THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

ONE WAY TO END FREEDOM IS TO TRIVIALIZE IT | 2003-05-10

O' Reilly and all the respectable conservatives love to bear their chests and shout about how much they love Freedom.

A person who loves freedom would talk about the fact that all Communist countries had to kill people who tried to escape, while we have to keep them out. Conservatives never mention the Communist border guards and they only apologize for our need to patrol our own borders.

They say our border guard is a regrettable necessity rather than something to be proud of. In other words, the fact that we are a country everybody wants to live and people want to escape from Communist countries means nothing to respectable conservatives. That has nothing to do with the respectable conservatives' idea of Freedom.

So what is this so-called Freedom these respectable conservatives are so big on?

Conservatives are for any freedom that doesn't seriously offend liberals.

Liberals and respectable conservatives trivialize the idea that freedom is a bunch of "ordinary" people doing what they want and getting what they want.

So O'Reilly says that the fact that white students want a separate prom doesn't mean a thing.

Real freedom is doing what you want to do. It does not have to call itself A Class Struggle or a True Democracy or True Diversity or anything else.

If you make your society a Class Struggle you build walls to keep real people in, what conservatives call "ordinary people," in. The argument that keeps those walls up is that the Class Struggle is more important than just letting people do what they want to do.

In the name of their capitalized Freedom they trivialize real freedom.

Notice that I capitalize O'Reilly's idea of Freedom. It is nothing like real freedom. Real freedom means doing what you want to do.

Real freedom can only be limited on a case-by-case basis. There is no easy-to-use general recipe that will make a free society.

Freedom does not mean the right to do anything that does not offend others. As a matter of fact, real freedom means nothing if it does not offend and inconvenience others. Communists offer you any freedom that they feel does not hurt others. So do Nazis.

Clichés will not give you freedom. If all you had to do to have freedom was say, "You have the right to do anything that doesn't bother other people," freedom would be as easy as liberals think it is. The third world could be free without any painful thinking on the part of voters.

But freedom is a case by case thing, a matter of judgment. It means nothing if you have no right to do anything that others don't like.

Freedom is a matter of judgment. That is why a country that is full of third world voters cannot be free.

LINK: See April 7, 2001 - CALIFORNIA BROWNOUT

Freedom is a matter of judgment. That is why a nation run by social scientists and education majors cannot be free.