Do you ever ask: “What is freedom?”
Independence Day in “the land of the free” is the most appropriate day to reflect on the ideas of freedom and liberty.
If the United States of America is anything, it is essentially the first nation in history founded on an explicit philosophical idea: that the individual has a right to freedom—the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Americans and others have different conceptions of freedom and liberty, in the political sense; some are correct; others approximately right; still others incorrect, woefully wrong or their opposite.
Here is my best understanding of political freedom: each individual has a right to act on his or her own judgment without others forcing them to do otherwise, and their actions don't violate the individual rights of others. That means the individual has a right to act on how he or she sees fit, whether their judgment and actions prove self-beneficial or self-destructive, moral or immoral—so long as they don’t initiate some form of coercion on others.
Freedom, in essence, is the ability to think and act in a social context without the imposition of force from others, while recognizing that this individual right applies equally to his or her fellow citizens.
In reality, this means that others and particularly the government – the politicians and bureaucrats whose sole job is to uphold and protect individual rights – cannot dictate to individuals what to do with their body or property, where they can live, which god they can worship or not believe in, which ideas they can adopt and speak openly about, which adults they can marry, what jobs they may hold, whom they must give their money to, and a whole constellation of other choices and actions they need to pursue their best lives and flourish or not.
Freedom requires that the (adult) individual is free to think and act in defiance of the dictates of his or her parents, relatives and neighbors; kings and queens; popes and rabbis and imams; government bureaucrats and dictators, and anyone else. Freedom means that no one, neither a petty criminal nor a politician, has a right to defraud, steal from, break a contract with, assault, enslave, rape or murder him or her—beacause all of these actions and their many varients are the use of force against him or her.
America’s founding, as brilliant and unprecedented as it was in world history, had its flaws and contradictions, the preservation of slavery the most egregious among them. But it was because America’s founding fathers essentially established a Constitutional Republic based on individual rights – which could be and eventually were applied universally – that such evils as the coercion of slavery were later abolished (and that helped spawn the first abolition movement in a world where slavery existed from time immemorial).
All of this is why I’m so happy that I was born in and have chosen to remain in America (for now), despite that so many don’t understand nor agree with my conception of freedom and violate it routinely. I don’t celebrate America’s birthday nor think the United States is the greatest nation in history because I was simply born here, nor because it’s “my country, right or wrong.” Instead, I celebrate America because it was the first nation, however imperfect, that finally established the philosophical foundations on which men and women need to live their best lives, according to their nature as human beings. That's what makes it the greatest.
As I like to analogize, freedom is like oxygen, the more there is, the better you can breathe and live; the more it is restricted, the more you are living a lesser life and closer to death.
Freedom is freedom from the clutches of force.
The windpipes must be opened wide.
Happy Birthday, America!