A Nation of Men

We often fuss too much about rights, and not enough about responsibilities. This seems rather strange, considering that our founding fathers put the weight of their democratic experiment on the shoulders of the people living under it. "The people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty," as Jefferson once said. For one thing, this helps highlight a drastic difference between our modern conception of freedom and the conception used by our founding fathers, who were much closer to the ancient and medieval philosophers in their assessment of freedom and liberty. For them, freedom is not simply the elimination of external constraints. Freedom is also something internal, and something that must be worked at.

When looked at properly, we often do think this way. Very few would say that a drug addict is completely free. He is, in fact, enslaved by his own desires and passions, in particular, his desire for the drug. For some reason, however, we do not apply this insight to our politics. A nation of people enslaved to their passions is not a free nation, whether the government lets allows or blocks their attempt to get what they want. But we do not see it that way. The only requirement we place on freedom is that the government get out of the way of whatever we want. This creates a government not with firm and just leadership, but a government who is like a doting mother so paranoid that she spends most of her energy trying to make sure her children don't have to face the consequences of their actions. Ironically, the doting mother can become as oppressive and tyrannical as the controlling father. This may seem all too familiar to those who remember the Bush and Obama bail-outs, and our government's insistence not to face any consequences or lay down any responsibility for our massive debt.

It seems that we do not have a government in America today, we have a paranoid babysitter. But we aren't babies, and we don't need a sitter. Freedom is not something granted from above. It is our responsibility, and it is something we must cultivate in our own hearts first. We should be a nation of men and women, and a nation of fathers and mothers. Only then will we truly be free.