Freedom is man’s natural state, and its foundation is a concept commonly referred to as natural law. The underlying premise of natural law is that every individual owns his own life and therefore has the right to do whatever he desires with that life, so long as he does not forcibly interfere with the lives of others.

Everyone has an equal and absolute right to sovereignty over his own body, his own property, and his own life, and to pursue his own happiness in any way that he chooses.
 

No one has the authority to grant rights to anyone else, because human beings already possess all natural rights at birth. These rights include both personal and economic freedoms, and the only way they can be lost is if someone takes them away by force. The only right that an individual does not naturally possess is the right to violate someone else’s liberty.

It logically follows, then, that people’s lives and actions are their own responsibility, and not by even the broadest interpretation of any country’s constitution are they the responsibility of government or “society.” As such, the primary moral justification for the existence of government is to protect its citizens from aggression, both domestic and foreign.

Though most people have strong beliefs about one or more causes, such beliefs represent nothing more than personal opinions, and are therefore morally inferior to individual liberty. In a truly free society, liberty must be given a higher priority than all other objectives, including any and all causes that certain people may deem to be noble.

The reality is that to the extent people are free to pursue their goals, their results will be unequal. The more government and society try to intervene in human affairs in an effort to equalize results, the less freedom people have.

Freedom is not about government-enforced security and equality. On the contrary, freedom is about insecurity and inequality. In the words of the great historians Will and Ariel Durant, “Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”

So the price of freedom is not only eternal vigilance, but also self-responsibility. And, make no mistake about it, self-responsibility means that no one has a right to anything other than what others are willing to give him, without authoritarian interference, in exchange for his products or services. Unfortunately, there are two realities that play havoc with the idealistic concept of freedom.

Terrorism

The first reality is that many individuals insist on having freedom on their terms, which, as noted above, usually translates into a warped, often childish, notion of equality among people. The end result of those who preach about “the good of society” and “the public welfare” is almost always the same: repression of individual freedom.

Nonetheless, many people believe they should be free to violate the liberty of others. In other words, when they espouse freedom, what they are really referring to is their freedom. And to achieve their idea of freedom requires that they be free to do whatever they desire with other people’s lives.

In the new millennium, this long-standing problem of “political terrorism” — often operating under the euphemistic banner of “political-action group” — has been compounded by the threat of foreign terrorism. Perhaps the one good thing that came out of the surfacing of foreign terrorists on domestic soil is that it made citizens of Western countries recognize that bringing liberty violators to justice after the fact is too late. If an individual is rational, and values human life, he is forced to conclude that protecting citizens to the maximum extent possible and maintaining a utopian society where civil liberties are sacrosanct are conflicting objectives.

Certitudes

The second reality is the importance of certitudes in a civilized society. Civilization cannot exist without a generally accepted code of conduct. I use the term generally accepted, because life — notwithstanding what many would like to believe — is not always black and white.

Purist libertarianism works beautifully in theory, but not in an upside-down world drowning in a sea of uncivilized behavior. The reality is that the closest we can come to perfection on this planet is to practice something I like to refer to as civilized libertarianism (as opposed to civil libertarianism). While making it a policy to err on the side of freedom, one must also strive to be pragmatic and work within the generally accepted framework of the civilization of which he is a part.

Civility is one of the things that most distinguishes the human race from the animal kingdom. Our desire for civility must be second only to our love of freedom. Unfortunately, since the hippie protests of the sixties, Western culture has deteriorated into a cesspool of anything-goes, take-this-job-and-shove-it antisocial dropouts. There is a stunning disrespect for anything that smacks of mainstream, and a seeming hatred for civilization itself.

In truth, however, what young people crave are certitudes. They want to know that there are limits to acceptable behavior, both in the eyes of their parents and society as a whole. They don’t want to hear the cop-out that it’s all in the eyes of the beholder.

They want to know that aggression will always be punished. They want to know that they will be rewarded not on the basis of ethnicity, but on merit. They want, and need, certitudes.

Purist libertarians argue that a totally free society can exist only in an atmosphere of anarchy, but this notion conflicts with the reality that civilization cannot exist without a generally accepted code of conduct.

When certitudes cease to exist, confusion takes hold, and confusion and frustration are natural bedfellows. Together they lead to fear, fear of the unknowns that could fill the vacancies left by certitudes.

The results are alienated kids who shoot their classmates — or leave home at sixteen and throw away their lives fighting for some half-baked cause in a third-world country.

Ironically, the worst long-term effect of a society without certitudes is that, in the wake of chaos, someone ultimately will come along and force order upon it. It’s an environment that is ripe for dictatorship.

Better for parents to start a grass-roots movement back toward a framework of reasonable certitudes than to leave the job to an unknown extremist down the road. When certitudes vanish, the disappearance of liberty cannot be far behind.

The Delicate Balance

The great paradox of freedom, then, is that in order to prevent someone with a distorted notion of freedom from trampling on the freedom of others, and to prevent antisocial behavior from undermining the certitudes of Western civilization, to one extent or another freedom must be restricted.

Though this flies in the face of unadulterated libertarianism, the realities of our modern-day world make such a restriction a necessity.

At a minimum, pragmatism dictates that people must live within the generally agreed-upon framework of the civilization of which they are a part. In the case of Western civilization, that framework includes such virtues as self-responsibility, respect for the property of others, hard work, honesty, loyalty, proper hygiene and dress, temperance, civility, tolerance, persistence, thriftiness, planning for the future, self-discipline, a stable economic system, respect for elders, and reverence for the family unit.

But perhaps the most glaring trademark of Eurocentric culture is nonviolence. In contrast to most societies throughout the world, where violence is ingrained in the culture, Western society is, above all, civilized.

Western culture is, in fact, the most civilized way of life the world has ever known, and nonviolence is its centerpiece. While it is true that Western countries are not perfect — that they are hypocritical, harbor political systems that routinely violate both property and civil rights, and are sometimes guilty of committing aggression against other nations — they are head and shoulders above all other civilizations when it comes to nonviolence.

Thus, while liberty should always be our number-one objective, reality dictates that we should be ever vigilant about preserving our cherished Eurocentric way of life, even if it means sacrificing to some degree our purist libertarian beliefs.

To one extent or another, the freedom of those who are either intent on violating the freedom of others or determined to destroy the fabric of Western Civilization must be curtailed.

It is a delicate balancing act, to be sure, and one that needs to be closely and continuously monitored by rational, intelligent, civilized adults who extol the virtues of freedom.