Illusion of Freedom

Complete freedom is an awful thing. It means being allowed to do anything, absolutely anything you want, without restrictions. No urge can be checked. If you want to kill and rape, that’s what you are to do.

The freedom of others is a limitation of your freedom, for their freedom would be used to limit yours. Two free persons cannot exist side by side; a free society is impossible.

Then what is this thing called a free society? A compromise? The best possible conditions compared to what is essentially impossible? A poor substitute that would be!

Freedom is doing what you want, but even in a so-called free society there is police to stop people from doing what they want. Is that a contradiction? Yes, it is, unless we assume that what some people want isn’t really what they want. Maybe the killer and the rapist don’t really want to kill and rape and the police help them to stay within their true wish.

There’s a lot to be said for that supposition. The only problem is that once you start assuming that people don’t really want what they explicitly indicate that they want, you deny a basic premise of western democracy: All choices must be respected and we are not supposed to question people’s preferences.

What the people vote for is their real opinion and the profession they choose is their real calling. The consumers are autonomous and even unhealthy habits must be accepted. We are not allowed to ask if people’s tastes and inclinations are genuine and it’s offensive to suggest that they may be deceiving themselves.

We must therefore also assume that the killer really wishes to kill, and since obviously we cannot allow him to do that, the only alternative is to stop him, that is, to take away his freedom.

Western society could only be called free if we insisted that criminals didn’t really want to commit crimes, but since we are barred from making that claim, we must concede that our society is not free.