You have heard it said that liberty is all well and good, but it needs to be balanced with an appropriate amount of authority and security, because unchecked liberty, absolute freedom, equates to anarchy.

What hogwash.  But it’s an easy mistake to make.  It is very easy to imagine that absolute freedom equates to absolute self-determination.  Indeed, it is very hard to define freedom otherwise (though one must, because there is no such thing as absolute self-determination; one is always beholden to some master).  In misdefining absolute freedom as absolute self-determination, one naturally envisions a world of unchecked freedom as a world of anarchy, a chaotic world in which “every person is out for himself,” with madmen running wild in the streets, robbing, raping, killing at will.

It may be a little easier to understand if I come at it from the other direction: Does this vision of an an anarchic libertine society sound to you like a society of people who love freedom?  Do you imagine these people speaking lovingly of liberty as an ideal, or do you imagine them mostly talking about their appetites?  More crucially, do you imagine the people of this imaginary society speaking about the freedom of others?  The freedom of their neighbors?  This vision by definition excludes, does it not, any mention people risking their lives for the freedom of their neighbors.

What it sounds like instead is a lot of people who all want their “freedom” (i.e., license to take or do whatever they want) at the expense of everyone around them.  Such an attitude is anathema to liberty, because it hates liberty in everyone else.  Tell me, what sort of person, in the history you know, carries this sort of attitude?  “I should be able to take whatever I want from everyone else or do whatever I want at the expense of everyone else.”  Is this not the defining attitude of the dictator?  The self-styled king?  Is that not the basic claim of royalty?

What a person is describing, when he imagines a society of absolute liberty as a chaotic wasteland of anarchy, is not a society of liberty at all, but a society in which every member is a would-be dictator, trying to impose his will on everyone around him.  Well, this situation will quickly sort itself out.  As individuals compete to tyrannize and oppress and prey on one another at every interaction, the stronger will overcome the weaker until the strongest rises to the top and overcomes all others, establishing a monarchy.

So, the dynamic, the basic public spirit, which this person calls a spirit of absolute liberty, is actually a spirit of monarchy, of oppression, of authority of one person over another.  This anarchic vision, everyone doing what he wants, is the opposite of a free society.  But if so, then a true free society must refer to something else.  If anarchy has no spirit of freedom in it, then what does a society of absolute freedom look like?  What is the meaning of freedom if doing whatever you want at the expense of others is tyranny, which is the opposite of freedom?

I will not answer the question for you here.  (If you are like most people, you aren’t ready for the answer.)  I will give you a hint, though:  If thinking of yourself at the expense of others produces tyranny (your tyranny over those others), then a spirit of freedom must demand the opposite of that, that you think of others at the expense of yourself.  If a society of people all endeavoring to sacrifice others for themselves is a society of universal tyranny, then a society of universal freedom would be a society of people all endeavoring to sacrifice themselves for others.

We can see this in the few even moderately free societies which have come into existence on the Earth.  They were always characterized by cultures of personal sacrifice, personal service of others, personal responsibility for others.  They were always characterized by a common cultural belief that the highest good was to give of oneself for the sake of others with no expectation of recompense. This implies something vitally important:  That what we call the spirit of liberty, which we wish to incorporate into our society, is not actually encoded in the structure of the society.  No system of laws, no government structure, no Constitution, can be invented which will create a free society.  The spirit of liberty rather emanates from the character of the people.  The only meaningful definition of a free society is a society of people of a certain character: people who as a majority prefer to sacrifice themselves for others.  A society of any other kind of people, no matter under what laws and governmental systems they live, can never be a free society.

To reiterate: If you believe in your freedom to live as you like, but not the freedom of others to live as they like, or you believe in the freedom of people to live as you approve, but not to live in ways you disapprove, then you are not a champion of freedom, you are a champion of dictatorship. Your beliefs are identical to those of every dictator ever. If you want to know if you are a person of freedom, this is your test: Are you willing to risk your children’s lives to give other people the freedom to live in ways of which you disapprove? Do you have faith that such freedom granted to your neighbors generally will produce the safest, most orderly, most prosperous future for your children, even if you, with your limited mortal vision, cannot see in the short term how it will be so?