Why Do People Hate Freedom?

"It is hard to free fools from the chains that they revere." Voltaire

I have always had an anti-authoritarian bent to my personality, even as a small child. I can remember the first days of school with the lists of rules and the establishment of "expectations" that teachers had for us. I tended to follow the rules as I was not particularly brave and I had strict authoritarian parents who would not have reacted well should they have received a phone call from an unhappy teacher. Nevertheless, I carried a great deal of resentment around toward teachers and parents alike. It didn't seem just that we should be treated so shabbily and with such disrespect simply because we were younger and less experienced. We were still human beings with feelings and desires, were we not?

In my 9th grade government class, I was the only student who raised my hand in answer to the question, "Who thinks that children should be allowed to do whatever they want?" The teacher made me stand up while she questioned me about the wisdom of allowing a small child to reach toward a hot stove. "Well," I replied, "if you tell them it is hot, and they touch it anyway, they certainly won't do it twice." This response brought laughter from the class and anger from the teacher, who didn't appreciate her point being undermined by my unusually spunky response. Although I may have underestimated the need to protect children from injury, I still grasped the concept of learning from natural consequences that others did not.

I was a Voluntaryist before I even knew that Voluntaryism existed. I could not understand why people could not just send their money to Israel if they liked Israel, or to Palestine if they liked Palestine. Why did a group of people have the right to forcefully take people's money and send it to support countries that people may or may not support as individuals? It seemed to me that all public works could be handled in this way. Why argue about whether to build a new library, remodel the courthouse, or repave the roads? Contribute your money to the project that is most meaningful to you, or not at all, for that matter.

I spent my whole childhood grasping for freedom. My struggles were covert in my youngest days. As long as I was quiet and in my room, my parents were not concerned with what I was doing. My freedom in those days was freedom of the mind. I read and I thought about things. I developed ideas and determined how I would live. When I reached the age of eighteen, I got an apartment with a friend. My parents could not understand why I would rather live in a ratty apartment that I had to struggle to pay for than live in their middle class home for free and spend my hard-earned money as I chose. My desire for freedom left them perplexed.

My perspectives reached a distressing turning point soon after discovering a man named Ron Paul. I was brimming with enthusiasm for this wise man. Here was a leader to whom I could relate. He wanted me to be free. I naively assumed that he would be more successful if only more people knew about him. In my efforts to share the good news, I gradually became aware of a heartbreaking reality--there are people who do not want to be free, and there are even more people who do not want others to be free.

The fact that some people do not want to be free is distressing but not surprising. Human beings, in general, have always had a desire to dominate other people. Why would a person care if others smoked and drank, who someone else married, or whether they wore a seat belt? People care because they enjoy the sense of power that they feel when others are forced to do their bidding. Even if one is not directly involved in creating the rules or legislation, there is a satisfying boost to one's self-esteem when "our" choices from "our" side are the rules and laws that are implemented. This is especially true if the people making those decisions were authorities for whom "we" voted.

But why would people not want to be free themselves? I have turned this question over and over in my mind and have only been able to reach one conclusion--people are afraid to be free. Being free means being responsible for one's own safety, support, and happiness. A citizen of a free society is responsible for making their own way, because to require someone else to take on that responsibility for you means that you have taken their freedom away. People are afraid of these responsibilities. They prefer to remain mired in the sticky mud of a failed political system which isolates one from predators, but also prevents one from experiencing the open field of wildflowers just over the hill. They give no credit to the empathy and compassion that resides within the hearts of their fellow beings and which motivates the majority of us to spontaneously help those in need of help. They clamor for a rigid structure that will impose morality upon us all, but that instead attracts the worst sort of self-absorbed autocrats to create it and bureaucrats to run it. They choose to remain in the known prison that feeds them three soggy meals of bread and water each day, rather than to step out into the sunshine of the free world, where you may not know where your next meal is coming from, but there is the delightful possibility that it may be steak or roasted chicken. They do all this while crying that life in the prison would be better if only they could get a better prison guard.

This puts me, and others like me, in a precarious position. If we could go somewhere and live our lives as we choose and leave the rest to remain in their secure prison we would but, alas, that is not allowed. So where does one find happiness in a cage? As Viktor Frankl discovered while being tortured in a concentration camp, the only place that true freedom is guaranteed to exist is in the mind and spirit. Even that can be controlled through manipulation and propaganda but, ultimately, if one has the strength to break through, one can break through.

What would happen if enough people gained freedom of the mind and spirit? They would no longer be satisfied with anything less than complete freedom. Here lies the work of the voluntaryist; help people see the beauty of being free. Will it work? Maybe not or, if I'm honest, probably not. But like perfection, even if it is impossible to attain it, it is a worthy goal for which to strive.