Toxic Liberty
When the quest for individual freedom turns into tyranny
This past Saturday, Los Angeles County re-instituted an indoor mask mandate. Promptly, the City of Santa Monica echoed that requirement in a community Facebook post, noting that new COVID cases have spiked recently, particularly among the unvaccinated. When I looked at the comments for this post, I already knew what I would find.
For those who believe that a place like Santa Monica exemplifies the Left Coast bleeding-heart lifestyle, I offer an individual whom I will call WN (for Worst Neighbor). Since the quarantine began over a year ago, WN has added a comment on nearly every Santa Monica Facebook post, boldly proclaiming his independence from any form of coercion. Sure enough, he had commented on this newest post, almost as soon as it went up. “I am not vaccinated,” WN wrote, “and I will refuse to wear a mask. Good luck enforcing it.” Later he added, “What other people do is their problem.”
I can’t guess exactly what the motivation is of people like WN, whether it’s a misreading of Thoreau or a correct reading of Ayn Rand, but they consistently elevate their own sense of individual freedom to the point that it becomes not just separated from the community in which they live, but actively opposed to it. Patrick Henry’s famous cry “Give me liberty or give me death!” has metastasized into “Give me liberty and @#$% you.”
TINSTAAUR
There is no such thing as an unlimited right.
I’ll repeat that, because it’s crucial. There is no such thing as an unlimited right. Right to life, right to free speech, right to liberty, right to own guns, none of these is unlimited, boundary-less. If they were, they would quickly become tyrannical. Here’s why.
Free Speech. The most common example of a limitation on individual rights is that you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater. Because that very likely leads to a sudden surge of panic, which leads to people trampling each other in a dash for the exits. In short, you have the freedom to say whatever you like, but not to the extent that it might lead to someone else’s injury or death.
Right to Life. It is not true that everyone has a sacrosanct right to life. Murderers on death row will be extinguished by the state on a fixed date. Obviously these are people who harmed others, so we see again that this exception is produced by a concern for the well-being of the larger community. But what about innocent family members of terrorism suspects, blown to bits in a drone attack? Their only crime is their proximity to criminals, but they’re considered collateral damage, a few lives sacrificed to save countless more. Sometimes the well-being of society exacts a heavy toll.
Right to Liberty. When someone commits a crime, an action against others, an offense against the community, we put them in prison. For felonies we even take away their right to vote. Liberty, curtailed.
Right to Property. Reverence for private property is baked into any capitalist system, yet this right too is subject to frequent limitations. TSA agents at the airport will impound that nail file you accidentally threw into your bag. DEA agents will impound your car, your house, your bank accounts if you’re convicted of drug offenses. If your home is on the U.S. border with Mexico, the federal government might declare eminent domain and seize your property so they can build a wall there. Community rights > individual rights.
Even the Right to Bear Arms is Restricted
A hypothetical: if Jeff Bezos decided he wanted to buy a working aircraft carrier, complete with missile-tipped fighter planes, should he be allowed to? Or a nuclear submarine? How about your crazy neighbor who decides he wants a tank? Your nephew who’s obsessed with flame throwers? These are, clearly, weapons of war that could cause rapid, enormous damage to the community if they were let loose. Community rights, once again, should supersede individual rights.
Which is exactly why I was so surprised to find that here in the United States, it is legal in 48 states to own a working flame thrower — so long as you use a gaseous fuel like propane. The gel used in military-grade flamethrowers, which sticks to a person and burns and burns, is still, thankfully, beyond the pale. You can own a tank, too, although the gun on the tank falls under the regulations and requirements of the National Firearms Act. But if you’ve got the cash (a lot of cash) and are willing to endure the hassle (a lot of that, too), apparently you could buy a working, shooting, used tank.
Regardless, the larger point still stands: the right to own even these kinds of weapons is restricted, and decidedly not unlimited.
Anti-Maskers: WTF?
All the limitations listed above (there are many, many more) are commonly accepted. Why, then, did the nation’s health advisories during the pandemic meet with such hostility, with so many outraged cries that the government was impeding people’s rights? The principle underlying all masking requirements is exactly the same we’ve seen before: the danger of community spread is so large that certain individual liberties must take a back seat to the greater good of the whole, on a temporary basis. And yet, outrage from Worst Neighbor and all his freedom-loving cohort.
Perhaps it’s because this is a new limitation, we haven’t grown up with it, it hasn’t been around all our lives. The government came along and said “Sorry, but…” and then insisted that you do something you’d rather not do, something that a couple months earlier wasn’t a problem. Was your liberty more infringed in 2020 than it was in 2019? Yes it was, but so what? This limitation on your liberty is no different from any of the other restrictions discussed above, and it won’t last forever. Get over yourself.
