and allowing the self to do what was best for the self would all be included in this sort of discussion.
Rather we do not focus on the self, we focus on the whole.
We as individuals are not flawed, we are told. Society is flawed. The only way to fix society is to make everyone do what the government thinks is best — We have cast away the notion of individual responsibility as if to say, “we tried that, look how bad it turned out, now it’s the government’s turn.”
So this is what we get, a society relying heavily on other individuals to tell all the individuals what to do. A society unwilling to take responsibility and dead set on upheaving traditional notions of freedom for the sole purpose of making themselves feel like they are safe.
A society rejecting the notions of individualism while asking a limited group of individuals how we should lead our lives. At least in this way we are individually and collectively doomed for failure.
Never mind limiting the upside to limit the downside, we have done away with the upside altogether as we regress, taking away our own rights that our forefathers fought so zealously to attain. Shameful.
