The War for Freedom is Eternal

A re-post (and reminder) from last year.

Photo by J. Amill Santiago on Unsplash

Life has interrupted the regular writing flow (and I plan to address why in a future post) but I did want to post something on July 4th. I started writing something, but it dawned on me I had already written everything I was trying to say… last year. I went and looked at the post, and yep, this was basically it.

So, as a refresher, or in case you missed it last time around…

The War for Freedom is Eternal

There is not, nor will there ever be, a utopia of freedom. It’s an eternal struggle, and one we should constantly undertake.

by James Edward Taylor

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I tend toward optimism, but I’m not so optimistic to believe something like “Freedom will always win in the end.”

It’s not inevitable.

There could be centuries of Dark Ages before humans decide they’ve had enough tyranny to fight for freedom again.

I don’t have centuries to wait for the next tidal wave of freedom sentiment. You don’t either. Nor do I wish to surrender future generations to such a fate.

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” goes the quote (usually attributed to Thomas Jefferson.)

The reason it requires eternal vigilance is that there will always be some segment of humans that wish to control others, either for their own gain, or out of a misguided sense of righteousness.

This, unfortunately, seems baked into the DNA of the species.

This means that there is no point at which the fight for freedom will be “finished”.

Constant vigilance, forever.

Two years ago, we got caught napping.

That’s why we found ourselves in a nearly global prison planet. And why we’ve been fighting to get back out of it ever since.

The impulse to power is ubiquitous, and we forgot that. We ignored the early warning signs that some big, bad, powerful people had some big, bad, powerful plans for us, and we let them carry those plans out.

But I believe the impulse to freedom is also baked into our DNA.

Some segment of us are repelled by the tyrannical impulse in others, and will always be so.

Call it a flaw in the species, but we tend to only value a thing when it is threatened. It mobilizes us, turns the docile in us into the ferocious.

The nefarious plans awakened a ferocious impulse for freedom in us.

It is said that without the darkness you would never truly know the light, and this has never been more apparent to me. In a way, I am thankful for this massive, blatant shift towards tyranny in the world, because it has made me aware of the heroism and beauty of some people that I otherwise would never have known. True freedom fighters, with whom I feel a love and kinship.

And this is what gives me optimism: though the would-be-tyrants could make life miserable for a long, long time, they will never truly eradicate the idea of freedom. They will only ever awaken it.

Think about it. If you were tyrant-in-chief of the planet, how would you eradicate the idea? How does history tell you this will play out?

First, freedom fighters will go underground.  They will have to be found, rounded up, and imprisoned, put in work camps, exiled, or executed. You will have to make a lot of prisons and bullets. But you will never be able to make enough to eradicate the idea of freedom. In fact, for every punishment meted out, every bullet fired, you will likely strengthen the idea of freedom in someone’s mind.

No two human beings agree on everything, so there will be inevitable disagreements and clashes and in-fighting within the regime. There will have to be loyalty tests, and purges, and the regime will inevitably swap hands a few times. If you somehow survive the purges, the in-fighting, and the assassination attempts, you will have to constantly look over your shoulder for the next up-and-comer who sees things differently, and probably isolate yourself in some kind of impenetrable, heavily guarded underground lair. Meanwhile, all the regime switches and purges will cause much doubt and questioning, and again, ideas about how life might be better without the regime at all.

Some new society will spring up which refuses to cede control to the global regime. You will have to go to war with that new power, and spend resources and blood to fight it. This refusal to bend to totalitarian power will cause people to wonder if the refusers are right.

You will have to constantly control information, and prevent your populace from questioning anything, or communicating with one another, or voicing their disapproval of your policies, or learning the truth about anything. This will require not only rigorous censorship, and actively spying on your own citizenry, but also putting out a near constant stream of propaganda as an alternative to all the independent thinking that might be going on. Again, since you can’t stop humans from having ideas, you will inevitably have to fill your prisons and concentration camps and gulags, or stage more executions—all of which will just cause more questioning.

The totalitarian dream/nightmare will eventually collapse under its own inability to control every minute detail.

The freedom-fighting armies will roll their tanks down your streets toward your bunker, and a bullet from your own gun, or from one of your rivals, will pass through your brain.

Maybe, in that moment right before the bullet does humanity a favor, you will have a brief time to wonder where it all went wrong.

I’ll save you the trouble: it went wrong when you decided to impose your vision of utopia on everyone else.

The moment you decided you knew better, and that human life was going to be wondrous under your guidance, with statues and pictures of you standing two hundred feet high, and throngs of people cheering your wisdom and beneficence.

That moment led to your downfall.

This has never not happened.

It happens because your impulse to control others awakens freedom-consciousness in them.

This is inevitable.

So, rather than try to impose this awful, impossible nightmare on the world, can we skip to the part of history where we realize it is a terrible idea and start arguing for, and upholding, individual rights and liberties again? Can we skip to the part of history where we realize that our rights are sacrosanct for a reason, not because they are written on a piece of paper, but because life becomes nasty and brutish and miserable when they are violated, and that we possess them as a natural right, regardless of any supposed “emergency” invented or real, and regardless of the designs of the would-be-tyrants in our midst?

There has always been the impulse to control others. There always will be.

This is why each new generation must argue for freedom anew.

The good news is that each new generation need not discover freedom anew.

Freedom sentiment is all around us. The sheer number of people who have risen to the call against tyranny over the last two years is staggering. People have instinctively reacted. Books, articles, videos and songs have poured out of us, as though we were desperately echo-locating to find each other in the dark. And despite the attempts to cloak us in darkness, we found each other. We have laughed, shouted, taken to the streets, played, worshipped, and gathered (despite prohibitions on gathering). We have forged human connections, despite being sold the inhuman idea of living “together apart” in self-made prison cells.

Commit all the censorship and burn all the books you want. It is very hard to eliminate an idea.

The genie is out of the bottle.

Remember, when we celebrate “freedom” today, we are not celebrating the symbols of freedom, or the trappings of prosperity, or our particular lifestyles. We are celebrating people who died long before we were ever around and their refusal to bend down to tyranny.

This should be a day to remind ourselves: keep the idea of freedom alive, and, whether it seems to be under attack or not, be ever-vigilant.

Happy Independence Day, freedom-lover.