When a Right Becomes Tyranny
Let’s imagine for a moment a world in which a right is in fact unlimited. In a Second Amendment context, let’s again ponder a world in which everyone has an unlimited right to bear arms. Any sort of arms they want. So what’s to stop an addled billionaire from buying a nuclear warhead and firing it at Pyongyang, thinking they’re going to “solve” the Korea problem? Then of course the surviving North Korean generals would carpet-bomb Seoul and you would have a brand-new conflagration on the Korean peninsula.
It’s an extreme example but it gets the point across. With an unlimited right — any unlimited right — then any individual’s resources (i.e., their available cash) become the only limitation on the kind of power they can assert. A random guy in the suburbs might start a podcast and say incendiary things, with some limited influence, but his reach will be constrained by his financial ability to extend his voice to a larger audience. But a billionaire with TV stations in 32 cities, unshackled by any limitations on speech, could say absolutely anything, could induce a new attack on the U.S. Capitol, with no fear of consequences. There would be a limitless link between money and power, because the amount of money at your disposal would become the only hindrance on your ability to assert your own power.
That’s why there’s no such thing as an unlimited right; it’s why there must never be an unlimited right.
Your Right vs. My Right
Another hypothetical, though it’s based on a real story: an open-carry advocate walks into a Subway store with an AK slung over his shoulder. The other patrons, unable to tell the difference between a gun nut and a nut with a gun, high-tail it from the establishment. So now the innocent franchisee-owner of the store is out several sales because of the open-carry advocate’s insistence on his right to carry a weapon in public.
The open-carry movement is an attempt to expand Second Amendment rights beyond the laws and norms currently in place. It posits the notion that the best deterrent to violence is the open threat of violence in return, or, to put it another way, that the solution to guns is more guns.
The problem comes when someone’s sense of his or her right to do something curdles into their entitlement to do that thing. There are natural rights, certainly, inherent to being born human. But the question that should follow, then, is: why is your freedom, your right, better or more important than someone else’s? “Nature makes none masters, none slaves,” wrote the Scottish philosopher Frances Hutcheson.
But the guy in the Subway store with the rifle slung over his shoulder is essentially saying that his right to bear arms is more important than the shop owner’s right to earn a living. His sense of entitlement to his right has overshadowed his obligation to other members of his community. This may be why so many are so zealously devoted to their right to bear arms: having already succumbed to the perilous thought that their right is greater than someone else’s, now they are firmly in the “might makes right” mindset, and the weapon over their shoulder proves that they are more right than the shop owner.
If a fellow citizen were to ask them to please put away their weapon, what is the likeliest response? “Make me.”
Who Slides Down the Slippery Slope?
The most stringent assertions of individual rights always seem to come at someone else’s expense. Those people like Worst Neighbor who are unwilling to get a COVID vaccination, for whatever reason, assert their own right to abstain by passing the risk on to others in their community. It’s no surprise that virologists are admitting the U.S. may be unable to reach herd immunity. Instead we will likely have to endure years of booster shots in the hope of staving off new variants, and avoiding another calamitous outbreak.
All these defenders of their own liberty (but not anyone else’s) will use a variation of the same phrase when someone suggests that they find a way to relax their own liberty a smidge in order to leave room for someone else’s liberty. They will talk about the slippery slope. They assert (usually loudly) that if you allow a right to be curtailed, even by the smallest degree, you will set foot on a slippery slope that will surely lead one day to the complete demolishment of that right. The relentless assertion of their own individual freedom, they claim, is the only way to defend freedom for everyone.
But remember, there is no such thing as an unlimited right. For you to remain secure on high ground, well above the slippery slope, someone else, like the Subway shop owner in the example above, is sent tumbling down it. That’s not liberty, it’s tyranny. “Liberty” doesn’t have any real meaning anymore, it’s just the word you use to feel better about the people you’re shoving over the edge.
The ultimate example of this slippery slope sacrifice is Sandy Hook. All those children, lying at the bottom of the slope, while the 2A zealots stand above the fray, looking down and, it would seem, feeling nothing at all.
The Forgotten Obligation
It’s about maturity, in the end. Childhood is about the self, adulthood is about the self within a community. Ideally, that community is larger than just your family and your friends and your co-workers, it also includes the people you’ve never met and the people on the other side of the continent who you probably never will meet. As Jimmy Stewart said in the middle of his fictional filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, “I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn’t have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness — and a little looking out for the other fella, too.”
But the child’s-eye view of adulthood that currently corrupts our politics has no kindness in it, no looking out for anyone else, it’s a wild west, rootin’-tootin’-sixgun-shootin’ version of individual liberty defended at the point of a pistol with no need to ever concern oneself with complexity or competing points of view. Might makes right. Give me liberty or I’ll give you death.
Unlike the quality of mercy, which as Shakespeare assured us “is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,” liberties do not simply radiate from some kind of freedom-sun. To revel in the exhilaration of flight you must first know, deep in your bones so you can never forget, the necessity of gravity. Otherwise it’s just you up there, all alone, blocking the sun while your shadow falls on the rest of us.
