I am writing again on the subject of liberty as opposed to the general concept of freedom. I feel the importance of realizing the difference between the two, and the primary, essential nature of liberty, cannot be overstated. Without the existence of liberty in our lives, any other freedom is conditional upon being allowed by the agreement of our oppressors. How can I say this? Because if we do not have liberty we are, by definition, oppressed. And if we are oppressed politically, economically, or militarily, we do not have liberty.
Some might consider this too fine a point, but it really isn’t. In fact, it is a monumental issue when we really get into the details of it. In the preambles to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, the Founders made it clear that “liberty” was a primary value that they sought to secure in the new nation. They do not write that they were seeking “freedom”, if they had meant freedom they would have written “freedom”. They knew about freedom. But they didn’t, they wrote that they were seeking to “…secure the blessings of liberty…”
What is the difference between liberty and freedom? Liberty is a specific type of freedom. It is the freedom from unjust oppression. The type of unjust oppression which many of the Founders, or their parents, had experienced at the hands of the monarchs, the aristocracy in Britain and which was still be waged upon the colonists in the land that would become the United States of America.
There is a place where liberty and freedom become mutually exclusive. That is when someone wants to claim the freedom to infringe upon the liberty of others. In other words, they seek to exercise some sort of political, religious, military or economic power, which they have used their freedom of some sort to acquire, to oppress another’s ability to reasonably engage in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Such actions of oppressing other, vulnerable, people seem to be a very common occurrence in the world when some individual(s) or group(s) are allowed to acquire an inordinate amount of political or military power or economic wealth.
The inherent conflict with the stated intentions of the Founders can be made to appear non-existent when people are led to conflate liberty with freedom. Redefining longstanding, traditional terminology seems to be a common ploy in the efforts by special interests to unjustly impose their agendas upon others. Two other recent examples are the redefining of “pandemic” and “vaccine”.
We in the United States are fortunate that the Founders of this nation cared about liberty as a primary value. We do not honor them, or ourselves, when we allow liberty to be redefined and abused in order to allow some to pursue their overly self-serving dreams of wealth and power. All too often this is defended in the United States by the phrase “It’s a free country.”
But if we can recapture, rekindle the desire for liberty for all so clearly expressed by our nation’s Founders. If we can thoughtfully work to make it a reality, with thoughtful expression and thoughtful restraint we can achieve the great nation that the Founders dreamed of and fought for. But not if we allow a false allegiance to unbridled freedom lead us down the path of our own worst impulses.
This essay is dealing exclusively with the role that the importance of liberty played in the birth of the United States. The fact that it was a primary value within the hearts and minds of the Founders of this country, does not in any way indicate that I do not know that many other people in other countries have also dreamed of, worked and fought for, liberty in their nations. Liberty is not something that one people or nation can hold a franchise on. In fact, it is only when many people around the world can realize a fair and just existence of liberty within their lives and their nations that such liberty may be truly secure for any of us.
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